>> Narrator: Live, from Washington DC, it's the CUBE, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix NEXTConf everybody. #NEXTConf, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stephen Hadley is here. He's the former US National Security Advisor, and currently with RHG, who is an advisor to Nutanix. He's an expert on national security and foreign policy, and public policy. Stephen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Nice to be here. >> So very important topic. One that you just can't talk about enough. So lets start. We're here at this sort of infrastructure show. We're up-leveling it now to this very important topic of security. There's so many things that are going on. We interviewed Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE five or six years ago and asked him, is security a do-over? He had a one word answer. Yes. So, where are we at? What's the state of cyber today? >> Well, let's talk in a couple respects. You know, one of the things that's been interesting to follow your industry, and I'm not a technical person. But, interesting following your industry, a lot of what was done, social media and all the rest, started to be fun. It was almost a toy. And what has happened, is you now have become, this industry and the services it provide are a international, global, and national resource. And is at the center of how we do business today. And it's been interesting to watch the industry deal with that challenge. It started out, what do you do about child pornography that gets onto the various sites and the like? Then it got to be, what do you do about terrorism? Now it's, what do you do about false news? And it's been interesting to see the industry, and I think very effectively, start to respond to what are the responsibilities they have to their users, in these various troublesome areas. And what are the solutions, technologically and process-wise. And I think the industry is taking the lead, and I would encourage them to do so, because I think the industry needs to define the solutions. If you wait to Washington to define the solutions, we'll get it wrong, as we usually do in Washington. >> Well, so let's come back and talk about that. But, I like to think of three categories of cyber threats. You've got the hackers. Like you said, maybe it's child porn or something else like that. You've got criminals, organized crime. And then you've got state-sponsored. Where do you feel the industry, that you've just sort of said, the industry really has to lead. Where do you think the industry should put its focus? Should they think about the attackers? Should they think more about the defense? Is that a right way to look at it? Those sort of three categories of threats? >> I think those are three categories. They are different kinds of threats. I think the industry is going to have to deal with all of them. I think the principal focus is going to be on defense. There has been a discussion in the literature, should companies have the ability to go on offense? And to respond to cyber attacks, by trying to reach out and hurt the attacker. That's a tricky question. And I guess, as a national security type, my instinct is, the industry needs to lead on defense. The government needs to think about offensive responses. I think particularly since one of the problems you've got in this business is the attribution problem. Someone marches into your country, you know who's doing it. If you get a cyber attack, it's not clear who the enemy is. And who the attack is coming from. And it makes the issue of response very difficult. Secondly, the problem of collateral damage. As we saw, beginning with Stuxnet, and in these latest attacks. You try to hit somebody over here offensively with cyber, and turns out your hitting users in 150 countries. So I think the industry's responsibility is to defend and to try to prevent their systems being used by various nefarious characters. The issue of how to respond to cyber attacks, I think is much more a state function. A law enforcement function, in terms of ordinary criminals and the like. A national security function, in terms of nation states. >> Well Robert Gates in theCUBE last April said that even governments have to be very careful about using cyber as an offensive weapon. You mention Stuxnet, and we saw what happened. But there are no standards with cyber war. With conventional warfare there's the Geneva Convention, there's standards that we can apply. With cyber it's the Wild West. So, what is industry's role in terms of creating those standards of cyber attacks? >> I think industry can inform it. I think it's going to be difficult for industry to take the lead. And I think one of the, my response would be, one of the problems is, cyber attacks, the attackers pay no penalty with cyber attacks. It's hard to find. It's hard to prove. And there's no responses. And, there's a whole question of what is the right response? So for example, some years ago, over eight 10 years ago, Russia pretty clearly took down the Estonian government, which was a real E government. Now NATO is, Estonia is in NATO. NATO, one of the pillars of NATO is an attack on one, is an attack on all. Was that an attack? Huge debate within NATO. Was it an attack, was not an attack? Nobody died. Traditional measure of where you've been attacked. On the other hand, a government was almost paralyzed. What's the right response? Do you have to respond only in cyberspace? Would you think of responding conventionally, through conventional military power to a cyber attack? None of that has been worked out. And, as a consequence, nobody pays any price for cyber attacks. My own view particularly with respect to state-sponsored cyber attacks, is until the country pays a disproportionate attack in cyberspace, for a cyber attack, you won't get them to stop. But as you just talked about rightly, it's very hard to respond in cyberspace, because of the unintended consequences and the cyber collateral damage, if you will. My hope, the way out of this, is, as you've seen in these last attacks over the last week or so, which were targeted, I think the most recent one was targeted on Ukraine, and ended up affecting 150 countries. I would hope that some of these at some point are going to bring the international community to it's senses. And people are going to basically say look, we're all vulnerable. We're all at risk. The United States is more dependent probably than other countries, but China isn't too far behind. And for the United States and China to start leading an international conversation about developing the rules of the road. I think that would be good. I think though there needs to be a panel from industry, that supports that effort. Or my worry is the governments will get it wrong, and will impair the growth of the industry, which is bringing so much benefit to the global community. >> Really interesting point. A couple of years ago, we interviewed the President of ICANN. The organization that >> Stephen: Yeah, I know him. >> oversees the entire internet >> Stephen: Good guy. >> Stu: Fadi, and he was really concerned that companies like China, and Germany were going to say, we're going to have our own internet. We're just going to wall things off. Kind of goes against what you're saying, is we need to work together. We see, dissonance between private corporations, and governments now. How do we get globally working on technology, working together? Rather than fragmenting more. >> And you make a very good point. It's working together on the basis of our principals. Look, our view is that a global internet, free access for everyone is a powerful political statement, and can be empowering of individuals. So it is a small d, democratic institution. And it is an enormous economic power. It would be a tragedy if individual countries start to Balkanize the internet. And start to make them national systems. Because you know the countries that will do it, are countries that are authoritarian, and will convert a device that actually empowers individuals to be a device by which the state controls individuals. Secondly, it will risk cutting them off from the global community. Which will have economic consequences, much less social consequences. So, I think it is important for us to try to take the lead and start that conversation, and to do it while we're still talking about a global internet, and really haven't lost that. So this conversation needs to start sooner rather than later. >> You're the Chairman of the United States Institute of Peace. I have to believe that there is some parallels between the work you're doing there, and what we were just discussing. Trying to get cooperation across communities. >> There is, in this sense. One of the things that USIP has found is, and when I was in government I always used to think about what governments can do to resolve conflicts, end wars and preserve peace. And that's sort of top-down government policy. What US Institute of Peace is doing, is bottom-up. Facilitating groups, civil society, and peace-builders and peace makers, in war-torn communities to begin to resolve the ethnic conflicts, the tribal conflicts, the religious conflicts that are really the kindling, and the fuel for conflict. And through an affiliated organization of the USIP called Peace Tech Lab, technology people are coming together with civil society people and saying, what are the tools you need that we can put on an app, and use on an internet platform that will allow you to do your bottom-up peace building work? And it's very powerful. So for example, election violence. Always a big problem. There are civil society groups using technology that we're able to monitor through social media the first signs of electoral violence, and bombard them with text messages and the like, to try to bring down the temperature. So, what we're seeing at USIP is, there is a bottom-up component of peace building that can be technologically enabled, to allow people to try to maintain peace in their communities. It is the new frontier in some sense, for the work of the US Institute of Peace. >> So, with Stuxnet we saw that malware had the potential to kill people. Maybe in and of itself, that malware didn't kill people, although people died in that whole dynamic, with two nuclear engineers in Iran. My question is, and Stuxnet is 15 year old technology. >> Yeah, I don't think it's Stuxnet was responsible for any of technicians. >> Dave: No, right, so let's clarify that. >> There was a separate. >> And it was associated with that whole initiative, and. >> There was an effort to set back the Iran nuclear program. >> Yes, right, but it wasn't the malware itself. But the malware was demonstrated to do damage, and it could theoretically, and probably in practice, kill people. And it's, as I say, 15 year old technology, and just scratching the surface. So, god knows where we are today. You may know, I don't. But you've sort of put forth this notion that countries, states need to come together, and sort of address this problem. My question is that, I'm inferring that the US has a lead. And as the leader, with the best weapon, what's the motivation for the United States and other countries, who are the "haves", to work with the "have-nots", and actually create these standards? Is it because we have more to lose? I wonder if you could comment. >> I think it's vulnerability. I mean look, we're more dependent on the internet. We're more dependent on cyber systems. Look, to your point, if you bring down and get into the control systems that allow you to shut off the water filtration plants, and bring down the electric grid, a lot of people are going to die. They're going to start in hospitals, and it's going to get worse. So, what is the task? The first task is, and we've known about this problem, of the vulnerability for critical interest structure since the 1990s, that the first studies were written. Government has been slow. Quite frankly, industry has been slow. And it's, I think that train is finally moving. Some sectors are farther ahead. The financial sector is much better and further along at hardening their infrastructure against cyber penetration. But we still are very vulnerable through control systems, in our water system, electric grid, all the rest. And of course, the internet of things, has only multiplied the portals through which people can get into these systems. So there's a huge task of defense. And hardening that needs to go on. And that's a responsibility of industry, and government working together. It can only be done if industry and government work together. That's the process we need within the country. Secondly then, can the US lead in a process to try to develop rules of the road that provide another layer of protection? But it's got to start with hardening our infrastructure here at home. >> I got to ask you about fake news. Fake news in Russia. Is Russia an adversary? Should they be perceived, from a diplomacy standpoint, should we be antagonistic? Or should we try to be more friendly? As it relates to what's been going on with fake news. I wonder if you could tie those together and give us your thoughts. >> Well look, one of the things that's different about Russia today, is what we've seen in the election. This effort through hacking, through disclosing emails, through probing our electoral infrastructure, through a variety of things the Russians are doing. They intervened in our election process, in a bigger way than we've ever seen before, and they're doing the same thing in Europe. That is a new problem. We need to get to the bottom of it, to know what happened. People do it from the standpoint of retaliating against Russia. I think the bigger problem is we need to harden our electoral infrastructure. Our electoral infrastructure turns out to be critical infrastructure that we have to harden, just like our electric grid, and our water supply systems. And you know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. If we don't harden our electoral infrastructure so this cannot happen again, next time it happens, it's our fault. >> So kind of a cyber Star Wars. Is it, we don't know if it's technically feasible. That's not your area of expertise, that's industry's problem to figure out. >> Stephen: Yes sir. >> Stephen, you are a fantastic guest. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate your insights. >> Stephen: Delighted to be here, thanks very much. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest, right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Nutanix .NEXT, NEXTConf Be right back.

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome back to accelerating analytics, maturity. I'm your host. Lisa Martin, Alan Jacobson joins me next. The chief data and analytics officer at Altrix Ellen. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks Lisa. >>So Ellen, as we know, everyone knows that being data driven is very important. It's a household term these days, but 93% of organizations are not utilizing the analytics skills of their employees, which is creating a widening analytics gap. What's your advice, your recommendations for organizations who are just starting out with analytics >>And you're spot on many organizations really aren't leveraging the, the full capability of their knowledge workers. And really the first step is probably assessing where you are on the journey, whether that's you personally, or your organization as a whole, we just launched an assessment tool on our website that we built with the international Institute of analytics, that in a very short period of time, in about 15 minutes, you can go on and answer some questions and understand where you sit versus your peer set versus competitors and kind of where you are on the journey. >>So when people talk about data analytics, they often think, ah, this is for data science experts like people like you. So why should people in the lines of business like the finance folks, the marketing folks, why should they learn analytics? >>So domain experts are really in the best position. They, they know where the gold is buried in their companies. They know where the inefficiencies are, and it is so much easier and faster to teach a domain expert a bit about how to automate a process or how to use analytics than it is to take a data scientist and try to teach them to have the knowledge of a 20 year accounting professional or a, or a logistics expert of your company. It much harder to do that. And really, if you think about it, the world has changed dramatically in a very short period of time. If, if you were a marketing professional 30 years ago, you likely didn't need to know anything about the internet, but today, do you know what you would call that marketing professional? If they didn't know anything about the internet, probably unemployed or retired. And so knowledge workers are having to learn more and more skills to really keep up with their professions. And analytics is really no exception. Pretty much in every profession, people are needing to learn analytics, to stay current and, and be capable for their companies. And companies need people who can do that. >>Absolutely. It seems like it's table stakes. These days, let's look at different industries. Now, are there differences in how you see analytics in automation being employed in different industries? I know Altrix is being used across a lot of different types of organizations from government to retail. I also see you're now with some of the leading sports teams, any differences in industries. >>Yeah. There's an incredible actually commonality between domains industry to industry. So if you look at what an HR professional is doing, maybe attrition analysis, it's probably quite similar, whether they're in oil and gas or in a high tech software company. And so really the similarities are, are much larger than you might think. And even on the, on, on the, on the sports front, we see many of the analytics that sports teams perform are very similar. So McLaren is one of the great partners that we work with and they use TRICS across many areas of their business from finance to production, extreme sports, logistics, wind tunnel engineering, the marketing team analyzes social media data, all using Altrics. And if I take as an example, the finance team, the finance team is trying to optimize the budget to make sure that they can hit the very stringent targets that F1 sports has. And I don't see a ton of difference between the optimization that they're doing to hit their budget numbers and what I see fortune 500 finance departments doing to optimize their budget. And so really the, the commonality is very high. Even across industries. >>I bet every F fortune 500 or even every company would love to be compared to the same department within McLaren F1, just to know that wow, what they're doing is so in incre incredibly important as is what we are doing. Absolutely. So talk about lessons learned, what lessons can business leaders take from those organizations like McLaren, who are the most analytically mature >>Probably first and foremost, is that the ROI with analytics and automation is incredibly high. Companies are having a ton of success. It's becoming an existential threat to some degree, if, if your company isn't going on this journey and your competition is it, it can be a, a huge problem. IDC just did a recent study about how companies are unlocking the ROI using analytics. And the data was really clear organizations that have a higher percentage of their workforce using analytics are enjoying a much higher return from their analytic investment. And so it's not about hiring two double PhD statisticians from Oxford. It really is how widely you can bring your workforce on this journey. Can they all get 10% more capable? And that's having incredible results at businesses all over the world. An another key finding that they had is that the majority of them said that when they had many folks using analytics, they were going on the journey faster than companies they didn't. And so picking technologies, that'll help everyone do this and, and do this fast and do it easily. Having an approachable piece of software that everyone can use is really a key, >>So faster able to move faster, higher ROI. I also imagine analytics across the organization is a big competitive advantage for organizations in any industry. >>Absolutely the IDC or not. The IDC, the international Institute of analytics showed huge correlation between companies that were more analytically mature versus ones that were not. They showed correlation to growth of the company. They showed correlation to revenue and they showed correlation to shareholder values. So across really all of the, the, the key measures of business, the more analytically mature companies simply outperformed their competition. >>And that's key these days is to be able to outperform your competition. You know, one of the things that we hear so often, Alan, is people talking about democratizing data and analytics. You talked about the line of business workers, but I gotta ask you, is it really that easy for the line of business workers who aren't trained in data science, to be able to jump in, look at data, uncover and extract business insights to make decisions. >>So in, in many ways, it really is that easy. I have a 14 and 16 year old kid. Both of them have learned Altrics they're, Altrics certified. And, and it was quite easy. It took 'em about 20 hours and they were, they, they were off to the races, but there can be some hard parts. The hard parts have more to do with change management. I mean, if you're an accountant, that's been doing the best accounting work in your company for the last 20 years. And all you happen to know is a spreadsheet for those 20 years. Are you ready to learn some new skills? And, and I would suggest you probably need to, if you want, keep up with your profession. The, the big four accounting firms have trained over a hundred thousand people in Altrix just one firm has trained over a hundred thousand. >>You, you can't be an accountant or an auditor at some of these places with, without knowing Altrix. And so the hard part, really in the end, isn't the technology and learning analytics and data science. The harder part is this change management change is hard. I should probably eat better and exercise more, but it's, it's hard to always do that. And so companies are finding that that's the hard part. They need to help people go on the journey, help people with the change management to, to help them become the digitally enabled accountant of the future. The, the logistics professional that is E enabled that that's the challenge. >>That's a huge challenge. Cultural, cultural shift is a challenge. As you said, change management. How, how do you advise customers? If you might be talking with someone who might be early in their analytics journey, but really need to get up to speed and mature to be competitive, how do you guide them or give them recommendations on being able to facilitate that change management? >>Yeah, that's a great question. So, so people entering into the workforce today, many of them are starting to have these skills Altrics is used in over 800 universities around the globe to teach finance and to teach marketing and to teach logistics. And so some of this is happening naturally as new workers are entering the workforce, but for all of those who are already in the workforce have already started their careers, learning in place becomes really important. And so we work with companies to put on programmatic approaches to help their workers do this. And so it's, again, not simply putting a box of tools in the corner and saying free, take one. We put on hackathons and analytic days, and it can, it can be great fun. We, we have a great time with, with many of the customers that we work with helping them, you know, do this, helping them go on the journey and the ROI, as I said, you know, is fantastic. And not only does it sometimes affect the bottom line, it can really make societal changes. We've seen companies have breakthroughs that really make great impact to society as a whole. >>Isn't that so fantastic to see the, the difference that that can make. It sounds like you're, you guys are doing a great job of democratizing access to alter X to everybody. We talked about the line of business folks and the incredible importance of enabling them and the, the ROI, the speed, the competitive advantage. Can you share some specific examples that you think of Alter's customers that really show data breakthroughs by the lines of business using the technology? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so many to choose from I'll I'll, I'll give you two examples. Quickly. One is armor express. They manufacture life saving equipment, defensive equipments, like armor plated vests, and they were needing to optimize their supply chain, like many companies through the pandemic. We, we see how important the supply chain is. And so adjusting supply to, to match demand is, is really vital. And so they've used all tricks to model some of their supply and demand signals and built a predictive model to optimize the supply chain. And it certainly helped out from a, a dollar standpoint, they cut over a half a million dollars of inventory in the first year, but more importantly, by matching that demand and supply signal, you're able to better meet customer customer demand. And so when people have orders and are, are looking to pick up a vest, they don't wanna wait. >>And, and it becomes really important to, to get that right. Another great example is British telecom. They're, they're a company that services the public sector. They have very strict reporting regulations that they have to meet and they had, and, and this is crazy to think about over 140 legacy spreadsheet models that they had to run to comply with these regulatory processes and, and report, and obviously running 140 legacy models that had to be done in a certain order and linked incredibly challenging. It took them over four weeks, each time that they had to go through that process. And so to, to save time and have more efficiency in doing that, they trained 50 employees over just a two week period to start using Altrix and, and, and learn Altrix. And they implemented an all new reporting process that saw a 75% reduction in the number of man hours. >>It took to run in a 60% runtime performance. And so, again, a huge improvement. I can imagine it probably had better quality as well, because now that it was automated, you don't have people copying and past data into a spreadsheet. And that was just one project that this group of, of folks were able to accomplish that had huge ROI, but now those people are moving on and automating other processes and performing analytics in, in other areas, you can imagine the impact by the end of the year that they will have on their business, you know, potentially millions upon millions of dollars. This is what we see again. And again, company after company government agency, after government agency is how analytics are really transforming the way work is being done. >>That was the word that came to mind when you were describing the all three customer examples, the transformation, this is transformative. The ability to leverage alters to, to truly democratize data and analytics, give access to the lines of business is transformative for every organization. And, and also the business outcomes. You mentioned, those are substantial metrics based business outcomes. So the ROI and leveraging a technology like alri seems to be right there, sitting in front of you. >>That's right. And, and to be honest, it's not only important for these businesses. It's important for, for the knowledge workers themselves. I mean, we, we hear it from people that they discover Alrich, they automate a process. They finally get to get home for dinner with their families, which is fantastic, but, but it leads to new career paths. And so, you know, knowledge workers that have these added skills have so much larger opportunity. And I think it's great when the needs of businesses to become more analytics and analytic and automate processes actually matches the needs of the employees. And, you know, they too wanna learn these skills and become more advanced in their capabilities, >>Huge value there for the business, for the employees themselves to expand their skillset, to, to really open up so many opportunities for not only the business to meet the demands of the demanding customer, but the employees to be able to really have that breadth and depth in their field of service. Great opportunities there. Alan, is there anywhere that you wanna point the audience to go, to learn more about how they can get started? >>Yeah. So one of the things that we're really excited about is how fast and easy it is to learn these tools. So any of the listeners who wanna experience Altrix, they can go to the website, there's a free download on the website. You can take our analytic maturity assessment, as we talked about at the beginning and, and see where you are on the journey and just reach out. You know, we'd love to work with you and your organization to see how we can help you accelerate your journey on, on analytics and automation, >>Alan, it was a pleasure talking to you about democratizing data and analytics, the power in it for organizations across every industry. We appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you so much >>In a moment, Paula Hanson, who is the president and chief revenue officer of ultras and Jackie Vander lay graying. Who's the global head of tax technology at eBay will join me. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>> It's no surprise that 73% of organizations indicate analytics spend will outpace other software investments in the next 12 to 18 months. After all as we know, data is changing the world and the world is changing with it. But is everyone's spending resulting in the same ROI? This is Lisa Martin. Welcome to "theCUBE"'s presentation of democratizing analytics across the enterprise, made possible by Alteryx. An Alteryx commissioned IDC info brief entitled, "Four Ways to Unlock Transformative Business Outcomes from Analytics Investments" found that 93% of organizations are not utilizing the analytics skills of their employees, which is creating a widening analytics gap. On this special "CUBE" presentation, Jason Klein, product marketing director of Alteryx, will join me to share key findings from the new Alteryx commissioned IDC brief and uncover how enterprises can derive more value from their data. In our second segment, we'll hear from Alan Jacobson, chief data and analytics officer at Alteryx. He's going to discuss how organizations across all industries can accelerate their analytic maturity to drive transformational business outcomes. And then in our final segment, Paula Hansen, who is the president and chief revenue officer of Alteryx, and Jacqui Van der Leij Greyling, who is the global head of tax technology at eBay, they'll join me. They're going to share how Alteryx is helping the global eCommerce company innovate with analytics. Let's get the show started. (upbeat music) Jason Klein joins me next, product marketing director at Alteryx. Jason, welcome to the program. >> Hello, nice to be here. >> Excited to talk with you. What can you tell me about the new Alteryx IDC research, which spoke with about 1500 leaders, what nuggets were in there? >> Well, as the business landscape changes over the next 12 to 18 months, we're going to see that analytics is going to be a key component to navigating this change. 73% of the orgs indicated that analytics spend will outpace other software investments. But just putting more money towards technology, it isn't going to solve everything. And this is why everyone's spending is resulting in different ROIs. And one of the reasons for this gap is because 93% of organizations, they're still not fully using the analytics skills of their employees, and this widening analytics gap, it's threatening operational progress by wasting workers' time, harming business productivity and introducing costly errors. So in this research, we developed a framework of enterprise analytics proficiency that helps organizations reap greater benefits from their investments. And we based this framework on the behaviors of organizations that saw big improvements across financial, customer, and employee metrics, and we're able to focus on the behaviors driving higher ROI. >> So the info brief also revealed that nearly all organizations are planning to increase their analytics spend. And it looks like from the info brief that nearly three quarters plan on spending more on analytics than any other software. And can you unpack, what's driving this demand, this need for analytics across organizations? >> Sure, well first there's more data than ever before, the data's changing the world, and the world is changing data. Enterprises across the world, they're accelerating digital transformation to capitalize on new opportunities, to grow revenue, to increase margins and to improve customer experiences. And analytics along with automation and AI is what's making digital transformation possible. They're providing the fuel to new digitally enabled lines of business. >> One of the things that the study also showed was that not all analytics spending is resulting in the same ROI. What are some of the discrepancies that the info brief uncovered with respect to the changes in ROI that organizations are achieving? >> Our research with IDC revealed significant roadblocks across people, processes, and technologies. They're preventing companies from reaping greater benefits from their investments. So for example, on the people side, only one out of five organizations reported a commensurate investment in upskilling for analytics and data literacy as compared to the technology itself. And next, while data is everywhere, most organizations, 63% from our survey, are still not using the full breadth of data types available. Yet data's never been this prolific, it's going to continue to grow, and orgs should be using it to their advantage. And lastly organizations, they need to provide the right analytics tools to help everyone unlock the power of data. >> So they- >> They instead rely on outdated spreadsheet technology. In our survey, nine out of 10 respondents said less than half of their knowledge workers are active users of analytics software beyond spreadsheets. But true analytic transformation can't happen for an organization in a few select pockets or silos. We believe everyone regardless of skill level should be able to participate in the data and analytics process and be driving value. >> Should we retake that, since I started talking over Jason accidentally? >> Yep, absolutely we can do so. We'll just go, yep, we'll go back to Lisa's question. Let's just, let's do the, retake the question and the answer, that'll be able to. >> It'll be not all analytics spending results in the same ROI, what are some of the discrepancies? >> Yes, Lisa, so we'll go from your ISO, just so we get that clean question and answer. >> Okay. >> Thank you for that. On your ISO, we're still speeding, Lisa, so give it a beat in your head and then on you. >> Yet not all analytics spending is resulting in the same ROI. So what are some of the discrepancies that the info brief uncovered with respect to ROI? >> Well, our research with IDC revealed significant roadblocks across people, processes, and technologies, all preventing companies from reaping greater benefits from their investments. So on the people side, for example, only one out of five organizations reported a commensurate investment in upskilling for analytics and data literacy as compared to the technology itself. And next, while data is everywhere, most organizations, 63% in our survey, are still not using the full breadth of data types available. Data has never been this prolific. It's going to continue to grow and orgs should be using it to their advantage. And lastly, organizations, they need to provide the right analytic tools to help everyone unlock the power of data, yet instead they're relying on outdated spreadsheet technology. Nine of 10 survey respondents said that less than half of their knowledge workers are active users of analytics software. True analytics transformation can't happen for an organization in a few select pockets or silos. We believe everyone regardless of skill level should be able to participate in the data and analytics process and drive value. >> So if I look at this holistically, then what would you say organizations need to do to make sure that they're really deriving value from their investments in analytics? >> Yeah, sure. So overall, the enterprises that derive more value from their data and analytics and achieve more ROI, they invested more aggressively in the four dimensions of enterprise analytics proficiency. So they've invested in the comprehensiveness of analytics across all data sources and data types, meaning they're applying analytics to everything. They've invested in the flexibility of analytics across deployment scenarios and departments, meaning they're putting analytics everywhere. They've invested in the ubiquity of analytics and insights for every skill level, meaning they're making analytics for everyone. And they've invested in the usability of analytics software, meaning they're prioritizing easy technology to accelerate analytics democratization. >> So very strategic investments. Did the survey uncover any specific areas where most companies are falling short, like any black holes that organizations need to be aware of at the outset? >> It did, it did. So organizations, they need to build a data-centric culture. And this begins with people. But what the survey told us is that the people aspect of analytics is the most heavily skewed towards low proficiency. In order to maximize ROI, organizations need to make sure everyone in the organization has access to the data and analytics technology they need. And then the organizations also have to align their investments with upskilling in data literacy to enjoy that higher ROI. Companies who did so experience higher ROI than companies who underinvested in analytics literacy. So among the high ROI achievers, 78% have a good or great alignment between analytics investment and workforce upskilling compared to only 64% among those without positive ROI. And as more orgs adopt cloud data warehouses or cloud data lakes, in order to manage the massively increasing workloads- Can I start that one over. >> Sure. >> Can I redo this one? >> Yeah. >> Of course, stand by. >> Tongue tied. >> Yep, no worries. >> One second. >> If we could do the same, Lisa, just have a clean break, we'll go your question. >> Yep, yeah. >> On you Lisa. Just give that a count and whenever you're ready. Here, I'm going to give us a little break. On you Lisa. >> So are there any specific areas that the survey uncovered where most companies are falling short? Like any black holes organizations need to be aware of from the outset? >> It did. You need to build a data-centric culture and this begins with people, but we found that the people aspect of analytics is most heavily skewed towards low proficiency. In order to maximize ROI organizations need to make sure everyone has access to the data and analytics technology they need. Organizations that align their analytics investments with upskilling enjoy higher ROI than orgs that are less aligned. For example, among the high ROI achievers in our survey, 78% had good or great alignment between analytics investments and workforce upskilling, compared to only 64% among those without positive ROI. And as more enterprises adopt cloud data warehouses or cloud data lakes to manage increasingly massive data sets, analytics needs to exist everywhere, especially for those cloud environments. And what we found is organizations that use more data types and more data sources generate higher ROI from their analytics investments. Among those with improved customer metrics, 90% were good or great at utilizing all data sources, compared to only 67% among the ROI laggards. >> So interesting that you mentioned people, I'm glad that you mentioned people. Data scientists, everybody talks about data scientists. They're in high demand, we know that, but there aren't enough to meet the needs of all enterprises. So given that discrepancy, how can organizations fill the gap and really maximize the investments that they're making in analytics? >> Right, so analytics democratization, it's no longer optional, but it doesn't have to be complex. So we at Alteryx, we're democratizing analytics by empowering every organization to upskill every worker into a data worker. And the data from this survey shows this is the optimal approach. Organizations with a higher percentage of knowledge workers who are actively using analytics software enjoy higher returns from their analytics investment than orgs still stuck on spreadsheets. Among those with improved financial metrics, AKA the high ROI achievers, nearly 70% say that at least a quarter of their knowledge workers are using analytics software other than spreadsheets compared to only 56% in the low ROI group. Also among the high ROI performers, 63% said data and analytic workers collaborate well or extremely well compared to only 51% in the low ROI group. The data from the survey shows that supporting more business domains with analytics and providing cross-functional analytics correlates with higher ROI. So to maximize ROI, orgs should be transitioning workers from spreadsheets to analytics software. They should be letting them collaborate effectively and letting them do so cross-functionally. >> Yeah, that cross-functional collaboration is essential for anyone in any organization and in any discipline. Another key thing that jumped out from the survey was around shadow IT. The business side is using more data science tools than the IT side. And it's expected to spend more on analytics than other IT. What risks does this present to the overall organization, if IT and the lines of business guys and gals aren't really aligned? >> Well, there needs to be better collaboration and alignment between IT and the line of business. The data from the survey, however, shows that business managers, they're expected to spend more on analytics and use more analytics tools than IT is aware of. And this isn't because the lines of business have recognized the value of analytics and plan to invest accordingly, but a lack of alignment between IT and business. This will negatively impact governance, which ultimately impedes democratization and hence ROI. >> So Jason, where can organizations that are maybe at the outset of their analytics journey, or maybe they're in environments where there's multiple analytics tools across shadow IT, where can they go to Alteryx to learn more about how they can really simplify, streamline, and dial up the value on their investment? >> Well, they can learn more on our website. I also encourage them to explore the Alteryx community, which has lots of best practices, not just in terms of how you do the analytics, but how you stand up in Alteryx environment, but also to take a look at your analytics stack and prioritize technologies that can snap to and enhance your organization's governance posture. It doesn't have to change it, but it should be able to align to and enhance it. >> And of course, as you mentioned, it's about people, process, and technologies. Jason, thank you so much for joining me today, unpacking the IDC info brief and the great nuggets in there. Lots that organizations can learn and really become empowered to maximize their analytics investments. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, it's been a pleasure. >> In a moment, Alan Jacobson, who's the chief data and analytics officer at Alteryx is going to join me. He's going to be here to talk about how organizations across all industries can accelerate their analytic maturity to drive transformational business outcomes. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in tech enterprise coverage. >> Somehow many have come to believe that data analytics is for the few, for the scientists, the PhDs, the MBAs. Well, it is for them, but that's not all. You don't have to have an advanced degree to do amazing things with data. You don't even have to be a numbers person. You can be just about anything. A titan of industry or a future titan of industry. You could be working to change the world, your neighborhood, or the course of your business. You can be saving lives or just looking to save a little time. The power of data analytics shouldn't be limited to certain job titles or industries or organizations because when more people are doing more things with data, more incredible things happen. Analytics makes us smarter and faster and better at what we do. It's practically a superpower. That's why we believe analytics is for everyone, and everything, and should be everywhere. That's why we believe in analytics for all. (upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to "Accelerating Analytics Maturity". I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Alan Jacobson joins me next. The chief of data and analytics officer at Alteryx. Alan, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> So Alan, as we know, everyone knows that being data driven is very important. It's a household term these days, but 93% of organizations are not utilizing the analytics skills of their employees, which is creating a widening analytics gap. What's your advice, your recommendations for organizations who are just starting out with analytics? >> You're spot on, many organizations really aren't leveraging the full capability of their knowledge workers. And really the first step is probably assessing where you are on the journey, whether that's you personally, or your organization as a whole. We just launched an assessment tool on our website that we built with the International Institute of Analytics, that in a very short period of time, in about 15 minutes, you can go on and answer some questions and understand where you sit versus your peer set versus competitors and kind of where you are on the journey. >> So when people talk about data analytics, they often think, ah, this is for data science experts like people like you. So why should people in the lines of business like the finance folks, the marketing folks, why should they learn analytics? >> So domain experts are really in the best position. They know where the gold is buried in their companies. They know where the inefficiencies are. And it is so much easier and faster to teach a domain expert a bit about how to automate a process or how to use analytics than it is to take a data scientist and try to teach them to have the knowledge of a 20 year accounting professional or a logistics expert of your company. Much harder to do that. And really, if you think about it, the world has changed dramatically in a very short period of time. If you were a marketing professional 30 years ago, you likely didn't need to know anything about the internet, but today, do you know what you would call that marketing professional if they didn't know anything about the internet, probably unemployed or retired. And so knowledge workers are having to learn more and more skills to really keep up with their professions. And analytics is really no exception. Pretty much in every profession, people are needing to learn analytics to stay current and be capable for their companies. And companies need people who can do that. >> Absolutely, it seems like it's table stakes these days. Let's look at different industries now. Are there differences in how you see analytics in automation being employed in different industries? I know Alteryx is being used across a lot of different types of organizations from government to retail. I also see you're now with some of the leading sports teams. Any differences in industries? >> Yeah, there's an incredible actually commonality between the domains industry to industry. So if you look at what an HR professional is doing, maybe attrition analysis, it's probably quite similar, whether they're in oil and gas or in a high tech software company. And so really the similarities are much larger than you might think. And even on the sports front, we see many of the analytics that sports teams perform are very similar. So McLaren is one of the great partners that we work with and they use Alteryx across many areas of their business from finance to production, extreme sports, logistics, wind tunnel engineering, the marketing team analyzes social media data, all using Alteryx, and if I take as an example, the finance team, the finance team is trying to optimize the budget to make sure that they can hit the very stringent targets that F1 Sports has, and I don't see a ton of difference between the optimization that they're doing to hit their budget numbers and what I see Fortune 500 finance departments doing to optimize their budget, and so really the commonality is very high, even across industries. >> I bet every Fortune 500 or even every company would love to be compared to the same department within McLaren F1. Just to know that wow, what they're doing is so incredibly important as is what we're doing. >> So talk- >> Absolutely. >> About lessons learned, what lessons can business leaders take from those organizations like McLaren, who are the most analytically mature? >> Probably first and foremost, is that the ROI with analytics and automation is incredibly high. Companies are having a ton of success. It's becoming an existential threat to some degree, if your company isn't going on this journey and your competition is, it can be a huge problem. IDC just did a recent study about how companies are unlocking the ROI using analytics. And the data was really clear, organizations that have a higher percentage of their workforce using analytics are enjoying a much higher return from their analytic investment, and so it's not about hiring two double PhD statisticians from Oxford. It really is how widely you can bring your workforce on this journey, can they all get 10% more capable? And that's having incredible results at businesses all over the world. An another key finding that they had is that the majority of them said that when they had many folks using analytics, they were going on the journey faster than companies that didn't. And so picking technologies that'll help everyone do this and do this fast and do it easily. Having an approachable piece of software that everyone can use is really a key. >> So faster, able to move faster, higher ROI. I also imagine analytics across the organization is a big competitive advantage for organizations in any industry. >> Absolutely the IDC, or not the IDC, the International Institute of Analytics showed huge correlation between companies that were more analytically mature versus ones that were not. They showed correlation to growth of the company, they showed correlation to revenue and they showed correlation to shareholder values. So across really all of the key measures of business, the more analytically mature companies simply outperformed their competition. >> And that's key these days, is to be able to outperform your competition. You know, one of the things that we hear so often, Alan, is people talking about democratizing data and analytics. You talked about the line of business workers, but I got to ask you, is it really that easy for the line of business workers who aren't trained in data science to be able to jump in, look at data, uncover and extract business insights to make decisions? >> So in many ways, it really is that easy. I have a 14 and 16 year old kid. Both of them have learned Alteryx, they're Alteryx certified and it was quite easy. It took 'em about 20 hours and they were off to the races, but there can be some hard parts. The hard parts have more to do with change management. I mean, if you're an accountant that's been doing the best accounting work in your company for the last 20 years, and all you happen to know is a spreadsheet for those 20 years, are you ready to learn some new skills? And I would suggest you probably need to, if you want to keep up with your profession. The big four accounting firms have trained over a hundred thousand people in Alteryx. Just one firm has trained over a hundred thousand. You can't be an accountant or an auditor at some of these places without knowing Alteryx. And so the hard part, really in the end, isn't the technology and learning analytics and data science, the harder part is this change management, change is hard. I should probably eat better and exercise more, but it's hard to always do that. And so companies are finding that that's the hard part. They need to help people go on the journey, help people with the change management to help them become the digitally enabled accountant of the future, the logistics professional that is E enabled, that's the challenge. >> That's a huge challenge. Cultural shift is a challenge, as you said, change management. How do you advise customers if you might be talking with someone who might be early in their analytics journey, but really need to get up to speed and mature to be competitive, how do you guide them or give them recommendations on being able to facilitate that change management? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So people entering into the workforce today, many of them are starting to have these skills. Alteryx is used in over 800 universities around the globe to teach finance and to teach marketing and to teach logistics. And so some of this is happening naturally as new workers are entering the workforce, but for all of those who are already in the workforce, have already started their careers, learning in place becomes really important. And so we work with companies to put on programmatic approaches to help their workers do this. And so it's, again, not simply putting a box of tools in the corner and saying free, take one. We put on hackathons and analytic days, and it can be great fun. We have a great time with many of the customers that we work with, helping them do this, helping them go on the journey, and the ROI, as I said, is fantastic. And not only does it sometimes affect the bottom line, it can really make societal changes. We've seen companies have breakthroughs that have really made great impact to society as a whole. >> Isn't that so fantastic, to see the difference that that can make. It sounds like you guys are doing a great job of democratizing access to Alteryx to everybody. We talked about the line of business folks and the incredible importance of enabling them and the ROI, the speed, the competitive advantage. Can you share some specific examples that you think of Alteryx customers that really show data breakthroughs by the lines of business using the technology? >> Yeah, absolutely, so many to choose from. I'll give you two examples quickly. One is Armor Express. They manufacture life saving equipment, defensive equipments, like armor plated vests, and they were needing to optimize their supply chain, like many companies through the pandemic. We see how important the supply chain is. And so adjusting supply to match demand is really vital. And so they've used Alteryx to model some of their supply and demand signals and built a predictive model to optimize the supply chain. And it certainly helped out from a dollar standpoint. They cut over a half a million dollars of inventory in the first year, but more importantly, by matching that demand and supply signal, you're able to better meet customer demand. And so when people have orders and are looking to pick up a vest, they don't want to wait. And it becomes really important to get that right. Another great example is British Telecom. They're a company that services the public sector. They have very strict reporting regulations that they have to meet and they had, and this is crazy to think about, over 140 legacy spreadsheet models that they had to run to comply with these regulatory processes and report, and obviously running 140 legacy models that had to be done in a certain order and length, incredibly challenging. It took them over four weeks each time that they had to go through that process. And so to save time and have more efficiency in doing that, they trained 50 employees over just a two week period to start using Alteryx and learn Alteryx. And they implemented an all new reporting process that saw a 75% reduction in the number of man hours it took to run in a 60% run time performance. And so, again, a huge improvement. I can imagine it probably had better quality as well, because now that it was automated, you don't have people copying and pasting data into a spreadsheet. And that was just one project that this group of folks were able to accomplish that had huge ROI, but now those people are moving on and automating other processes and performing analytics in other areas. So you can imagine the impact by the end of the year that they will have on their business, potentially millions upon millions of dollars. And this is what we see again and again, company after company, government agency after government agency, is how analytics are really transforming the way work is being done. >> That was the word that came to mind when you were describing the all three customer examples, transformation, this is transformative. The ability to leverage Alteryx, to truly democratize data and analytics, give access to the lines of business is transformative for every organization. And also the business outcome you mentioned, those are substantial metrics based business outcomes. So the ROI in leveraging a technology like Alteryx seems to be right there, sitting in front of you. >> That's right, and to be honest, it's not only important for these businesses. It's important for the knowledge workers themselves. I mean, we hear it from people that they discover Alteryx, they automate a process, they finally get to get home for dinner with their families, which is fantastic, but it leads to new career paths. And so knowledge workers that have these added skills have so much larger opportunity. And I think it's great when the needs of businesses to become more analytic and automate processes actually matches the needs of the employees, and they too want to learn these skills and become more advanced in their capabilities. >> Huge value there for the business, for the employees themselves to expand their skillset, to really open up so many opportunities for not only the business to meet the demands of the demanding customer, but the employees to be able to really have that breadth and depth in their field of service. Great opportunities there, Alan. Is there anywhere that you want to point the audience to go to learn more about how they can get started? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we're really excited about is how fast and easy it is to learn these tools. So any of the listeners who want to experience Alteryx, they can go to the website, there's a free download on the website. You can take our analytic maturity assessment, as we talked about at the beginning, and see where you are on the journey and just reach out. We'd love to work with you and your organization to see how we can help you accelerate your journey on analytics and automation. >> Alan, it was a pleasure talking to you about democratizing data and analytics, the power in it for organizations across every industry. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> In a moment, Paula Hansen, who is the president and chief revenue officer of Alteryx, and Jacqui Van der Leij Greyling, who's the global head of tax technology at eBay, will join me. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> 1200 hours of wind tunnel testing, 30 million race simulations, 2.4 second pit stops. >> Make that 2.3. >> Sector times out the wazoo. >> Way too much of this. >> Velocities, pressures, temperatures, 80,000 components generating 11.8 billion data points and one analytics platform to make sense of it all. When McLaren needs to turn complex data into winning insights, they turn to Alteryx. Alteryx, analytics automation. (upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to the program. Lisa Martin here, I've got two guests joining me. Please welcome back to "theCUBE" Paula Hansen, the chief revenue officer and president at Alteryx, and Jacqui Van der Leij Greyling joins us as well, the global head of tax technology at eBay. They're going to share with you how Alteryx is helping eBay innovate with analytics. Ladies, welcome, it's great to have you both on the program. >> Thank you, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> Yeah, Paula, we're going to start with you. In this program, we've heard from Jason Klein, we've heard from Alan Jacobson. They talked about the need to democratize analytics across any organization to really drive innovation. With analytics, as they talked about, at the forefront of software investments, how's Alteryx helping its customers to develop roadmaps for success with analytics? >> Well, thank you, Lisa. It absolutely is about our customers' success. And we partner really closely with our customers to develop a holistic approach to their analytics success. And it starts of course with our innovative technology and platform, but ultimately we help our customers to create a culture of data literacy and analytics from the top of the organization, starting with the C-suite. And we partner with our customers to build their roadmaps for scaling that culture of analytics, through things like enablement programs, skills assessments, hackathons, setting up centers of excellence to help their organization scale and drive governance of this analytics capability across the enterprise. So at the end of the day, it's really about helping our customers to move up their analytics maturity curve with proven technologies and best practices, so they can make better business decisions and compete in their respective industries. >> Excellent, sounds like a very strategic program, we're going to unpack that. Jacqui, let's bring you into the conversation. Speaking of analytics maturity, one of the things that we talked about in this event is the IDC report that showed that 93% of organizations are not utilizing the analytics skills of their employees, but then there's eBay. How Jacqui did eBay become one of the 7% of organizations who's really maturing and how are you using analytics across the organization at eBay? >> So I think the main thing for us is when we started out was is that, our, especially in finance, they became spreadsheet professionals instead of the things that we really want our employees to add value to. And we realized we had to address that. And we also knew we couldn't wait for all our data to be centralized until we actually start using the data or start automating and being more effective. So ultimately we really started very, very actively embedding analytics in our people and our data and our processes. >> Starting with people is really critical. Jacqui, continuing with you, what were some of the roadblocks to analytics adoption that you faced and how did you overcome them? >> So I think eBay is a very data driven company. We have a lot of data. I think we are 27 years around this year, so we have the data, but it is everywhere. And how do you use that data? How do you use it efficiently? How do you get to the data? And I believe that that is definitely one of our biggest roadblocks when we started out and just finding those data sources and finding ways to connect to them to move forward. The other thing is that people were experiencing a lot of frustration. I mentioned before about the spreadsheet professionals. And there was no, we were not independent. You couldn't move forward, you would've put it on somebody else's roadmap to get the data and to get the information if you want it. So really finding something that everybody could access analytics or access data. And finally we have to realize is that this is uncharted territory. This is not exactly something that everybody is used to working with every day. So how do you find something that is easy, and that is not so daunting on somebody who's brand new to the field? And I would call those out as your major roadblocks, because you always have, not always, but most of the times you have support from the top, and in our case we have, but at the end of the day, it's our people that need to actually really embrace it, and making that accessible for them, I would say is definitely not per se, a roadblock, but basically a block you want to be able to move. >> It's really all about putting people first. Question for both of you, and Paula we'll start with you, and then Jacqui we'll go to you. I think the message in this program that the audience is watching with us is very clear. Analytics is for everyone, should be for everyone. Let's talk now about how both of your organizations are empowering people, those in the organization that may not have technical expertise to be able to leverage data, so that they can actually be data driven. Paula. >> Yes, well, we leverage our platform across all of our business functions here at Alteryx. And just like Jacqui explained, at eBay finance is probably one of the best examples of how we leverage our own platform to improve our business performance. So just like Jacqui mentioned, we have this huge amount of data flowing through our enterprise and the opportunity to leverage that into insights and analytics is really endless. So our CFO Kevin Rubin has been a key sponsor for using our own technology. We use Alteryx for forecasting all of our key performance metrics, for business planning, across our audit function, to help with compliance and regulatory requirements, tax, and even to close our books at the end of each quarter. So it's really going to remain across our business. And at the end of the day, it comes to how do you train users? How do you engage users to lean into this analytic opportunity to discover use cases? And so one of the other things that we've seen many companies do is to gamify that process, to build a game that brings users into the experience for training and to work with each other, to problem solve and along the way, maybe earn badges depending on the capabilities and trainings that they take. And just have a little healthy competition as an employee base around who can become more sophisticated in their analytic capability. So I think there's a lot of different ways to do it. And as Jacqui mentioned, it's really about ensuring that people feel comfortable, that they feel supported, that they have access to the training that they need, and ultimately that they are given both the skills and the confidence to be able to be a part of this great opportunity of analytics. >> That confidence is key. Jacqui, talk about some of the ways that you're empowering folks without that technical expertise to really be data driven. >> Yeah, I think it means to what Paula has said in terms of getting people excited about it, but it's also understanding that this is a journey and everybody is at a different place in their journey. You have folks that's already really advanced who has done this every day. And then you have really some folks that this is brand new or maybe somewhere in between. And it's about how you get everybody in their different phases to get to the initial destination. I say initial, because I believe a journey is never really complete. What we have done is that we decided to invest, and built a proof of concept, and we got our CFO to sponsor a hackathon. We opened it up to everybody in finance in the middle of the pandemic. So everybody was on Zoom and we told people, listen, we're going to teach you this tool, it's super easy, and let's just see what you can do. We ended up having 70 entries. We had only three weeks. So and these are people that do not have a background. They are not engineers, they're not data scientists. And we ended up with a 25,000 hour savings at the end of that hackathon from the 70 entries with people that have never, ever done anything like this before. And there you have the result. And then it just went from there. People had a proof of concept. They knew that it worked and they overcame the initial barrier of change. And that's where we are seeing things really, really picking up now. >> That's fantastic. And the business outcome that you mentioned there, the business impact is massive, helping folks get that confidence to be able to overcome sometimes the cultural barriers is key here. I think another thing that this program has really highlighted is there is a clear demand for data literacy in the job market, regardless of organization. Can each of you share more about how you're empowering the next generation of data workers? Paula, we'll start with you. >> Absolutely, and Jacqui says it so well, which is that it really is a journey that organizations are on and we as people in society are on in terms of upskilling our capabilities. So one of the things that we're doing here at Alteryx to help address this skillset gap on a global level is through a program that we call SparkED, which is essentially a no-cost analytics education program that we take to universities and colleges globally to help build the next generation of data workers. When we talk to our customers like eBay and many others, they say that it's difficult to find the skills that they want when they're hiring people into the job market. And so this program's really developed just to do just that, to close that gap and to work hand in hand with students and educators to improve data literacy for the next generation. So we're just getting started with SparkED. We started last May, but we currently have over 850 educational institutions globally engaged across 47 countries, and we're going to continue to invest here because there's so much opportunity for people, for society and for enterprises, when we close the gap and empower more people with the necessary analytics skills to solve all the problems that data can help solve. >> So SparkED has made a really big impact in such a short time period. It's going to be fun to watch the progress of that. Jacqui, let's go over to you now. Talk about some of the things that eBay is doing to empower the next generation of data workers. >> So we basically wanted to make sure that we kept that momentum from the hackathon, that we don't lose that excitement. So we just launched the program called eBay Masterminds. And what it basically is, is it's an inclusive innovation in each other, where we firmly believe that innovation is for upskilling for all analytics roles. So it doesn't matter your background, doesn't matter which function you are in, come and participate in in this where we really focus on innovation, introducing new technologies and upskilling our people. We are, apart from that, we also said, well, we shouldn't just keep it to inside eBay. We have to share this innovation with the community. So we are actually working on developing an analytics high school program, which we hope to pilot by the end of this year, where we will actually have high schoolers come in and teach them data essentials, the soft skills around analytics, but also how to use Alteryx. And we're working with, actually, we're working with SparkED and they're helping us develop that program. And we really hope that at, say, by the end of the year, we have a pilot and then also next year, we want to roll it out in multiple locations in multiple countries and really, really focus on that whole concept of analytics for all. >> Analytics for all, sounds like Alteryx and eBay have a great synergistic relationship there that is jointly aimed at especially going down the stuff and getting people when they're younger interested, and understanding how they can be empowered with data across any industry. Paula, let's go back to you, you were recently on "theCUBE"'s Supercloud event just a couple of weeks ago. And you talked about the challenges the companies are facing as they're navigating what is by default a multi-cloud world. How does the Alteryx Analytics Cloud platform enable CIOs to democratize analytics across their organization? >> Yes, business leaders and CIOs across all industries are realizing that there just aren't enough data scientists in the world to be able to make sense of the massive amounts of data that are flowing through organizations. Last I checked, there was 2 million data scientists in the world, so that's woefully underrepresented in terms of the opportunity for people to be a part of the analytics solution. So what we're seeing now with CIOs, with business leaders is that they're integrating data analysis and the skillset of data analysis into virtually every job function, and that is what we think of when we think of analytics for all. And so our mission with Alteryx Analytics Cloud is to empower all of those people in every job function, regardless of their skillset, as Jacqui pointed out from people that are just getting started all the way to the most sophisticated of technical users. Every worker across that spectrum can have a meaningful role in the opportunity to unlock the potential of the data for their company and their organizations. So that's our goal with Alteryx Analytics Cloud, and it operates in a multi cloud world and really helps across all sizes of data sets to blend, cleanse, shape, analyze, and report out so that we can break down data silos across the enterprise and help drive real business outcomes as a result of unlocking the potential of data. >> As well as really lessening that skill gap. As you were saying, there's only 2 million data scientists. You don't need to be a data scientist, that's the beauty of what Alteryx is enabling and eBay is a great example of that. Jacqui, let's go ahead and wrap things with you. You talked a great deal about the analytics maturity that you have fostered at eBay. It obviously has the right culture to adapt to that. Can you talk a little bit and take us out here in terms of where Alteryx fits in as that analytics maturity journey continues and what are some of the things that you are most excited about as analytics truly gets democratized across eBay? >> When we're starting up and getting excited about things when it comes to analytics, I can go on all day, but I'll keep it short and sweet for you. I do think we are on the top of the pool of data scientists. And I really feel that that is your next step, for us anyways, is that how do we get folks to not see data scientists as this big thing, like a rocket scientist, it's something completely different. And it's something that is in everybody in a certain extent. So again, partnering with Alteryx who just released the AI ML solution, allowing folks to not have a data scientist program, but actually build models and be able to solve problems that way. So we have engaged with Alteryx and we purchased the licenses, quite a few. And right now through our Masterminds program, we're actually running a four month program for all skill levels, teaching them AI ML and machine learning and how they can build their own models. We are really excited about that. We have over 50 participants without a background from all over the organization. We have members from our customer services. We have even some of our engineers are actually participating in the program. We just kicked it off. And I really believe that that is our next step. I want to give you a quick example of the beauty of this is where we actually just allow people to go out and think about ideas and come up with things. And one of the people in our team who doesn't have a data scientist background at all, was able to develop a solution where there is a checkout feedback functionality on the eBay side where sellers or buyers can verbatim add information. And she built a model to be able to determine what relates to tax specific, what is the type of problem, and even predict how that problem can be solved before we as a human even step in, and now instead of us or somebody going to verbatim and try to figure out what's going on there, we can focus on fixing the error versus actually just reading through things and not adding any value, and it's a beautiful tool and I was very impressed when I saw the demo and definitely developing that sort of thing. >> That sounds fantastic. And I think just the one word that keeps coming to mind, and we've said this a number of times in the program today is empowerment. What you're actually really doing to truly empower people across the organization with varying degrees of skill level, going down to the high school level, really exciting. We'll have to stay tuned to see what some of the great things are that come from this continued partnership. Ladies, I want to thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking about how Alteryx and eBay are really partnering together to democratize analytics and to facilitate its maturity. It's been great talking to you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you so much. (cheerful electronic music) >> As you heard over the course of our program, organizations where more people are using analytics who have deeper capabilities in each of the four Es, that's everyone, everything, everywhere, and easy analytics, those organizations achieve more ROI from their respective investments in analytics and automation than those who don't. We also heard a great story from eBay, great example of an enterprise that is truly democratizing analytics across its organization. It's enabling and empowering line of business users to use analytics, not only focused on key aspects of their job, but develop new skills rather than doing the same repetitive tasks. We want to thank you so much for watching the program today. Remember you can find all of the content on thecube.net. You can find all of the news from today on siliconangle.com and of course alteryx.com. We also want to thank Alteryx for making this program possible and for sponsoring "theCUBE". For all of my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. We want to thank you for watching and bye for now. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, guys and girls, welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier are live with theCUBE at AWS Summit 22, here in The Big Apple. We're excited to be talking about security next. James Arlen joins us, the CISO at Aiven. James, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Absolutely, it's good to be here. >> Tell the audience a little bit about Aiven, what you guys do, what you deliver, and what some of those differentiators are. >> Oh, Aiven. Aiven is a fantastic organization. I'm actually really lucky to work there. It's a database as a service, managed databases, all open source. And we're capital S, serious about open source. So 10 different open source database products delivered as a platform, all managed services, and the game is really about being the most performant, secure, and compliant database as a service on the market, friction free for your developers. You don't need people worrying about how to run databases. You just want to be able to say, here, take care of my data for me. And that's what we do. And that's actually the differentiator. We just take care of it for you. >> Take care of it for you, I like that. >> So they download the open source. They could do it on their own. So all the different projects are out there. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What do you guys bringing to the table? You said the managed service, can you explain that. >> Yeah, the managed service aspect of it is, really, you could install the software yourself. You can use Postgres or Apache Kafka or any one of the products that we support. Absolutely you can do it yourself. But is that really what you do for a living, or do you develop software, or do you sell a product? So we take and do the hard work of running the systems, running the equipment. We take care of backups, high availability, all the security and compliance things around access and certifications, all of those things that are logging, all of that stuff that's actually difficult to do, well and consistently, that's all we do. >> Talk about the momentum, I see you guys were founded in what? 2016? >> Yes. >> Just in May of '22, raised $210 million in series D funding. >> Yes. >> Talk about the momentum and also from your perspective, all of the massive changes in security. >> It's very interesting to work for a company where you're building more than 100% growth year over year. It's a powers of two thing. Going from one to two, not so scary, two to four, not so scary. 512 to 1024, it's getting scary. (Lisa chuckles) 1024 to 2048, oh crap! I've been with Aiven for just almost two years now, and we are less than 70 when I started, and we're near 500 now. So, explosive growth is very interesting, but it's also that, you're growing within a reasonable burn rate boundary as well. And what that does from a security perspective, is it leaves you in the position that I had. I walked in and I was the first actual CISO. I had a team of four, I now have a team of 40. Because it turns out that like a lot of things in life, as you start unpacking problems, they're kind of fractal. You unpack the problem, you're like oh, well I did deal with that problem, but now I got another problem that I got to deal with. And so there's, it's not turtles all the way down. >> There's a lot of things going on and other authors, survive change. >> And there's fundamental problems that are still not fixed. And yet we treat them like they're fixed. And so we're doing a lot of hard work to make it so that we don't have to do hard work ongoing. >> And that's the value of the managed service. >> Yes. >> Okay, so talk about competition. Obviously, we had ETR on which is Enterprise Research Firm that we trust, we like. And we were looking at the data with the headwinds in the market, looking at the different players like got Amazon has Redshift, Snowflake, and you got Azure Sequence. I think it's called one of those products. The money that's being shifted from on premise data where the old school data warehouse like terra data and whatnot, is going first to Snowflake, then to Azure, then to AWS. Yes, so that points to snowflake being kind of like the bell of the ball if you will, in terms of from a data cloud. >> Absolutely. >> How do you compete with them? What's the pitch 'Cause that seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction from the industry. 'Cause snowflake is hot. They have a good value product. They have a smart team, Databrick is out there too. >> Yeah I mean... >> how do you guys compete against all that. >> So this is that point where you're balancing the value of a specific technology, or a specific technology vendor. And am I going to be stuck with them? So I'm tying my future to their future. With open source, I'm tying my future to the common good right. The internet runs on open source. It doesn't run on anything closed. And so I'm not hitching my wagon to something that I don't control. I'm hitching it to something where, any one of our customers could decide. I'm not getting the value I need from Aiven anymore. I need to go. And we provide you with the tools necessary, to move from our open source managed service to your own. Whether you go on-prem or you run it yourself, on a cloud service provider, move your data to you because it's your data. It's not ours. How can I hold your data? It's like weird extortion ransoming thing. >> Actually speaking, I mean enterprise, it's a big land grab 'cause with cloud you're horizontally scalable. It's a beautiful thing, open source is booming. It's going in Aiven, every day it's just escalating higher and higher. >> Absolutely. >> It is the software business. So open is open. Integration and scale seems to be the competitive advantage. >> Yeah. >> Right. So, how do you guys compete with that? Because now you got open source. How do you offer the same benefits without the lock in, or what's the switching costs? How do you guys maintain that position of not saying the same thing in Snowflake? >> Because all of the biggest data users and consumers tend to give away their data products. LinkedIn gave away their data product. Uber gave away their data product, Facebook gave away their data product. And we now use those as community solutions. So, if the product works for something the scale of LinkedIn, or something the scale of Uber. It will probably work for you too. And scale is just... >> Well Facebook and LinkedIn, they gave away the product to own the data to use against you. >> But it's the product that counts because you need to be able to manipulate data the way they manipulate data, but with yours. >> So low latency needs to work. So horizontally, scalable, fees, machine learning. That's what we're seeing. How do you make that available? Customers want on architecture? What do you recommend? Control plane, data plane, how do you think about that? >> It's interesting. There's architectural reasons to think about it in terms like that. And there's other good architectural reasons to not think about it. There's sort of this dividing line in the cloud, where your cloud service provider, takes over and provides you with the opportunity to say, I don't know. And I don't care >> As long as it's secure >> As long as it's secure absolutely. But there's sort of that water line idea, where if it's below the water line, let somebody else deal. >> What is in the table stakes? 'Cause I like that approach. I think that's a good value proposition. Store it, what boxes have to be checked? Compliance, secure, what are some of the boxes? >> You need to make sure that you've taken care of all of the same basics if you are still running it. Remember you can't absolve yourself of your duty to your customer. You're still on the hook. So, you have to have backups. You have to have access control. You have to understand who's administering it, and how and what they're doing. Good logging, good comprehension there. You have to have anomaly detection, secure operations. You have to have all those compliance check boxes. Especially if you're dealing with regulated data type like PCI data or HIPAA health data or you know what there's other countries besides the United States, there's other kinds of of compliance obligations there. So you have to make sure that you've got all that taken into account. And remember that, like I said, you can't absolve yourself with those things. You can share responsibilities. But you can't walk away from that responsibility. So you still have to make sure that you validate that your vendor knows what they're talking about. >> I wanted to ask you about the cybersecurity skills gap. So I'm kind of giving a little segue here, because you mentioned you've been with Aiven for about two years. >> Almost. >> Almost two years. You've started with a team of four. You've grown at 10X in less than two years. How have you accomplished that, considering we're seeing one of the biggest skills shortages in cyber in history. >> It's amazing, you see this show up in a lot of job Ads, where they ask for 10 years of experience in something that's existed for three years. (John Furrier laughs) And it's like okay, well if I just be logical about this I can hire somebody at less than the skill level that I need today, and bring them up to that skill level. Or I can spend the same amount of time, hoping that I'll find the magical person that has that set of skills that I need. So I can solve the problem of the skills gap by up-skilling the people that I hire. Which is strangely contrary to how this thing works. >> The other thing too, is the market's evolving so fast that, that carry up and pulling someone along, or building and growing your own so to speak is workable. >> It also really helps us with a bunch of sustainability goals. It really helps with anything that has to do with diversity and inclusion, because I can bring forward people who are never given a chance. And say, you know what? You don't have that magical ticket in life, but damn you know what you're talking about? >> It's a classic pedigree. I went to this school, I studied this degree. There's no degree if have to stop a hacker using state of the art malware. (John Furrier laughs) >> Exactly. What I do today as a job, didn't exist when I was in post-secondary at all. >> So when you hire, what do you look for? I mean obviously problem solving. What's your kind of algorithm for hiring? >> Oh, that's a really interesting question. The quickest sort of summary of it is, I'm looking for not a jerk. >> Not a jerk. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Because it turns out that the quality that I can't fix in a candidate, is I can't fix whether or not they're a jerk, but I can up-skill them, I can educate them. I can teach them of a part of the world that they've not had any interaction with. But if they're not going to work with the team, if they're going to be, look at me, look at me. If they're going to not have that moment of, I have this great job, and I get to work today. And that's awesome. (Lisa Martin laughs) That's what I'm trying to hire for. >> The essence of this teamwork is fundamental. >> Collaboration. >> Cooperation. >> Curiosity. >> That's the thing yeah, absolutely. >> And everybody? >> Those things, oh absolutely. Those things are really, really hard to interview for. And they're impossible to fix after the fact. So that's where you really want to put the effort. 'Cause I can teach you how to use a computer. I mean it's hard, but it's not that hard. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Well I love the current state of data management. Good overview, you guys are in the good position. We love open source. Been covering it for, since theCUBE started. It continues to redefine more and more the industry. It is the software industry. Now there's no debate about that. If people want to have that debate, that's kind of waste of time, but there are other ways that are happening. So I have to ask you. As things are going forward with innovation. Okay, if opensource is going to be the software industry. Where's the value? >> That's a fun question wow? >> Is it going to be in the community? Is it the integration? Is it the scale? If you're open and you have low switching costs... >> Yeah so, when you look at Aiven's commitment to open source, a huge part of that is our open source project office, where we contribute back to those core products, whether it's parts of the Apache Foundation, or Postgres, or whatever. We contribute to those, because we have staff who work on those products. They don't work on our stuff. They work on those. And it's like the opposite of a zero sum game. It's more like Nash equilibrium. If you ever watch that movie, "A beautiful mind." That great idea of, you don't have to have winners and losers. You can have everybody loses a little bit but everybody wins a little bit. >> Yeah and that's the open the ethos. >> And that's where it gets tied up. >> Another follow up on that. The other thing I want to get your reaction on is that, now in this modern era of open source, almost all corporations are part of projects. I mean if you're an entrepreneur and you want to get funding it's pretty simple. You start open source project. How many stars you get on GitHub guarantees it's a series C round, pretty much. So open source now has got this new thing going on, where it's not just open source folks who believe in it It's an operating model. What's the dynamic of corporations being part of the system. It used to be, oh what's the balance between corporate and influence, now it's standard. What's your reaction? >> They can do good and they can do harm. And it really comes down to why are you in it? So if you look at the example of open search, which is one of the data products that we operate in the Aiven system. That's a collaboration between Aiven. Hey we're an awesome company, but we're nowhere near the size of AWS. And AWS where we're working together on it. And I just had this conversation with one of the attendees here, where he said, "Well AWS is going to eat your story there. "You're contributing all of this "to the open search platform. "And then AWS is going to go and sell it "and they're going to make more money." And I'm like yep, they are. And I've got staff who work for the organization, who are more fulfilled because they got to deliver something that's used by millions of people. And you think about your jobs. That moment of, (sighs) I did a cool thing today. That's got a lot of value in it. >> And part of something. >> Exactly. >> As a group. >> 100%. >> Exactly. >> And we end up with a product that's used by millions. Some of it we'll capture, because we do a better job running than the AWS does, but everybody ends up winning out of the backend. Again, everybody lost a little, but everybody also won. And that's better than that whole, you have to lose so that I can win. At zero something, that doesn't work. >> I think the silo conversations are coming, what's the balance between siloing something and why that happens. And then what's going to be freely accessible for data. Because the real time information is based upon what you can access. "Hey Siri, what's the weather. "We had a guest on earlier." It says, oh that's a data query. Well, if the weather is, the data weathers stored in a database that's out here and it can't get to the response on the app. Yeah, that's not good, but the data is available. It just didn't get delivered. >> Yeah >> Exactly. >> This is an example of what people are realizing now the consequences of this data, collateral damage or economy value. >> Yeah, and it's understanding how data fits in your environment. And I don't want to get on the accountants too hard, but the accounting organizations, AICPA and ISAE and others, they haven't really done a good job of helping you understand data as an asset, or data as a liability. I hold a lot of customer data. That's a liability to me. It's going to blow up in my face. We don't talk about the income that we get from data, Google. We don't talk about the expense of regenerating that data. We talk about, well what happens if you lose it? I don't know. And we're circling the drain around fiduciary responsibility, and we know how to do this. If you own a manufacturing plant, or if you own a fleet of vehicles you understand the fiduciary duty of managing your asset. But because we can't touch it, we don't do a good job of it. >> How far do you think are people getting into the point where they actually see that asset? Because I think it's out of sight out of mind. Now there's consequences, there's now it's public companies might have to do filings. It's not like sustainability and data. Like, wait a minute, I got to deal with these things. >> It's interesting, we got this great benefit of the move to cloud computing, and the move to utility style computing. But we took away that. I got to walk around and pet my computers. Like oh! This is my good database. I'm very proud of you. Like we're missing that piece now. And when you think about the size of data centers, we become detached from that, you don't really think about, Aiven operates tens of thousands of machines. It would take entire buildings to hold them all. You don't think about it. So how do you recreate that visceral connection to your data? Well, you need to start actually thinking about it. And you need to do some of that tokenization. When was the last time you printed something out, like you get a report and happens to me all the time with security reports. Look at a security report and it's like 150 page PDF. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Print it out, stump it on the table in front of you. Oh, there's gravitas here. There's something here. Start thinking about those records, count them up, and then try to compare that to something in the real world. My wife is a school teacher, kindergarten to grade three, and tokenizing math is how they teach math to little kids. You want to count something? Here's 10 things, count them. Well, you've got 60,000 customer records, or you have 2 billion data points in your IOT database, tokenize that, what does 2 billion look like? What does $1 million look like in the form of $100 dollars bills on a pallet? >> Wow. >> Right. Tokenize that data, create that visceral connection with it, and then talk about it. >> So when you say tokenized, you mean like token as in decentralization token? >> No, I mean create like a totem or an icon of it. >> Okay, got it. >> A thing you can hold holy. If you're a token company. >> Not token as in Token economics and Crypto. >> If you're a mortgage company, take that customer record for one of your customers, print it out and hold the file. Like in a Manila folder, like it's 1963. Hold that file, and then say yes. And you're explaining to somebody and say yes, and we have 3 million of these. If we printed them all out, it would take up a room this size. >> It shows the scale. >> Right. >> Right. >> Exactly, create that connection back to the human level of interaction with data. How do you interact with a terabyte of data, but you do. >> Right. >> But once she hits upgrade from Google drive. (team laughs) >> What's a terabyte right? We don't hold that anymore. >> Right, right. >> Great conversation. >> Recreate that connection. Talk about data that way. >> The visceral connection with data. >> Follow up after this event. We'd love to dig more and love the approach. Love open source, love what you're doing there. That's a very unique approach. And it's also an alternative to some of the other vast growing plus your valuations are very high too. So you're not like a... You're not too far away from these big valuations. So congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah excellent, I'm sure there's lots of work to do, lots of strategic work to do with that round of funding. But also lots of opportunity, that it's going to open up, and we know you don't hire jerks. >> I don't >> You have a whole team of non jerks. That's pretty awesome. Especially 40 of 'em. That's impressive James.| >> It is. >> Congratulations to you on what you've accomplished in the course of the team. And thank you for sharing your insights with John and me today, we appreciate it. >> Awesome. >> Thanks very much, it's been great. >> Awesome, for John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube, live in New York city at AWS Summit NYC 22, John and I will be right back with our next segment, stick around. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Despite all the talk about repatriation, hybrid and multi-Cloud opportunities, and Cloud is an increasingly expensive option for customers, the data continues to show the importance of public Cloud to the digital economy. Moreover, the two leaders, AWS and Azure, are showing signs of accelerated momentum that point to those two giants pulling away from the pack in the years ahead, with each firm's showing broad based momentum across their respective product lines. It's unclear if anything, other than government intervention or self-inflicted wounds will slow these two companies down this decade. Despite their commanding lead, a winning strategy for companies that don't run their own Cloud continues to be innovating on top of their massive CapEx investments. The most notable example here being Snowflake. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we provide our quarterly market share update for the big four hyperscale Cloud providers. And we'll share some new ETR data from their most recent survey. And we'll drill into some of the reasons for the momentum of these two companies and drill further into the database and data warehouse sector to see what, if anything, has changed in that space. First, let's look at some of the noteworthy comments from AWS and Microsoft in their recent earnings updates. We heard from Amazon, the following, "AWS has seen a reacceleration of revenue growth as customers have expanded their commitment to the Cloud and selected AWS as their Cloud partner." Notably, AWS revenues increased 39% in Q3 2021. That's a thousand basis point increase in growth relative to Q3 2020. That's an astounding milestone for a company that we expect to surpass $60 billion in revenue this year. Further, AWS touted the adoption of its custom silicon, and specifically its Graviton2 processors. AWS is fond of emphasizing Graviton's 40% price performance improvements relative to x86 processors, something we've reported on quite extensively. AWS is investing in custom silicon, encouraging ISVs to port their code to the platform so that customers will experience little or no code changes when they migrate. Again, we believe this is a secret weapon for AWS as its cost structure will continue to improve at a rate faster than competitors that don't have the resources or the skills or the stomach to develop such capabilities. Microsoft, for its part, also saw astoundingly good growth of 48% this past quarter for Azure. This is a company that we forecast will approach $40 billion in IaaS and PaaS public Cloud revenue this year. Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, on its earnings call, emphasized the changing nature of Cloud expanding in a distributed fashion to the edge. He referenced Azure as the world's computer. Building on his statements last year that Microsoft is building out a powerful, ubiquitous, intelligent, sensing and predictive Cloud. Yes, folks, it does feel like we're entering the so-called Metaverse, doesn't it? Okay, to underscore the momentum of these two companies, let's take a look at the ETR breakdown of Net score, which measures spending momentum. This chart will be familiar to our listeners. It shows the breakdown of net score for AWS, with the lime green showing new adoptions. That's 11%. The forest green is spending more than 6% relative to the first half of this year. That's a very robust 53%. The gray is flat spending. That's 30% on a very, very large base. And the pink is spending declines of minus 6% or worse. That's 4%. And the bright red is defections i.e those leaving AWS. That's 1%. That's virtually non-existent. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score of 59. Remember, anything over 40, we can still consider to be elevated. Let's look at that same data for Microsoft again. You have some new ads that lime green, that's 7%. The forest green is at 46% of customers spending more, which is an incredible figure for a company with revenues that will in the near term surpass $200 billion. And the red is in the low single digits. Buffered by its enormous PC software profits over the years, Microsoft is powered through its Window's Dogma and transitioned into a Cloud powerhouse. Let's now share some of our latest numbers for the big four hyperscale players, AWS, Azure, Alibaba and Google. Here, we show data for these companies from 2018 and our estimates for 2021. This data includes our final figures for AWS, Azure and GCP for Q3 with Alibaba yet to report. Remember, only AWS and Alibaba report IaaS revenue cleanly with Microsoft and Google, they give us a little breadcrumb nuggets that allow us to triangulate with our survey data and other intelligence. But it's our attempt to do an apples to apples comparison for those four companies using AWS and it's reporting as a baseline. In Q3, AWS reported more than $16 billion in revenue. We estimate Azure at 10 billion, Alibaba, we expect to come in at just under 3 billion, and GCP at 2.5 billion for the quarter. With three quarters of data in, with the exception of Alibaba, we're forecasting AWS to capture 51% of the big four revenue, the hyperscale revenue. And really we believe these are the only four hyperscalers. AWS will surpass 60 billion with Azure just under 40 billion, Alibaba approaching 11 billion, and Google coming in just under 10 billion for the year is our expectation. We forecast these four will account for $120 billion this year. That's a 41% increase over 2020 and the same collective growth rate as 2020 relative to 2019. We expect Azure to be 63% of the size of AWS revenue. So it is gaining share. Both of those companies, however, saw accelerated growth this past quarter with Alibaba and GCP's growth rates decelerating relative to last year. Now, let's take a closer look at those growth rates. This chart shows the quarterly growth rates for each of the four going back to the beginning of 2019. Both GCP and Alibaba are showing dramatic declines in growth rates, whereas, this past quarter Azure saw accelerated growth and AWS has now seen an increased rate of growth for the past two quarters. In fact, AWS' growth is about where it was in 2019 when it was around half of its current revenue size. And in 2019 growth was decelerating through the quarters as you can see where today that trend has reversed. It's quite amazing. All right, let's take a look at the broader Cloud landscape and bring back some ETR data. This chart that we're showing here, it shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the dataset on the horizontal axis. Note that red dotted line, anything above that we can still consider elevated and impressive. As when we've previously shared this data, AWS and Microsoft Azure are up and to the right. Now remember, this chart is not just counting IaaS and PaaS as we showed you earlier, it's however the customers views whatever they think Cloud is. And so they're likely including Microsoft SaaS in this picture. Which is why Microsoft shows larger than AWS despite what we showed you earlier. Nonetheless, these two are well ahead of the pack and the growth rates indicate that they're pulling away. But we've added some of the other players, most notably VMware Cloud on AWS. It's showing momentum as is VMware Cloud, which is VMware Cloud foundation and other on-prem Cloud offerings, even though it's below the red line for the on-prem piece, it's very respectable. The VMware Cloud on AWS has been consistently up above that red line. Has popped beneath it in some quarters, but it's very, very strong. As is, you know, Red Hat OpenShift, it's a little bit below the line, but it is respectable. We've superimposed this by the way. Red Hat OpenShift in the ETR platform is under the container orchestration taxonomy, but we'd like to put it in next to the Cloud players for context. That's how Red Hat sort of thinks about this as well. They think about OpenShift as Cloud. And then you can see the other players. Alibaba has got a small sample in the ETR dataset. Just does not enough presence in China. But Dell and HPE have started to show up in the Cloud taxonomy. So buyers are associating their private Clouds with Cloud. So Dell's Apex, HPE's GreenLake. So that's a positive. And you can see Oracle, which of course is OCI, Oracle Cloud infrastructure. And then IBM with its public Cloud. So, it's a positive that these on-prem players are showing up in this data, but the reality is the hyperscalers are growing collectively at 40% annually and the on-prem players are growing in the low single digits. So, and if you carve out the IaaS business of AWS and Azure, they're larger than most of the on-premises infrastructure players. And all the on-prem players are moving toward an as a service model, as I just alluded to. So, undoubtedly, hybrid multicloud edge are going to present opportunities for the likes of Dell, HPE, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Red Hat, et cetera. But they also present opportunities for the public Cloud players who have vibrant ecosystems and marketplaces much more diverse and deep than the traditional vendors. You know, we have a clearer picture of Microsoft's sort of hybrid and edge strategy because the company has such an enormous legacy business, it really had to think about that much more deeply. It wasn't a blank sheet of paper like AWS. It's going to be interesting at reinvent this year if new CEO, Adam Selipsky, will talk about this. And it will be good to hear how he's thinking about the next decade, how AWS thinks about hybrid and edge, I guarantee that with their developer affinity and custom Silicon capabilities, they're thinking about it differently than traditional enterprise players. And as we've stressed in this segment, they have across the board momentum. Now to quantify that, let's take a look at AWS as portfolio in the spending momentum within its product segments. This chart shows AWS's net scores or spending momentum in the areas where AWS participates in the ETR taxonomy. Again, note that red line. Anything above 40% is considered an elevated watermark. We're showing data from last October, this past July and the latest October 21 survey. That yellow line or a bar. What's notable is the yellow versus the gray bars up across the board for the most part, other than chime... And by the way, other than chime, everything is above the 40% mark as well. Now, we've highlighted database because we feel it's one of the most strategic sectors in a real battleground. So we want to drill into that a bit. Here's our familiar X Y graph showing Net score on the Y axis, remember, that's, again, spending momentum and market share or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis. This data, by the way, includes on-prem and Cloud database data warehouse. So keep that in mind. Let's start with one of our favorite topics; Snowflake. We've reported again and again and again, that we've never seen anything like this. The company's net score has moderated ever so slightly this quarter, but it's still just below 80%. Very highly elevated. Well, above that 40% mark. It's Snowflake's presence continues to grow as a gain share in the market. Snowflake is growing revenue in the triple digits. It's an insane pace, hence its current $115 billion market cap as of this episode. Now that said, all three US-based Cloud players there are above the 40% line with AWS and Microsoft having significant presence on the horizontal axis. You see Cockroach Labs, Redis, Couchbase, they're all elevated or highly elevated. Couchbase just went public this summer. So that may help with its presence. MongoDB, they're killing it. They have a $37 billion market cap as of this episode. The stock has been on a tear. You see MariaDB was also in the mix. And then of course you have Oracle, the database leader. Look, they continue to invest in making the Oracle database and other software like MySQL, the best solution for mission critical workloads, and they're investing in their Cloud. But you can see overall, they just don't have the momentum from a spending standpoint that the others do because the declines in their legacy business. And they've been around a long time. Those declines are not fully offset by the growth in Cloud database and Cloud migration. But look, Oracle is a financial powerhouse with a $250 billion plus market cap. And the stock has done very well this past year. Up over 60%. Cloudera is going private. So it can hide the pain of the transitions that it's undergoing between the legacy install bases of Cloudera and Hortonworks. It's just a tough situation. When the companies came together, Cloudera essentially had a dead end. Each of those respective platforms and migrate their customers to a more modern stack as part of its Cloud strategy. Ironic that it's name is Cloudera. You know, that's always a difficult thing to do. So as a private company, Cloudera can maybe get off that 90 day shot clock and buy some time to invest without getting hammered by the street. And you know, Teradata consistently has not shown up well in the ETR dataset. It's transitioned to Cloud and cross-Cloud still hasn't shown momentum in the surveys. So, look right now, it's looking like the rich get richer. So just to quantify that a little bit, let's line up some of the database players and look a little bit more closely at net score. This chart shows the spending momentum or lack thereof with the net score or spending velocity granularity that we described before. Remember, green is spending more, red is spending less, bright red is leaving the platform, bright green is adding the platform. You take red, subtract red from the green, and that gives you a net score. Snowflake, as we said, tops the list. You can see the granularity there. You can compare the performance. In a little different view to understand how these scores are derived, look, the ideal profile is a solid lime green, a big forest green, a not too large gray and ideally little or no bright red AKA defections. And you can see the green funnel in the gray increasing prominence as the vendor momentum declines. Interestingly, with the exception of Cloudera and Teradata, defections are all in the single digits or nonexistent. In the case of Snowflake, Redis, red is no red at all, but small sample, Couchbase has no defections and very little defection for the giant Microsoft. Incredibly impressive. This speaks to how hard it is to migrate off of a database no matter how disgruntled you are. The more common scenario is to isolate the database and build new functionality on modern platforms. Okay, so what to watch out for. Well, reinvent this coming up next month. Oh this month. It's the first time someone other than Andy Jassy will be keynoting as CEO. 15 years of Cloud, this is the 10th re-invent, which is always a market for the direction of the industry. I've said many times that the last decade was largely about IT transformation powered by the Cloud. I believe we're entering a new era of business transformation where the Cloud is going to play a significant role. But the Cloud is evolving from a set of remote services out there in the Cloud to an omnipresent platform on top of which many customers and technology companies can innovate. And virtually every industry will be impacted by Cloud. However it evolves in the coming decade. The question will be, how fast can you go? And how will players like AWS and Microsoft and many others that are building on top of these platforms make it easier for you to go fast? That's what I'll be watching for at re-invent and beyond. Okay, that's a wrap for today. Remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody. Stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. We'll see you at re-invent. (soft upbeat music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the cube with digital >>Coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to IBM Think 2021 The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of think 21. And right now we're gonna talk about banking in the post isolation economy. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guest. Look at wag lee is the general manager, Global banking financial markets at IBM and john Degnan is the global ceo and vice president and distinguished engineer for banking and financial services. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Yeah >>that's my pleasure. Look at this current economic upheaval. It's quite a bit different from the last one, isn't it? I mean liquidity doesn't seem to be a problem for most pecs these days. I mean if anything they're releasing loan loss reserves that they didn't need. What's from your perspective, what's the state of banking today and hopefully as we exit this pandemic soon. >>So so dave, I think, like you say, it's, you know, it's a it's a state and a picture that in a significantly different from what people were expecting. And I think some way, in some ways you're seeing the benefits of a number of the regulations that were put into into place after the, you know, the financial crisis last time around, right? And therefore this time, you know, a health crisis did not become a financial crisis, because I think the banks were in better shape. And also, you know, governments clearly have put worldwide a lot of liquidity into the, into the system. I think if you look at it though, maybe two or three things ready to call out firstly, there's a there's a massive regional variation. So if you look at the U. S. Banking industry, it's extremely buoyant and I'll come back to that in a minute in the way in which is performing, you know, the banks that are starting to report their first quarter results are going to show profitability. That's you know significantly ahead of where they were last year and probably some of the some of their best performance for quite a long time. If you go into europe, it's a completely different picture. I think the banks are extremely challenged out there and I think you're going to see a much bleaker outlook in terms of what those banks report and as far as Asia pacific is concerned again, you know because they they have come out of the pandemic much faster than consumer businesses back into growth. Again, I think they're showing some pretty buoyant performance as far as as far as banking performance is concerned. I think the piece that's particularly interesting and I think him as a bit of a surprise to most is what we've seen in the U. S. Right. And in the US what's actually happened is uh the investment banking side of banking businesses has been doing better than they've ever done before. There's been the most unbelievable amount of acquisition activity. You've seen a lot of what's going on with this facts that's driving deal raised, you know, deal based fee income for the banks. The volatility in the marketplace is meaning that trading income is much much higher than it's ever been. And therefore the banks are very much seeing a profitability on that investment banking side. That was way ahead of what I think they were. They were expecting consumer businesses definitely down. If you look at the credit card business, it's down. If you look at, you know, lending activity that's going down going out is substantially less than where it was before. There's hardly any lending growth because the economy clearly is flat at this moment in time. But again, the good news that, and I think this is a worldwide which are not just in us, the good news here is that because of the liquidity and and some of the special measures the government put out there, there has not been the level of bankruptcies that people were expecting, right. And therefore most of the provisioning that the banks did um in expectation of non performing loans has been, I think, a much more, much greater than what they're going to need, which is why you're starting to see provisions being released as well, which are kind of flattering, flattering the income, flattering the engine. I think going forward that you're going to see a different picture >>is the re thank you for the clarification on the regional divergence, is that and you're right on, I mean, european central banks are not the same, the same position uh to to affect liquidity. But is that nuances that variation across the globe? Is that a is that a blind spot? Is that a is that a concern or the other other greater concerns? You know, inflation and and and the the pace of the return to the economy? What are your thoughts on that? >>So, I think, I think the concern, um, you know, as far as the european marketplace is concerned is um you know, whether whether the performance that and particularly, I don't think the level of provisions in there was quite a generous, as we saw in other parts of the world, and therefore, you know, is the issue around non performing loans in in europe, going to hold the european uh european banks back? And are they going to, you know, therefore, constrain the amount of lending that they put into the economy and that then, um, you know, reduces the level of economic growth that we see in europe. Right? I think, I think that is certainly that is certainly a concern. Um I would be surprised and I've been looking at, you know, forecasts that have been put forward by various people around the world around inflation. I would be surprised if inflation starts to become a genuine problem in the, in the kind of short to medium term, I think in the industry that are going to be two or three other things that are probably going to be more, you know, going to be more issues. Right. I think the first one which is becoming top of mind for chief executives, is this whole area around operational resiliency. So, you know, regulators universally are making very very sure that banks do not have a technical debt or a complexity of legacy systems issue. They are and you know, the U. K. Has taken the lead on this and they are going so far as even requiring non executive directors to be liable if banks are found to not have the right policies in place. This is now being followed by other regulators around the world. Right. So so that is very much drop in mind at this moment in time. So I think discretionary investment is going to be put you know, towards solving that particular problem. I think that's that's one issue. I think the other issue is what the pandemic has shown is that and and and this was very evident to me and I mean I spent the last three years out in Singapore where you know, banks have become very digital businesses. Right? When I came into the U. S. In my current role, it was somewhat surprising to me as to where the U. S. Market place was in terms of digitization of banking. But if you look in the last 12 months, you know, I think more has been achieved in terms of banks becoming digital businesses and they've probably done in the last two or three years. Right. And that the real acceleration of that digitization which is going to continue to happen. But the downside of that has been that the threat to the banking industry from essentially fintech and big tex has exactly, it's really accelerated. Right, Right. Just to give you an example, Babel is the second largest financial services institutions in the US. Right. So that's become a real problem I think with the banking industry is going to have to deal with >>and I want to come back to that. But now let's bring john into the conversation. Let's talk about the tech stack. Look, it was talking about whether it was resiliency going digital, We certainly saw over the pandemic, remote work, huge, huge volumes of things like TPP and and and and and mortgages and with dropping rates, etcetera. So john, how is the tech stack Been altered in the past 14 months? >>Great question. Dave. And it's top of mind for almost every single financial services firm, regardless of the sector within the overall industry, every single business has been taking stock of how they handled the pandemic and the economic conditions thereafter and all of the business needs that were driven by the pandemic. In so many situations, firms were unable to service their clients or we're not competitive in serving their clients. And as a result they've had to do very deep uh architectural transformation and digital transformation around their core platforms. Their systems of analytics and their systems different end systems of engagement In terms of the core processing systems that many of these institutions, some in many cases there are 50 years old And with any 50 year old application platform there are inherent limitations. There's an in flex itty inflexibility. There's an inability to innovate for the future. There's a speed of delivery issue. In other words, it can be very hard to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities onto an aging platform. And so in every single case um institutions are looking to hybrid cloud and public cloud technology and pre packaged a ai and prepackaged solutions from an I. S. V. Ecosystem of software vendor ecosystem to say. As long as we can crack open many of these old monolithic cause and surround them with new digitalization, new user experience that spans every channel and automation from the front to back of every interaction. That's where most institutions are prioritizing. >>Banks aren't going to migrate, they're gonna they're gonna build an abstraction layer. I want to come back to the disruption is so interesting. The coin base I. P. O. Last month see Tesla and microstrategy. They're putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Jamie diamonds. Traditional banks are playing a smaller role in the financial system because of the new fin text. Look at, you mentioned Paypal, the striped as Robin Hood, you get the Silicon Valley giants have this dual disrupt disruption agenda. Apple amazon even walmart facebook. The question is, are traditional banks going to lose control of the payment systems? >>Yeah. I mean I think to a large extent that is that has already happened, right? Because I think if you look at, you know, if you look at the experience in ASia, right? And you look at particularly organizations like and financial, you know, in India, you look at organizations like A T. M. You know, very substantial chance, particularly on the consumer payments side has actually moved away from the banks. And I think you're starting to see that in the west as well, right? With organizations like, you know, cloud, No, that's coming out with this, you know, you know, buying out a later type of schemes. You've got great. Um, and then so you've got paper and as you said, strike, uh and and others as well, but it's not just, you know, in the payment side. Right. I think, I think what's starting to happen is that there are very core part of the banking business. You know, especially things like lending for instance, where again, you are getting a number of these Frontex and big, big tech companies entering the marketplace. And and I think the threat for the banks is this is not going to be small chunks of market share that you're going to actually lose. Right? It's it's actually, it could actually be a Kodak moment. Let me give you an example. Uh, you know, you will have just seen that grab is going to be acquired by one of these facts for about $40 billion. I mean, this organization started like the Uber in Singapore. It very rapidly got into both the payment site. Right? So it actually went to all of these moment pop shops and then offered q are based um, 12 code based payment capabilities to these very small retailers, they were charging about half or a third or world Mastercard or Visa were charging to run those payment rails. They took market share overnight. You look at the Remittance business, right? They went into the Remittance business. They set up these wallets in 28 countries around the Asean region. They took huge chunks of business completely away from DBS, which is the local bank out there from Western Union and all of these, all of these others. So, so I think it's a real threat. I think Jamie Dimon is saying what the banking industry has said always right, which is the reason we're losing is because the playing field is not even, this is not about playing fields. Been even write, all of these businesses have been subject to exactly the same regulation that the banks are subject to. Regulations in Singapore and India are more onerous than maybe in other parts of the world. This is about the banking business, recognizing that this is a threat and exactly as john was saying, you've got to get to delivering the customer experience that consumers are wanting at the level of cost that they're prepared to pay. And you're not going to do that by purely sorting out the channels and having a cool app on somebody's smartphone, Right? If that's not funny reported by arcade processes and legacy systems when I, you know, like, like today, you know, you make a payment, your payment does not clear for five days, right? Whereas in Singapore, I make a payment. The payment is instantaneously clear, right? That's where the banking system is going to have to get to. In order to get to that. You need to water the whole stack. And the really good news is that many examples where this has been done very successfully by incumbent banks. You don't have to set up a digital bank on the site to do it. And incumbent bank can do it and it can do it in a sensible period of time at a sensible level of investment. A lot of IBM s business across our consulting as well as our technology stack is very much trying to do that with our clients. So I am personally very bullish about what the industry >>yeah, taking friction out of the system, sometimes with a case of crypto taking the middle person out of the system. But I think you guys are savvy, you understand that, you know, you yeah, Jamie Diamond a couple years ago said he'd fire anybody doing crypto Janet Yellen and says, I don't really get a Warren Buffett, but I think it's technology people we look at and say, okay, wait a minute. This is an interesting Petri dish. There's, there's a fundamental technology here that has massive funding that is going to inform, you know, the future. And I think, you know, big bags are gonna lean in some of them and others, others won't john give you the last word here >>for sure, they're leaning in. Uh so to just to to think about uh something that lick it said a moment ago, the reason these startups were able to innovate fast was because they didn't have the legacy, They didn't have the spaghetti lying around. They were able to be relentlessly laser focused on building new, using the app ecosystem going straight to public and hybrid cloud and not worrying about everything that had been built for the last 50 years or so. The benefit for existing institutions, the incumbents is that they can use all of the same techniques and tools and hybrid cloud accelerators in terms And we're not just thinking about uh retail banking here. Your question around the industry that disruption from Bitcoin Blockchain technologies, new ways of processing securities. It is playing out in every single securities processing and capital markets organization right now. I'm working with several organizations right now exactly on how to build custody systems to take advantage of these non fungible digital assets. It's a hard, hard topic around which there's an incredible appetite to invest. An incredible appetite to innovate. And we know that the center of all these technologies are going to be cloud forward cloud ready. Ai infused data infused technologies >>Guys, I want to have you back. I wish I had more time. I want to talk about SPAC. So I want to talk about N. F. T. S. I want to talk about technology behind all this. You really great conversation. I really appreciate your time. I'm sorry. We got to go. >>Thank you. Thanks very much indeed for having us. It was a real pleasure. >>Really. Pleasure was mine. Thank you for watching everybody's day. Volonte for IBM think 2021. You're watching the Cube. Mhm.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay, hello everyone. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here with Meet the Analysts segment Sunday morning. We've got everyone around the world here to discuss a bit of the news around the EU killing the privacy deal, striking it down, among other topics around, you know, data privacy and global commerce. We got great guests here, Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. Bill Mew, founder and CEO of Cyber Crisis Management from the Firm Crisis Team. And JD, CEO of Spearhead Management. JD, I can let you say your name because I really can't pronounce it. How do I (laughs) pronounce it, doctor? >> I wouldn't even try it unless you are Dutch, otherwise it will seriously hurt your throat. (Ray laughing) So, JD works perfect for me. >> Doctor Drooghaag. >> And Sarbjeet Johal, who's obviously an influencer, a cloud awesome native expert. Great, guys. Great to have you on, appreciate it, thanks for comin' on. And Bill, thank you for initiating this, I appreciate all your tweets. >> Happy Sunday. (Bill laughing) >> You guys have been really tweeting up a storm, I want to get everyone together, kind of as an analyst, Meet the Analyst segment. Let's go through with it. The news is the EU and U.S. Privacy Shield for data struck down by the court, that's the BBC headline. Variety of news, different perspectives, you've got an American perspective and you've got an international perspective. Bill, we'll start with you. What does this news mean? I mean, basically half the people in the world probably don't know what the Privacy Shield means, so why is this ruling so important, and why should it be discussed? >> Well, thanks to sharing between Europe and America, it's based on a two-way promise that when data goes from Europe to America, the Americans promise to respect our privacy, and when data goes form America to Europe, the Europeans promise to respect the American privacy. Unfortunately, there are big cultural differences between the two blocks. The Europeans have a massive orientation around privacy as a human right. And in the U.S., there's somewhat more of a prioritization on national security, and therefore for some time there's been a mismatch here, and it could be argued that the Americans haven't been living up to their promise because they've had various different laws, and look how much talk about FISA and the Cloud Act that actually contravene European privacy and are incompatible with the promise Americans have given. That promise, first of all, was in the form of a treaty called Safe Harbor. This went to court and was struck down. It was replaced by Privacy Shield, which was pretty much the same thing really, and that has recently been to the court as well, and that has been struck down. There now is no other means of legally sharing data between Europe and America other than what are being called standard contractual clauses. This isn't a broad treaty between two nations, these are drawn by each individual country. But also in the ruling, they said that standard contractual clauses could not be used by any companies that were subject to mass surveillance. And actually in the U.S., the FISA courts enforce a level of mass surveillance through all of the major IT firms, of all major U.S. telcos, cloud firms, or indeed, social media firms. So, this means that for all of the companies out there and their clients, business should be carrying on as usual apart from if you're one of those major U.S. IT firms, or one of their clients. >> So, why did this come about? Was there like a major incident? Why now, was it in the court, stuck in the courts? Were people bitchin' and moanin' about it? Why did this go down, what's the real issue? >> For those of us who have been following this attentively, things have been getting more and more precarious for a number of years now. We've had a situation where there are different measures being taken in the U.S., that have continued to erode the different protections that there were for Europeans. FISA is an example that I've given, and that is the sort of secret courts and secret warrants that are issued to seize data without anyone's knowledge. There's the Cloud Act, which is a sort of extrajudicial law that means that warrants can be served in America to U.S. organizations, and they have to hand over data wherever that data resides, anywhere in the world. So, data could exist on a European server, if it was under the control of an American company, they'd have to hand that over. So, whilst FISA is in direct conflict with the promises that the Americans made, things like the Cloud Act are not only in controversion with the promise they've made, there's conflicting law here, because if you're a U.S. subsidiary of a big U.S. firm, and you're based in Europe, who do you obey, the European law that says you can't hand it over because of GDPR, or the American laws that says they've got extrajudicial control, and that you've got to hand it over. So, it's made things a complete mess. And to say has this stuff, hasn't really happened? No, there's been a gradual erosion, and this has been going through the courts for a number of years. And many of us have seen it coming, and now it just hit us. >> So, if I get you right in what you're saying, it's basically all this mishmash of different laws, and there's no coherency, and consistency, is that the core issue? >> On the European side you could argue there's quite a lot of consistency, because we uphold people's privacy, in theory. But there have been incidents which we could talk about with that, but in theory, we hold your rights dear, and also the rights of Europeans, so everyone's data should be safe here from the sort of mass surveillance we're seeing. In the U.S., there's more of a direct conflict between everything, including there's been a, in his first week in the White House, Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that the Privacy Act in the U.S., which had been the main protection for people in the U.S., no longer applied to non-U.S. citizens. Which was, if you wanted try and cause a storm, and if you wanted to try and undermine the treaty, there's no better way of doing it than that. >> A lot of ways, Ray, I mean simplify this for me, because I'm a startup, I'm hustlin', or I'm a big company, I don't even know who runs the servers anymore, and I've got data stored in multiple clouds, I got in regions, and Oracle just announced more regions, you got Amazon, a gazillion regions, I could be on-premise. I mean bottom line, what is this about? I mean, and -- >> Bill's right, I mean when Max Schrems, the Austrian. Bill's right, when Max Schrems the Austrian activist actually filed his case against Facebook for where data was being stored, data residency wasn't as popular. And you know, what it means for companies that are in the cloud is that you have to make sure your data's being stored in the region, and following those specific region rules, you can't skirt those rules anymore. And I think the cloud companies know that this has been coming for some time, and that's why there's been announced in a lot of regions, a lot of areas that are actually happening, so I think that's the important part. But going back to Bill's earlier point, which is important, is America is basically the Canary Islands of privacy, right? Privacy is there, but it isn't there in a very, very explicit sense, and I think we've been skirting the rules for quite some time, because a lot of our economy depends on that data, and the marketing of the data. And so we often confuse privacy with consent, and also with value exchange, and I think that's part of the problem of what's going on here. Companies that have been building their business models on free data, free private data, free personally identifiable data information are the ones that are at risk! And I think that's what's going on here. >> It's the classic Facebook issue, you're the product, and the data is your product. Well, I want to get into what this means, 'cause my personal take away, not knowing the specifics, and just following say, cyber security for instance, one of the tenets there is that data sharing is an invaluable, important ethos in the community. Now, everyone has their own privacy, or security data, they don't want to let everyone know about their exploits but, but it's well known in the security world that sharing data with each other, different companies and countries is actually a good thing. So, the question that comes in my mind, is this really about data sharing or data privacy, or both? >> I think it's about both. And actually what the ruling is saying here is, all we're asking from the European side is please stop spying on us and please give us a level of equal protection that you give to your own citizens. Because data comes from America to Europe, whatever that data belongs to, a U.S. citizen or a European citizen, it's given equal protection. It is only if data goes in the other direction, where you have secret courts, secret warrants, seizure of data on this massive scale, and also a level of lack of equivalence that has been imposed. And we're just asking that once you've sorted out a few of those things, we'd say everything's back on the table, away we go again! >> Why don't we merge the EU with the United States? Wouldn't that solve the problem? (Bill laughing) >> We just left Europe! (laughs heartily) >> Actually I always -- >> A hostile takeover of the UK maybe, the 52nd state. (Bill laughing loudly) >> I always pick on Bill, like Bill, you got all screaming loud and clear about all these concerns, but UKs trying to get out of that economic union. It is a union at the end of the day, and I think the problem is the institutional mismatch between the EU and U.S., U.S. is old democracy, bigger country, population wise, bigger economy. Whereas Europe is several countries trying to put together, band together as one entity, and the institutions are new, like you know, they're 15 years old, right? They're maturing. I think that's where the big mismatch is and -- >> Well, Ray, I want to get your thoughts on this, Ray wrote a book, I forget what year it was, this digital disruption, basically it was digital transformation before it was actually a trend. I mean to me it's like, do you do the process first and then figure out where the value extraction is, and this may be a Silicon Valley or an American thing, but go create value, then figure out how to create process or understand regulations. So, if data and entrepreneurship is going to be a new modern era of value, why wouldn't we want to create a rule based system that's open and enabling, and not restrictive? >> So, that's a great point, right? And the innovation culture means you go do it first, and you figure out the rules later, and that's been a very American way of getting things done, and very Silicon Valley in our perspective, not everyone, but I think in general that's kind of the trend. I think the challenge here is that we are trading privacy for security, privacy for convenience, privacy for personalization, right? And on the security level, it's a very different conversation than what it is on the consumer end, you know, personalization side. On the security side I think most Americans are okay with a little bit of "spying," at least on your own side, you know, to keep the country safe. We're not okay with a China level type of spying, which we're not sure exactly what that means or what's enforceable in the courts. We look like China to the Europeans in the way we treat privacy, and I think that's the perspective we need to understand because Europeans are very explicit about how privacy is being protected. And so this really comes back to a point where we actually have to get to a consent model on privacy, as to knowing what data is being shared, you have the right to say no, and when you have the right to say no. And then if you have a value exchange on that data, then it's really like sometimes it's monetary, sometimes it's non-monetary, sometimes there's other areas around consensus where you can actually put that into place. And I think that's what's missing at this point, saying, you know, "Do we pay for your data? Do we explicitly get your consent first before we use it?" And we haven't had that in place, and I think that's where we're headed towards. And you know sometimes we actually say privacy should be a human right, it is in the UN Charter, but we haven't figured out how to enforce it or talk about it in the digital age. And so I think that's the challenge. >> Okay, people, until they lose it, they don't really understand what it means. I mean, look at Americans. I have to say that we're idiots on this front, (Bill chuckling) but you know, the thing is most people don't even understand how much value's getting sucked out of their digital exhaust. Like, our kids, TikTok and whatnot. So I mean, I get that, I think there's some, there's going to be blow back for America for sure. I just worry it's going to increase the cost of doing business, and take away from the innovation for citizen value, the people, because at the end of the day, it's for the people right? I mean, at the end of the day it's like, what's my privacy mean if I lose value? >> Even before we start talking about the value of the data and the innovation that we can do through data use, you have to understand the European perspective here. For the European there's a level of double standards and an erosion of trust. There's double standards in the fact that in California you have new privacy regulations that are slightly different to GDPR, but they're very much GDPR like. And if the boot was on the other foot, to say if we were spying on Californians and looking at their personal data, and contravening CCPA, the Californians would be up in arms! Likewise if we having promised to have a level of equality, had enacted a local rule in Europe that said that when data from America's over here, actually the privacy of Americans counts for nothing, we're only going to prioritize the privacy of Europeans. Again, the Americans would be up in arms! And therefore you can see that there are real double standards here that are a massive issue, and until those addressed, we're not going to trust the Americans. And likewise, the very fact that on a number of occasions Americans have signed up to treaties and promised to protect our data as they did with Safe Harbor, as they did with Privacy Shield, and then have blatantly, blatantly failed to do so means that actually to get back to even a level playing field, where we were, you have a great deal of trust to overcome! And the thing from the perspective of the big IT firms, they've seen this coming for a long time, as Ray was saying, and they sought to try and have a presence in Europe and other things. But the way this ruling has gone is that, I'm sorry, that isn't going to be sufficient! These big IT firms based in the U.S. that have been happy to hand over data, well some of them maybe more happy than others, but they all need to hand over data to the NSA or the CIA. They've been doing this for some time now without actually respecting this data privacy agreement that has existed between the two trading blocks. And now they've been called out, and the position now is that the U.S. is no longer trusted, and neither are any of these large American technology firms. And until the snooping stops and equality is introduced, they can now no longer, even from their European operations, they can no longer use standard contractual clauses to transfer data, which is going to be a massive restriction on their business. And if they had any sense, they'd be lobbying very, very hard right now to the Senate, to the House, to try and persuade U.S. lawmakers actually to stick to some these treaties! To stop introducing really mad laws that ride roughshod over other people's privacy, and have a certain amount of respect. >> Let's let JD weigh in, 'cause he just got in, sorry on the video, I made him back on a host 'cause he dropped off. Just, Bill, real quick, I mean I think it's like when, you know, I go to Europe there's the line for Americans, there's the line for EU. Or EU and everybody else. I mean we might be there, but ultimately this has to be solved. So, JD, I want to let you weigh in, Germany has been at the beginning forefront of privacy, and they've been hardcore, and how's this all playing out in your perspective? >> Well, the first thing that we have to understand is that in Germany, there is a very strong law for regulation. Germans panic as soon as they know regulation, so they need to understand what am I allowed to do, and what am I not allowed to do. And they expect the same from the others. For the record I'm not German, but I live in Germany for some 20 years, so I got a bit of a feeling for them. And that sense of need for regulation has spread very fast throughout the European Union, because most of the European member states of the European Union consider this, that it makes sense, and then we found that Britain had already a very good framework for privacy, so GDPR itself is very largely based on what the United Kingdom already had in place with their privacy act. Moving forward, we try to find agreement and consensus with other countries, especially the United States because that's where most of the tech providers are, only to find out, and that is where it started to go really, really bad, 2014, when the mass production by Edward Snowden came out, to find out it's not data from citizens, it's surveillance programs which include companies. I joined a purchasing conference a few weeks ago where the purchase of a large European multinational, where the purchasing director explicitly stated that usage of U.S. based tech providers for sensitive data is prohibited as a result of them finding out that they have been under surveillance. So, it's not just the citizens, there's mass -- >> There you have it, guys! We did trust you! We did have agreements there that you could have abided by, but you chose not to, you chose to abuse our trust! And you're now in a position where you are no longer trusted, and unless you can lobby your own elected representatives to actually recreate a level playing field, we're not going to continue trusting you. >> So, I think really I -- >> Well I mean that, you know, innovation has to come from somewhere, and you know, has to come from America if that's the case, you guys have to get on board, right? Is that what it -- >> Innovation without trust? >> Is that the perspective? >> I don't think it's a country thing, I mean like, it's not you or them, I think everybody -- >> I'm just bustin' Bill's chops there. >> No, but I think everybody, everybody is looking for what the privacy rules are, and that's important. And you can have that innovation with consent, and I think that's really where we're going to get to. And this is why I keep pushing that issue. I mean, privacy should be a fundamental right, and how you get paid for that privacy is interesting, or how you get compensated for that privacy if you know what the explicit value exchange is. What you're talking about here is the surveillance that's going on by companies, which shouldn't be happening, right? That shouldn't be happening at the company level. At the government level I can understand that that is happening, and I think those are treaties that the governments have to agree upon as to how much they're going to impinge on our personal privacy for the trade off for security, and I don't think they've had those discussions either. Or they decided and didn't tell any of their citizens, and I think that's probably more likely the case. >> I mean, I think what's happening here, Bill, you guys were pointing out, and Ray, you articulated there on the other side, and my kind of colorful joke aside, is that we're living a first generation modern sociology problem. I mean, this is a policy challenge that extends across multiple industries, cyber security, citizen's rights, geopolitical. I mean when would look, and even when we were doing CUBE events overseas in Europe, in North American companies we'd call it abroad, we'd just recycle the American program, and we found there's so much localization value. So, Ray, this is the digital disruption, it's the virtualization of physical for digital worlds, and it's a lot of network theory, which is computer science, a lot of sociology. This is a modern challenge, and I don't think it so much has a silver bullet, it's just that we need smart people working on this. That's my take away! >> I think we can describe the ideal endpoint being somewhere we have meaningful protection alongside the maximization of economic and social value through innovation. So, that should be what we would all agree would be the ideal endpoint. But we need both, we need meaningful protection, and we need the maximization of economic and social value through innovation! >> Can I add another axis? Another axis, security as well. >> Well, I could -- >> I put meaningful protection as becoming both security and privacy. >> Well, I'll speak for the American perspective here, and I won't speak, 'cause I'm not the President of the United States, but I will say as someone who's been from Silicon Valley and the east coast as a technical person, not a political person, our lawmakers are idiots when it comes to tech, just generally. (Ray laughing) They're not really -- (Bill laughing loudly) >> They really don't understand. They really don't understand the tech at all! >> So, the problem is -- >> I'm not claiming ours are a great deal better. (laughs) >> Well, this is why I think this is a modern problem. Like, the young people I talk to are like, "Why do we have this rules?" They're all lawyers that got into these positions of Congress on the American side, and so with the American JEDI Contract you guys have been following very closely is, it's been like the old school Oracle, IBM, and then Amazon is leading with an innovative solution, and Microsoft has come in and re-pivoted. And so what you have is a fight for the digital future of citizenship! And I think what's happening is that we're in a massive societal transition, where the people in charge don't know what the hell they're talkin' about, technically. And they don't know who to tap to solve the problems, or even shape or frame the problems. Now, there's pockets of people that are workin' on it, but to me as someone who looks at this saying, it's a pretty simple solution, no one's ever seen this before. So, there's a metaphor you can draw, but it's a completely different problem space because it's, this is all digital, data's involved. >> We've got a lobbyists out there, and we've got some tech firms spending an enormous amount of lobbying. If those lobbyists aren't trying to steer their representatives in the right direction to come up with law that aren't going to massively undermine trade and data sharing between Europe and America, then they're making a big mistake, because we got here through some really dumb lawmaking in the U.S., I mean, there are none of the laws in Europe that are a problem here. 'Cause GDPR isn't a great difference, a great deal different from some of the laws that we have already in California and elsewhere. >> Bill, Bill. >> The laws that are at issue here -- >> Bill, Bill! You have to like, back up a little bit from that rhetoric that EU is perfect and U.S. is not, that's not true actually. >> I'm not saying we're perfect! >> No, no, you say that all the time. >> But I'm saying there's a massive lack of innovation. Yeah, yeah. >> I don't, I've never said it! >> Arm wrestle! >> Yes, yes. >> When I'm being critical of some of the dumb laws in the U.S, (Sarbjeet laughing) I'm not saying Europe is perfect. What we're trying to say is that in this particular instance, I said there was an equal balance here between meaningful protection and the maximization of economic and social value. On the meaningful protection side, America's got it very wrong in terms of the meaningful protection it provides to civil European data. On the maximization of economic and social value, I think Europe's got it wrong. I think there are a lot of things we could do in Europe to actually have far more innovation. >> Yeah. >> It's a cultural issue. The Germans want rules, that's what they crave for. America's the other way, we don't want rules, I mean, pretty much is a rebel society. And that's kind of the ethos of most tech companies. But I think you know, to me the media, there's two things that go on with this tech business. The company's themselves have to be checked by say, government, and I believe in not a lot of regulation, but enough to check the power of bad actors. Media so called "checking power", both of these major roles, they don't really know what they're talking about, and this is back to the education piece. The people who are in the media so called "checking power" and the government checking power assume that the companies are bad. Right, so yeah, because eight out of ten companies like Amazon, actually try to do good things. If you don't know what good is, you don't really, (laughs) you know, you're in the wrong game. So, I think media and government have a huge education opportunity to look at this because they don't even know what they're measuring. >> I support the level of innovation -- >> I think we're unreeling from the globalization. Like, we are undoing the globalization, and that these are the side effects, these conflicts are a side effect of that. >> Yeah, so all I'm saying is I support the focus on innovation in America, and that has driven an enormous amount of wealth and value. What I'm questioning here is do you really need to spy on us, your allies, in order to help that innovation? And I'm starting to, I mean, do you need mass surveillance of your allies? I mean, I can see you may want to have some surveillance of people who are a threat to you, but wait, guys, we're meant to be on your side, and you haven't been treating our privacy with a great deal of respect! >> You know, Saudi Arabia was our ally. You know, 9/11 happened because of them, their people, right? There is no ally here, and there is no enemy, in a way. We don't know where the rogue actors are sitting, like they don't know, they can be within the walls -- >> It's well understood I think, I agree, sorry. it's well understood that nation states are enabling terrorist groups to take out cyber attacks. That's well known, the source enables it. So, I think there's the privacy versus -- >> I'm not sure it's true in your case that it's Europeans that's doing this though. >> No, no, well you know, they share -- >> I'm a former officer in the Royal Navy, I've stood shoulder to shoulder with my U.S. counterparts. I put my life on the line on NATO exercises in real war zones, and I'm now a disabled ex-serviceman as a result of that. I mean, if I put my line on the line shoulder to shoulder with Americans, why is my privacy not respected? >> Hold on -- >> I feel it's, I was going to say actually that it's not that, like even the U.S., right? Part of the spying internally is we have internal actors that are behaving poorly. >> Yeah. >> Right, we have Marxist organizations posing as, you know, whatever it is, I'll leave it at that. But my point being is we've got a lot of that, every country has that, every country has actors and citizens and people in the system that are destined to try to overthrow the system. And I think that's what that surveillance is about. The question is, we don't have treaties, or we didn't have your explicit agreements. And that's why I'm pushing really hard here, like, they're separating privacy versus security, which is the national security, and privacy versus us as citizens in terms of our data being basically taken over for free, being used for free. >> John: I agree with that. >> That I think we have some agreement on. I just think that our governments haven't really had that conversation about what surveillance means. Maybe someone agreed and said, "Okay, that's fine. You guys can go do that, we won't tell anybody." And that's what it feels like. And I don't think we deliberately are saying, "Hey, we wanted to spy on your citizens." I think someone said, "Hey, there's a benefit here too." Otherwise I don't think the EU would have let this happen for that long unless Max had made that case and started this ball rolling, so, and Edward Snowden and other folks. >> Yeah, and I totally support the need for security. >> I want to enter the -- >> I mean we need to, where there are domestic terrorists, we need to stop them, and we need to have local action in UK to stop it happening here, and in America to stop it happening there. But if we're doing that, there is absolutely no need for the Americans to be spying on us. And there's absolutely no need for the Americans to say that privacy applies to U.S. citizens only, and not to Europeans, these are daft, it's just daft! >> That's a fair point. I'm sure GCHQ and everyone else has this covered, I mean I'm sure they do. (laughs) >> Oh, Bill, I know, I've been involved, I've been involved, and I know for a fact the U.S. and the UK are discussing I know a company called IronNet, which is run by General Keith Alexander, funded by C5 Capital. There's a lot of collaboration, because again, they're tryin' to get their arms around how to frame it. And they all agree that sharing data for the security side is super important, right? And I think IronNet has this thing called Iron Dome, which is essentially like they're saying, hey, we'll just consistency around the rules of shared data, and we can both, everyone can have their own little data. So, I think there's recognition at the highest levels of some smart people on both countries. (laughs) "Hey, let's work together!" The issue I have is just policy, and I think there's a lot of clustering going on. Clustered here around just getting out of their own way. That's my take on that. >> Are we a PG show? Wait, are we a PG show? I just got to remember that. (laughs) (Bill laughing) >> It's the internet, there's no regulation, there's no rules! >> There's no regulation! >> The European rules or is it the American rules? (Ray laughing) >> I would like to jump back quickly to the purpose of the surveillance, and especially when mass surveillance is done under the cover of national security and terror prevention. I worked with five clients in the past decade who all have been targeted under mass surveillance, which was revealed by Edward Snowden, and when they did their own investigation, and partially was confirmed by Edward Snowden in person, they found out that their purchasing department, their engineering department, big parts of their pricing data was targeted in mass surveillance. There's no way that anyone can explain me that that has anything to do with preventing terror attacks, or finding the bad guys. That is economical espionage, you cannot call it in any other way. And that was authorized by the same legislation that authorizes the surveillance for the right purposes. I'm all for fighting terror, and anything that can help us prevent terror from happening, I would be the first person to welcome it. But I do not welcome when that regulation is abused for a lot of other things under the cover of national interest. I understand -- >> Back to the lawmakers again. And again, America's been victim to the Chinese some of the individual properties, well documented, well known in tech circles. >> Yeah, but just 'cause the Chinese have targeted you doesn't give you free right to target us. >> I'm not saying that, but its abuse of power -- >> If the U.S. can sort out a little bit of reform, in the Senate and the House, I think that would go a long way to solving the issues that Europeans have right now, and a long way to sort of reaching a far better place from which we can all innovate and cooperate. >> Here's the challenge that I see. If you want to be instrumenting everything, you need a closed society, because if you have a free country like America and the UK, a democracy, you're open. If you're open, you can't stop everything, right? So, there has to be a trust, to your point, Bill. As to me that I'm just, I just can't get my arms around that idea of complete lockdown and data surveillance because I don't think it's gettable in the United States, like it's a free world, it's like, open. It should be open. But here we've got the grids, and we've got the critical infrastructure that should be protected. So, that's one hand. I just can't get around that, 'cause once you start getting to locking down stuff and measuring everything, that's just a series of walled gardens. >> So, to JD's point on the procurement data and pricing data, I have been involved in some of those kind of operations, and I think it's financial espionage that they're looking at, financial security, trying to figure out a way to track down capital flows and what was purchased. I hope that was it in your client's case, but I think it's trying to figure out where the money flow is going, more so than trying to understand the pricing data from competitive purposes. If it is the latter, where they're stealing the competitive information on pricing, and data's getting back to a competitor, that is definitely a no-no! But if it's really to figure out where the money trail went, which is what I think most of those financial analysts are doing, especially in the CIA, or in the FBI, that's really what that probably would have been. >> Yeah, I don't think that the CIA is selling the data to your competitors, as a company, to Microsoft or to Google, they're not selling it to each other, right? They're not giving it to each other, right? So, I think the one big problem I studied with FISA is that they get the data, but how long they can keep the data and how long they can mine the data. So, they should use that data as exhaust. Means like, they use it and just throw it away. But they don't, they keep mining that data at a later date, and FISA is only good for five years. Like, I learned that every five years we revisit that, and that's what happened this time, that we renewed it for six years this time, not five, for some reason one extra year. So, I think we revisit all these laws -- >> Could be an election cycle. >> Huh? >> Could be an election cycle maybe. (laughs) >> Yes, exactly! So, we revisit all these laws with Congress and Senate here periodically just to make sure that they are up to date, and that they're not infringing on human rights, or citizen's rights, or stuff like that. >> When you say you update to check they're not conflicting with anything, did you not support that it was conflicting with Privacy Shield and some of the promises you made to Europeans? At what point did that fail to become obvious? >> It does, because there's heightened urgency. Every big incident happens, 9/11 caused a lot of new sort of like regulations and laws coming into the picture. And then the last time, that the Russian interference in our election, that created some sort of heightened urgency. Like, "We need to do something guys here, like if some country can topple our elections, right, that's not acceptable." So, yeah -- >> And what was it that your allies did that caused you to spy on us and to downgrade our privacy? >> I'm not expert on the political systems here. I think our allies are, okay, loose on their, okay, I call it village politics. Like, world is like a village. Like it's so only few countries, it's not millions of countries, right? That's how I see it, a city versus a village, and that's how I see the countries, like village politics. Like there are two camps, like there's Russia and China camp, and then there's U.S. camp on the other side. Like, we used to have Russia and U.S., two forces, big guys, and they managed the whole world balance somehow, right? Like some people with one camp, the other with the other, right? That's how they used to work. Now that Russia has gone, hold on, let me finish, let me finish. >> Yeah. >> Russia's gone, there's this void, right? And China's trying to fill the void. Chinese are not like, acting diplomatic enough to fill that void, and there's, it's all like we're on this imbalance, I believe. And then Russia becomes a rogue actor kind of in a way, that's how I see it, and then they are funding all these bad people. You see that all along, like what happened in the Middle East and all that stuff. >> You said there are different camps. We thought we were in your camp! We didn't expect to be spied on by you, or to have our rights downgraded by you. >> No, I understand but -- >> We thought we were on your side! >> But, but you have to guys to trust us also, like in a village. Let me tell you, I come from a village, that's why I use the villager as a hashtag in my twitter also. Like in village, there are usually one or two families which keep the village intact, that's our roles. >> Right. >> Like, I don't know if you have lived in a village or not -- >> Well, Bill, you're making some great statements. Where's the evidence on the surveillance, where can people find more information on this? Can you share? >> I think there's plenty of evidence, and I can send some stuff on, and I'm a little bit shocked given the awareness of the FISA Act, the Cloud Act, the fact that these things are in existence and they're not exactly unknown. And many people have been complaining about them for years. I mean, we've had Safe Harbor overturned, we've had Privacy Shield overturned, and these weren't just on a whim! >> Yeah, what does JD have in his hand? I want to know. >> The Edward Snowden book! (laughs) >> By Edward Snowden, which gives you plenty. But it wasn't enough, and it's something that we have to keep in mind, because we can always claim that whatever Edward Snowden wrote, that he made it up. Every publication by Edward Snowden is an avalanche of technical confirmation. One of the things that he described about the Cisco switches, which Bill prefers to quote every time, which is a proven case, there were bundles of researchers saying, "I told you guys!" Nobody paid attention to those researchers, and Edward Snowden was smart enough to get the mass media representation in there. But there's one thing, a question I have for Sabjeet, because in the two parties strategy, it is interesting that you always take out the European Union as part. And the European Union is a big player, and it will continue to grow. It has a growing amount of trade agreements with a growing amount of countries, and I still hope, and I think think Bill -- >> Well, I think the number of countries is reducing, you've just lost one! >> Only one. (Bill laughing loudly) Actually though, those are four countries under one kingdom, but that's another point. (Bill chortling heartily) >> Guys, final topic, 5G impact, 'cause you mentioned Cisco, couldn't help think about -- >> Let me finish please my question, John. >> Okay, go ahead. How would you the United States respond if the European Union would now legalize to spy on everybody and every company, and every governmental institution within the United States and say, "No, no, it's our privilege, we need that." How would the United States respond? >> You can try that and see economically what happens to you, that's how the village politics work, you have to listen to the mightier than you, and we are economically mightier, that's the fact. Actually it's hard to swallow fact for, even for anybody else. >> If you guys built a great app, I would use it, and surveil all you want. >> Yeah, but so this is going to be driven by the economics. (John laughing) But the -- >> That's exactly what John said. >> This is going to be driven by the economics here. The big U.S. cloud firms are got to find this ruling enormously difficult for them, and they are inevitably going to lobby for a level of reform. And I think a level of a reform is needed. Nobody on your side is actually arguing very vociferously that the Cloud Act and the discrimination against Europeans is actually a particularly good idea. The problem is that once you've done the reform, are we going to believe you when you say, "Oh, it's all good now, we've stopped it!" Because with Crypto AG scandal in Switzerland you weren't exactly honest about what you were doing. With the FISA courts, so I mean FISA secret courts, the secret warrants, how do we know and what proof can we have that you've stopped doing all these bad things? And I think one of the challenges, A, going to be the reform, and then B, got to be able to show that you actually got your act together and you're now clean. And until you can solve those two, many of your big tech companies are going to be at a competitive disadvantage, and they're going to be screaming for this reform. >> Well, I think that, you know, General Mattis said in his book about Trump and the United states, is that you need alliances, and I think your point about trust and executing together, without alliances, it really doesn't work. So, unless there's some sort of real alliance, (laughs) like understanding that there's going to be some teamwork here, (Bill laughing) I don't think it's going to go anywhere. So, otherwise it'll continue to be siloed and network based, right? So to the village point, if TikTok can become a massively successful app, and they're surveilling, so and then we have to decide that we're going to put up with that, I mean, that's not my decision, but that's what's goin' on here. It's like, what is TikTok, is it good or bad? Amazon sent out an email, and they've retracted it, that's because it went public. I guarantee you that they're talkin' about that at Amazon, like, "Why would we want infiltration by the Chinese?" And I'm speculating, I have no data, I'm just saying, you know. They email those out, then they pull it back, "Oh, we didn't mean to send that." Really, hmm? (laughs) You know, so this kind of -- >> But the TRA Balin's good, you always want to get TRA Balin out there. >> Yeah, exactly. There's some spying going on! So, this is the reality. >> So, John, you were talking about 5G, and I think you know, the role of 5G, you know, the battle between Cisco and Huawei, you just have to look at it this way, would you rather have the U.S. spy on you, or would you rather have China? And that's really your binary choice at this moment. And you know both is happening, and so the question is which one is better. Like, the one that you're in alliance with? The one that you're not in alliance with, the one that wants to bury you, and decimate your country, and steal all your secrets and then commercialize 'em? Or the one kind of does it, but doesn't really do it explicitly? So, you've got to choose. (laughs) >> It's supposed to be -- >> Or you can say no, we're going to create our own standard for 5G and kick both out, that's an option. >> It's probably not as straightforward a question as, or an answer to that question as you say, because if we were to fast-forward 50 years, I would argue that China is going to be the largest trading nation in the world. I believe that China is going to have the upper hand on many of these technologies, and therefore why would we not want to use some of their innovation, some of their technology, why would we not actually be more orientated around trading with them than we might be with the U.S.? I think the U.S. is throwing its weight around at this moment in time, but if we were to fast-forward I think looking in the longterm, if I had to put my money on Huawei or some of its competitors, I think given its level of investments in research and whatever, I think the better longterm bet is Huawei. >> No, no, actually you guys need to pick a camp. It's a village again. You have to pick a camp, you can't be with both guys. >> Global village. >> Oh, right, so we have to go with the guys that have been spying on us? >> How do you know the Chinese haven't been spying on you? (Ray and John laughing loudly) >> I think I'm very happy, you find a backdoor in the Huawei equipment and you show it to us, we'll take them to task on it. But don't start bullying us into making decisions based on what-ifs. >> I don't think I'm, I'm not qualified to represent the U.S., but what we would want to say is that if you look at the dynamics of what's going on, China, we've been studying that as well in terms of the geopolitical aspects of what happens in technology, they have to do what they're doing right now. Because in 20 years our population dynamics go like this, right? You've got the one child policy, and they won't have the ability to go out and fight for those same resources where they are, so what they're doing makes sense from a country perspective and country policy. But I think they're going to look like Japan in 20 years, right? Because the xenophobia, the lack of immigration, the lack of inside stuff coming in, an aging population. I mean, those are all factors that slow down your economy in the long run. And the lack of bringing new people in for ideas, I mean that's part of it, they're a closed system. And so I think the longterm dynamics of every closed system is that they tend to fail versus open systems. So, I'm not sure, they may have better technology along the way. But I think a lot of us are probably in the camp now thinking that we're not going to aid and abet them, in that sense to get there. >> You're competing a country with a company, I didn't say that China had necessarily everything rosy in its future, it'll be a bigger economy, and it'll be a bigger trading partner, but it's got its problems, the one child policy and the repercussions of that. But that is not one of the things, Huawei, I think Huawei's a massively unlimited company that has got a massive lead, certainly in 5G technology, and may continue to maintain a lead into 6G and beyond. >> Oh yeah, yeah, Huawei's done a great job on the 5G side, and I don't disagree with that. And they're ahead in many aspects compared to the U.S., and they're already working on the 6G technologies as well, and the roll outs have been further ahead. So, that's definitely -- >> And they've got a great backer too, the financer, the country China. Okay guys, (Ray laughing) let's wrap up the segment. Thanks for everyone's time. Final thoughts, just each of you on this core issue of the news that we discussed and the impact that was the conversation. What's the core issue? What should people think about? What's your solution? What's your opinion of how this plays out? Just final statements. We'll start with Bill, Ray, Sarbjeet and JD. >> All I'm going to ask you is stop spying on us, treat us equally, treat us like the allies that we are, and then I think we've got to a bright future together! >> John: Ray? >> I would say that Bill's right in that aspect in terms of how security agreements work, I think that we've needed to be more explicit about those. I can't represent the U.S. government, but I think the larger issue is really how do we view privacy, and how we do trade offs between security and convenience, and you know, what's required for personalization, and companies that are built on data. So, the sooner we get to those kind of rules, an understanding of what's possible, what's a consensus between different countries and companies, I think the better off we will all be a society. >> Yeah, I believe the most important kind of independence is the economic independence. Like, economically sound parties dictate the terms, that's what U.S. is doing. And the smaller countries have to live with it or pick the other bigger player, number two in this case is China. John said earlier, I think, also what JD said is the fine balance between national security and the privacy. You can't have, you have to strike that balance, because the rogue actors are sitting in your country, and across the boundaries of the countries, right? So, it's not that FISA is being fought by Europeans only. Our internal people are fighting that too, like how when you are mining our data, like what are you using it for? Like, I get concerned too, when you can use that data against me, that you have some data against me, right? So, I think it's the fine balance between security and privacy, we have to strike that. Awesome. JD? I'll include a little fake check, fact check, at the moment China is the largest economy, the European Union is the second largest economy, followed directly by the USA, it's a very small difference, and I recommend that these two big parties behind the largest economy start to collaborate and start to do that eye to eye, because if you want to balance the economical and manufacturing power of China, you cannot do that as being number two and number three. You have to join up forces, and that starts with sticking with the treaties that you signed, and that has not happened in the past, almost four years. So, let's go back to the table, let's work on rules where from both sides the rights and the privileges are properly reflected, and then do the most important thing, stick to them! >> Yep, I think that's awesome. I think I would say that these young kids in high school and college, they need to come up and solve the problems, this is going to be a new generational shift where the geopolitical landscape will change radically, you mentioned the top three there. And new alliances, new kinds of re-imagination has to be there, and from America's standpoint I'll just say that I'd like to see lawmakers have, instead of a LinkedIn handle, a GitHub handle. You know, when they all go out on campaign talk about what code they've written. So, I think having a technical background or some sort of knowledge of computer science and how the internet works with sociology and societal impact will be critical for our citizenships to advance. So, you know rather a lawyer, right so? (laughs) Maybe get some law involved in that, I mean the critical lawyers, but today most people are lawyers in American politics, but show me a GitHub handle of that congressman, that senator, I'd be impressed. So, that's what we need. >> Thanks, good night! >> Ray, you want to say something? >> I wanted to say something, because I thought the U.S. economy was 21 trillion, the EU is sittin' at about 16, and China was sitting about 14, but okay, I don't know. >> You need to do math man. >> Hey, we went over our 30 minutes time, we can do an hour with you guys, so you're still good. (laughs) >> Can't take anymore. >> No go on, get in there, go at it when you've got something to say. >> I don't think it's immaterial the exact size of the economy, I think that we're better off collaborating on even and fair terms, we are -- >> We're all better off collaborating. >> Yeah. >> Gentlemen -- >> But the collaboration has to be on equal and fair terms, you know. (laughs) >> How do you define fair, good point. Fair and balanced, you know, we've got the new -- >> We did define fair, we struck a treaty! We absolutely defined it, absolutely! >> Yeah. >> And then one side didn't stick to it. >> We will leave it right there, and we'll follow up (Bill laughing) in a later conversation. Gentlemen, you guys are good. Thank you. (relaxing electronic music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in the Palo Alto cube studios. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, with a great guest here, Shanthi Vigneshwaran, who is with the Office of Strategic programs in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research within the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, is the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the Year award. Congratulations, Shanthi welcome to this cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> Congratulations on being the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the year award. Tell us more about the organization. I see FDA everyone's probably concerned these days making sure things going faster and faster, more complex, more things are happening. Tell us about your organization and what you work on. >> FDA is huge, our organization is Center for Drug Evaluation research. And its core mission is to promote public health by ensuring the availability of safety and effective drugs. For example any drugs you go and buy it in the pharmacy today, Our administration helps in trying to approve them and make sure it's so in term of quality and integrity of the marketed products in the industry. My office is specifically Office of strategic programs whose mission is to transform the drug regulatory operations with the customer focus through analytics and informatics. They work towards the advancement for the CDERs public health mission. >> What are some of the objectives that you guys have? What are some things you guys have as your core top objectives of the CDER, the drug research group? >> The core objectives is we wanted to make sure that we are promoting a safe use of the marketed drugs. We want to make sure there's the availability of the drugs that are going to the patients are effective. And also the quality of the drugs that are being marketed are able to protect public health. >> What are some of the challenges that you guys have to take in managing the pharmaceutical safety, because I can only imagine certainly now that supply chains, tracing, monitoring, drug efficacy, safety, all these things are happening. What are some of the challenges in doing all this? >> In our office there are challenges in three different areas. One is the drug regulation challenges because as drugs are being more advanced and as there are more increasingly complex products, and there are challenging in the development area of the drugs, we wanted to make sure here we have a regulation that supports any advancement in science and technology. The other thing is also Congress is actually given new authorities and roles for the FDA to act. For example the Drug Quality and Security Act, which means any drug that's they want to track and trace all the drugs that goes to the public is they know who are the distributors, who are the manufacturers. Then you have the 21st Century Cures Act, and also the CARES Act package which was recently assigned, which also has a lot of the OTC drug regulatory modernization. Then there's also the area of globalization because just as disease don't have any borders, Product safety and quality are no longer on one country. It's basically a lot of the drugs that are being manufactured are overseas and as a result we wanted to make sure there are 300 US ports. And we want to make sure the FDA regulated shipments are coming through correctly to proper venues and everything is done correctly. Those are some the challenges we have to deal with. >> So much going on a lot of moving purchase as people say, there's always drug shortages, always demand, knowing that and tracking it. I can only imagine the world you're living in because you got to be innovative, got to be fast, got to be cutting edge, got to get the quality right. Data is super critical. And can you share take a minute to explain some of the data challenges you have to address and how you did that. Because I mean I could almost just my mind's blown just thinking about how you live it every day. Can you just share some of those challenges that you had to address and how did you do? >> Some of the key challenges we actually see is we have roughly 170,000 regulatory submissions per year. There are roughly 88,000 firm registration and product listing that comes to us, and then there are more than 2 million adverse event reports. So with all these data submissions and organization as such as us we need it, we have multiple systems where this data is acquired and each has its own criteria for validating the data. Adding to it are internal and external stakeholders also want certain rules and the way the data is being identified. So we wanted to make sure there is a robust MDM framework to make sure to cleanse and enrich and standardize the data. So that it basically make sure the trust and the availability and the consistent of the data, is being supplied to published to the CDER regulatory data users. >> You guys are dealing with- >> Otherwise like it's almost to give them a 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. Through each of the different phases, both pre market which is before the drug hits the market, and then after it hits the market. We still want to make sure the data we receive still supports a regulatory review and decision making process. >> Yeah, and you got to deliver a consumer product to get people at the right time. All these things have to happen, and you can see it clearly the impacts everyday life. I got to ask you that the database question 'cause the database geek inside of me is just going okay. I can only imagine the silos and the different systems and the codes, because data silos is big document. We've been reporting on this on theCUBE for a long time around, making data available automation. All these things have to happen if there's data availability. Can you just take one more minute talk about some of the challenges there because you got to break down the silos at the same time you really can't replace them. >> That's true. What we did was we did leave it more of us I mean, step back like seven years ago, when we did the data management. We had like a lot of silo systems as well. And we wanted to look at we wanted to establish a, we knew we wanted to establish a master data management. So we took a little bit more of a strategic vision. And so what we ended up saying is identifying what are the key areas of the domain that will give us some kind of a relationship. What are the key areas that will give us the 360 degree lifecycle? So that's what we did. We identified the domains. And then we took a step back and said and then we looked at what is the first domain we wanted to tackle. Because we know what are these domains are going to be. And then we were like, okay, let's take a step back and say which is the domain we do it first that will give us the most return on investment, which will make people actually look at it and say, hey, this makes sense. This data is good. So that's what we ended up looking at. We looked at it as at both ends. One is from a end user perspective. Which is the one they get the benefit out of and also from a data silo perspective which is the one data domains that are common, where there's duplication that we can consolidate. >> So that's good. You did the work up front. That's critical knowing what you want to do and get out of it. What were some of the benefits you guys got out of it. From an IT standpoint, how does that translate to the business benefits? And what was achieved? >> I think the benefits we got from the IT standpoint was a lot of the deduplication was not theirs. Which basically means like a lot of the legacy systems and all of the manual data quality work we had to do we automated it. We had bots, we also had other automation process that we actually put into work with Informatica, that actually helped us to make sure it's the cost of it actually went for us considerably. For example it used to take us three days to process submissions. Now it takes us less than 24 hours to do it, for the users to see the data. So it was a little bit more, we saw the, we wanted to look at what are the low hanging fruits where it's labor intensive and how can we improve it. That's how we acted there. >> What are some of the things that you're experiencing? I mean, like, we look back at what it was before, where it is now? Is it more agility, you more responsive to the changes? Was it an aspirin? Was it a complete transformation? Was some pain reduced? Can you share just some color commentary on kind of before the way it was before and then what you're experiencing now? >> So for us, I think before, we didn't know where the for us, I mean, I wouldn't say we didn't know it, when we have the data, we looked at product and it was just product. We looked at manufactured they were all in separate silos. But when we did the MDM domain, we were able to look at the relationship. And it was very interesting to see the relationship because we now are able to say is. for example, if there is a drug shortage during due to hurricane, with the data we have, we can narrow down and say, Hey, this area is going to be affected which means these are the manufacturing facilities in that area , that are going to be not be able to function or impacted by it. We can get to the place where the hurricane tracks we use the National Weather Service data, but it helps us to narrow down some of the challenges and we can able to predict where the next risk is going to be. >> And then before the old model, there was either a blind spot or you were ad hoc, probably right? Probably didn't have that with you. >> Yeah, before you were either blind or you're doing in a more of a reactionary not proactively. Now we are able to do a little bit more proactively. And even with I mean drug shortages and drug supply chain are the biggest benefit we saw with this model. Because, for us the drug supply chain means linking the pre and post market phases that lets us know if there's a trigger and the adverse events, we actually can go back to the pre market side and see where the traceability is who's at that truck. What are all the different things that was going on. >> This is one of the common threats I see in innovation where people look at the business model and data and look at it as a competitive advantage, in this case proactivity on using data to make decisions before things happen, less reactivity. So that increases time. I mean, that would probably you're saying, and you get there faster, if you can see it, understand it, and impact the workflows involved. This is a major part of the data innovation that's going on and you starting to see new kinds of data whereas has come out. So again, starting to see a real new changeover to scaling up this kind of concept almost foundationally. What's your thoughts just as someone who's a practitioner in the industry as you start to get this kind of feelings and seeing the benefits? What's next, what do you see happening because you haven't success. How do you scale it? What how do you guys look at that? >> I think our next is we have the domains and we actually have the practices that we work. We look at it as it's basically data always just changes. So we look at is like what are some of the ways that we can improve the data? How can we take it to the next level. Because now they talk about power. They are also warehouse data lakes. So we want to see is how can we take these domains and get that relationship or get that linkages when there is a bigger set of data that's available for us. What can we use that and it actually we think there are other use cases we wanted to explore and see what is the benefit that we can get a little bit more on the predictability to do like post market surveillance or like to look at like safety signals and other things to see what are the quick things that we can use for the business operations. >> It's really a lot more fun. You're in there using the data. You're seeing the benefits and real. This is what clouds all about the data clouds here. It's scaling. Super fun to talk about and excited. When you see the impacts in real time, not waiting for later. So congratulations. You guys have been selected and you receive recognition from Informatica as the 2020, Intelligent Disrupter of the year. congratulations. What does that mean for your organization? >> I think we were super excited about it. But one thing I can say is when we embarked on this work, like seven years ago, or so, problem was like we were trying to identify and develop new scientific methods to improve the quality of our drugs to get that 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. The program today enables FDA CDER to capture all the granular details of data we need for the regulatory data. It helps us to support the informed decisions that we have to make in real time sometimes or and also to make sure when there's an emergency, we are able to respond with a quick look at the data to say like, hey this is what we need to do. It also helps the teams. It recognizes all the hard work. And the hours we put into establishing the program and it helped to build the awareness within FDA and also with the industry of our political master data management is. >> It's a great reward to see the fruits of the labor and good decision making I'm sure it was a lot of hard work. For folks out there watching, who are also kind of grinding away in some cases, some cases moving faster. You guys are epitome of a supply chain that's super critical. And speed is critical. Quality is critical. A lot of days critical. A lot of businesses are starting to feel this as part of an integrated data strategy. And I'm a big proponent. I think you guys have have a great example of this. What advice would you have for other practitioners because you got data scientists, but yet data engineers now who are trying to architect and create scale, and programmability, and automation, and you got the scientists in the the front lines coming together and they all feed into applications. So it's kind of a new things go on. Your advice to folks out there, on how to do this, how to do it right, the learnings, share. >> I think the key thing I, at least for my learning experience was, it's not within one year you're going to accomplish it, It's kind of we have to be very patient. And it's a long road. If you make mistakes, you will have to go back and reassess. Even with us, with all the work we did, we almost went back a couple of the domains because we thought like, hey, there are additional use cases how this can be helpful. There are additional, for example, we went with the supply chain, but then now we go back and look at it and say like, hy, there may be other things that we can use with the supply chain not just with this data, can we expand it? How can we look at the study data or other information so that's what we try to do. It's not like you're done with MDM and that is it. Your domain is complete. It's almost like you look at it and it creates a web and you need to look at each domain and you want to come back to it and see how it is you have to go. But the starting point is you need to establish what are your key domains. That will actually drive your vision for the next four or five years. You can't just do bottom up, it's more of like a top down approach. >> That's great. That's great the insight. And again, it's never done. I mean, it's data is coming. It's not going away. It's going to be integrated. It's going to be shared. You got to scale it up. A lot of hard work. >> Yeah. >> Shanthi thank you so much for the insight. Congratulations on your receiving the Disrupter of the Year Award winner for Informatica. congratulations. Intelligence >> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Thank you. >> Thank you for sharing, Shanthi Vigneshswaran is here, Office of Strategic programs at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research with the US FDA. Thanks for joining us, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Valenti, welcome back to our RPA Drill Down. Ted Kummert is here he is Executive Vice President for Products and Engineering at UiPath. Ted, thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Dave, it's great to be here, thanks so much. >> Dave your background is pretty interesting, you started as a Silicon Valley Engineer, they pulled you out, you did a huge stint at Microsoft. You got experience in SAS, you've got VC chops with Madrona. And at Microsoft you saw it all, the NT, the CE Space, Workflow, even MSN you did stuff with MSN, and then the all important data. So I'm interested in what attracted you to UiPath? >> Yeah Dave, I feel super fortunate to have worked in the industry in this span of time, it's been an amazing journey, and I had a great run at Microsoft it was fantastic. You mentioned one experience in the middle there, when I first went to the server business, the enterprise business, I owned our Integration and Workflow products, and I would say that's the first I encountered this idea. Often in the software industry there are ideas that have been around for a long time, and what we're doing is refining how we're delivering them. And we had ideas we talked about in terms of Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Workflow. The ways to efficiently able somebody to express the business process in a piece of software. Bring systems together, make everybody productive, bring humans into it. These were the ideas we talked about. Now in reality there were some real gaps. Because what happened in the technology was pretty different from what the actual business process was. And so lets fast forward then, I met Madrona Venture Group, Seattle based Venture Capital Firm. We actually made a decision to participate in one of UiPath's fundraising rounds. And that's the first I really came encountered with the company and had to have more than an intellectual understanding of RPA. 'Cause when I first saw it, I said "oh, I think that's desktop automation" I didn't look very close, maybe that's going to run out of runway, whatever. And then I got more acquainted with it and figured out "Oh, there's a much bigger idea here". And the power is that by really considering the process and the implementation from the humans work in, then you have an opportunity really to automate the real work. Not that what we were doing before wasn't significant, this is just that much more powerful. And that's when I got really excited. And then the companies statistics and growth and everything else just speaks for itself, in terms of an opportunity to work, I believe, in one of the most significant platforms going in the enterprise today, and work at one of the fastest growing companies around. It was like almost an automatic decision to decide to come to the company. >> Well you know, you bring up a good point you think about software historically through our industry, a lot of it was 'okay here's this software, now figure out how to map your processes to make it all work' and today the processes, especially you think about this pandemic, the processes are unknown. And so the software really has to be adaptable. So I'm wondering, and essentially we're talking about a fundamental shift in the way we work. And is there really a fundamental shift going on in how we write software and how would you describe that? >> Well there certainly are, and in a way that's the job of what we do when we build platforms for the enterprises, is try and give our customers a new way to get work done, that's more efficient and helps them build more powerful applications. And that's exactly what RPA does, the efficiency, it's not that this is the only way in software to express a lot of this, it just happens to be the quickest. You know in most ways. Especially as you start thinking about initiatives like our StudioX product to what we talk about as enabling citizen developers. It's an expression that allows customers to just do what they could have done otherwise much more quickly and efficient. And the value on that is always high, certainly in an unknown era like this, it's even more valuable, there are specific processes we've been helping automate in the healthcare, in financial services, with things like SBA Loan Processing, that we weren't thinking about six months ago, or they weren't thinking about six months ago. We're all thinking about how we're reinventing the way we work as individuals and corporations because of what's going on with the coronavirus crisis, having a platform like this that gives you agility and mapping the real work to what your computer state and applications all know how to do, is even more valuable in a climate like that. >> What attracted us originally to UiPath, we knew Bobby Patrick CMO, he said "Dave, go download a copy, go build some automations and go try it with some other companies". So that really struck us as wow, this is actually quite simple. Yet at the same time, and so you've of course been automating all these simple tasks, but now you've got real aspiration, you're glomming on to this term of Hyperautomation, you've made some acquisitions, you've got a vision, that really has taken you beyond 'paving the cow path' I sometimes say, of all these existing processes. It's really trying to discover new processes and opportunities for automation, which you would think after 50 or whatever years we've been in this industry, we'd have attacked a lot of it, but wow, seems like we have a long way to go. Again, especially what we're learning through this pandemic. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I'd say Hyperautomation. It's actually a Gartner term, it's not our term. But there is a bigger idea here, built around the core automation platform. So let's talk for a second just what's not about the core platform and then what Hyperautomation really means around that. And I think of that as the bookends of how do I discover and plan, how do I improve my ability to do more automations, and find the real opportunities that I have. And how do I measure and optimize? And that's a lot of what we delivered in 20.4 as a new capability. So let's talk about discover and plan. One aspect of that is the wisdom of the crowd. We have a product we call Automation Hub that is all about that. Enabling people who have ideas, they're the ones doing the work, they have the observation into what efficiencies can be. Enabling them to either with our Ask Capture Utility capture that and document that, or just directly document that. And then, people across the company can then collaborate eventually moving on building the best ideas out of that. So there's capturing the crowd, and then there's a more scientific way of capturing actually what the opportunities are. So we've got two products we introduced. One is process mining, and process mining is about going outside in from the, let's call it the larger processes, more end to end processes in the enterprise. Things like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, helping you understand by watching the events, and doing the analytics around that, where your bottle necks, where are you opportunities. And then task mining said "let's watch an individual, or group of individuals, what their tasks are, let's watch the log of events there, let's apply some machine learning processing to that, and say here's the repetitive things we've found." And really helping you then scientifically discover what your opportunities are. And these ideas have been along for a long time, process mining is not new. But the connection to an automation platform, we think is a new and powerful idea, and something we plan to invest a lot in going forward. So that's the first bookend. And then the second bookend is really about attaching rich analytics, so how do I measure it, so there's operationally how are my robots doing? And then there's everything down to return on investment. How do I understand how they are performing, verses what I would have spent if I was continuing to do them the old way. >> Yeah that's big 'cause (laughing) the hero reports for the executives to say "hey, this is actually working" but at the same time you've got to take a systems view. You don't want to just optimize one part of the system at the detriment to others. So you talk about process mining, which is kind of discovering the backend systems, ERP and the like, where the task mining it sounds like it's more the collaboration and front end. So that whole system thinking, really applies, doesn't it? >> Yeah. Very much so. Another part of what we talked about then, in the system is, how do we capture the ideas and how do we enable more people to build these automations? And that really gets down to, we talk about it in our company level vision, is a robot for every person. Every person should have a digital assistant. It can help you with things you do less frequently, it can help you with things you do all the time to do your job. And how do we help you create those? We've released a new tool we call StudioX. So for our RPA Developers we have Studio, and StudioX is really trying to enable a citizen developer. It's not unlike the art that we saw in Business Intelligence there was the era where analytics and reporting were the domain of experts, and they produced formalized reports that people could consume. But the people that had the questions would have to work with them and couldn't do the work themselves. And then along comes ClickView and Tableau and Power BI enabling the self services model, and all of a sudden people could do that work themselves, and that enabled powerful things. We think the same arch happens here, and StudioX is really our way of enabling that, citizen developer with the ideas to get some automation work done on their own. >> Got a lot in this announcement, things like document understanding, bring your own AI with AI fabric, how are you able to launch so many products, and have them fit together, you've made some acquisitions. Can you talk about the architecture that enables you to do that? >> Yeah, it's clearly in terms of ambition, and I've been there for 10 weeks, but in terms of ambition you don't have to have been there when they started the release after Forward III in October to know that this is the most ambitious thing that this company has ever done from a release perspective. Just in terms of the surface area we're delivering across now as an organization, is substantive. We talk about 1,000 feature improvements, 100's of discreet features, new products, as well as now our automation cloud has become generally available as well. So we've had muscle building over this past time to become world class at offering SAS, in addition to on-premises. And then we've got this big surface area, and architecture is a key component of how you can do this. How do you deliver efficiently the same software on-premises and in the cloud? Well you do that by having the right architecture and making the right bets. And certainly you look forward, how are companies doing this today? It's really all about Cloud-Native Platform. But it's about an architecture such that we can do that efficiently. So there is a lot about just your technical strategy. And then it's just about a ton of discipline and customer focus. It keeps you focused on the right things. StudioX was a great example of we were led by customers through a lot of what we actually delivered, a couple of the major features in it, certainly the out of box templates, the studio governance features, came out of customer suggestions. I think we had about 100 that we have sitting in the backlog, a lot of which we've already done, and really being disciplined and really focused on what customers are telling. So make sure you have the right technical strategy and architecture, really follow your customers, and really stay disciplined and focused on what matters most as you execute on the release. >> What can we learn from previous examples, I think about for instance SQL Server, you obviously have some knowledge in it, it started out pretty simple workloads and then at the time we all said "wow, it's a lot more powerful to come from below that it is, if a Db2, or an Oracle sort of goes down market", Microsoft proved that, obviously built in the robustness necessary, is there a similar metaphor here with regard to things like governance and security, just in terms of where UiPath started and where you see it going? >> Well I think the similarities have more to do with we have an idea of a bigger platform that we're now delivering against. In the database market, that was, we started, SQL Server started out as more of just a transactional database product, and ultimately grew to all of the workloads in the data platform, including transaction for transactional apps, data warehousing and as well as business intelligence. I see the same analogy here of thinking more broadly of the needs, and what the ability of an integrated platform, what it can do to enable great things for customers, I think that's a very consistent thing. And I think another consistent thing is know who you are. SQL Server knew exactly who it had to be when it entered the database market. That it was going to set a new benchmark on simplicity, TCO, and that was going to be the way it differentiated. In this case, we're out ahead of the market, we have a vision that's broader than a lot of the market is today. I think we see a lot of people coming in to this space, but we see them building to where we were, and we're out ahead. So we are operating from a leadership position, and I'm not going to tell you one's easier that the other, and both you have to execute with great urgency. But we're really executing out ahead, so we've got to keep thinking about, and there's no one's tail lights to follow, we have to be the ones really blazing the trail on what all of this means. >> I want to ask you about this incorporation of existing systems. Some markets they take off, it's kind of a one shot deal, and the market just embeds. I think you guys have bigger aspirations than that, I look at it like a service now, misunderstood early on, built the platform and now really is fundamental part of a lot of enterprises. I also look at things like EDW, which again, you have some experience in. In my view it failed to live up to a lot of it's promises even though it delivered a lot of value. You look at some of the big data initiatives, you know EDW still plugs in, it's the system of record, okay that's fine. How do you see RPA evolving? Are we going to incorporate, do we have to embrace existing business process systems? Or is this largely a do-over in your opinion? >> Well I think it's certainly about a new way of building automation, and it's starting to incorporate and include the other ways, for instance in the current release we added support for long running workflow, it was about human workflow based scenarios, now the human is collaborating with the robot, and we built those capabilities. So I do see us combining some of the old and new way. I think one of the most significant things here, is also that impact that AI and ML based technologies and skills can have on the power of the automations that we deliver. We've certainly got a surface area that, I think about our AI and ML strategy in two parts, that we are building first class first party skills, that we're including in the platform, and then we're building a platform for third parties and customers to bring their what their data science teams have delivered, so those can also be a part of our ecosystem, and part of automations. And so things like document understanding, how do I easily extract data from more structured, semi-structured and completely unstructured documents, accurately? And include those in my automations. Computer vision which gives us an ability to automate at a UI level across other types of systems than say a Windows and a browser base application. And task mining is built on a very robust, multi layer ML system, and the innovation opportunity that I think just consider there, you know continue there. You think it's a macro level if there's aspects of machine learning that are about captured human knowledge, well what exactly is an automation that captured where you're capturing a lot of human knowledge. The impact of ML and AI are going to be significant going out into the future. >> Yeah, I want to ask you about them, and I think a lot of people are just afraid of AI, as a separate thing and they have to figure out how to operationalize it. And I think companies like UiPath are really in a position to embed UI into applications AI into applications everywhere, so that maybe those folks that haven't climbed on the digital bandwagon, who are now with this pandemic are realizing "wow, we better accelerate this" they can actually tap machine intelligence through your products and others as well. Your thoughts on that sort of narrative? >> Yeah, I agree with that point of view, it's AI and ML is still maturing discipline across the industry. And you have to build new muscle, and you build new muscle and data science, and it forces you to think about data and how you manage your data in a different way. And that's a journey we've been on as a company to not only build our first party skills, but also to build the platform. It's what's given us the knowledge that to help us figure out, well what do we need to include here so our customers can bring their skills, actually to our platform, and I do think this is a place where we're going to see the real impact of AI and ML in a broader way. Based on the kind of apps it is and the kind of skills we can bring to bear. >> Okay last question, you're ten weeks in, when you're 50, 100, 200 weeks in, what should we be watching, what do you want to have accomplished? >> Well we're listening, we're obviously listening closely to our customers, right now we're still having a great week, 'cause there's nothing like shipping new software. So right now we're actually thinking deeply about where we're headed next. We see there's lots of opportunities and robot for every person, and that initiative, and so we're launched a bunch of important new capabilities there, and we're going to keep working with the market to understand how we can, how we can add additional capability there. We've just got the GA of our automation cloud, I think you should expect more and more services in our automation cloud going forward. I think this area we talked about, in terms of AI and ML and those technologies, I think you should expect more investment and innovation there from us and the community, helping our customers, and I think you will also see us then, as we talked about this convergence of the ways we bring together systems through integrate and build business process, I think we'll see a convergence into the platform of more of those methods. I look ahead to the next releases, and want to see us making some very significant releases that are advancing all of those things, and continuing our leadership in what we talk about now as the Hyperautomation platform. >> Well Ted, lot of innovation opportunities and of course everybody's hopping on the automation bandwagon. Everybody's going to want a piece of your RPA hide, and you're in the lead, we're really excited for you, we're excited to have you on theCUBE, so thanks very much for all your time and your insight. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks Dave, great to spend this time with you. >> All right thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Velanti for theCUBE, and our RPA Drill Down Series, keep it right there we'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming instrumental music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston connecting with alt leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this Breaking Analysis. I'm here with Erik Bradley, who's the managing director of ETR and runs their VEN program. Erik good to see you. >> Very nice to see you too Dave. Hope you're doing well. >> Yeah, I'm doing okay hanging in there. You know, you guys in New York are fighting the battle. Looks like we're making some progress here so, you know, all the best, you and your family and the wider community. I'm really excited to have you on today because I had the pleasure of sitting in on a CIO/ CISO panel last week. And we're going to explain sort of what that's all about, but one of the things ETR does that I really like is they go deeper with anecdotal information and it's almost like in-depth interviews in these round tables. So they compliment their quarterly surveys, and their other drill down surveys, with other anecdotal information for people in their community. So it's a tried and true survey practice that adds some color to the dataset. So guys if you bring up the agenda, I want to share with the audience what we're going to talk about today. So, we'll talk a little bit about, you know we just did intros, I want to ask Erik, what ETR VENN is and then we'll go through some of the guests, but if we go back to Erik, explain a little bit about VENN and the whole process and how you guys do that. >> Yeah sure, we should hire you for marketing. You just did a great job, actually, describing that, but about three years ago what we decided was, ETR does an amazing job collecting the data. It can tell you what's happening, who it's happening to and when it's happening. But it can't always tell you why it's happened. So leveraging a lot of my background in twenty-plus years in journalism and institutional Wall Street research, we decided to take the ETR community, the people that actually take the surveys, and start doing interviews with them and start doing events with them. And enable to doing that, we're basically just trying to compliment the survey findings and the data. So what we always say is that ETR will always give you the quantitative answer and VENN will give you the qualitative answer. >> Now guys, let's bring up the agenda slide again, let's take a look at the folks that participated in the round table. Now, for ETR's clients, they actually know the names and the titles and well the company that these guys work for. We've anonymized it for the public. But you had a CIO of a Global Auto Supplier, a CISO of a Diversified Holdings Firm, who actually had some hospitality exposure but also some government contract manufacturing exposure. Chief Architect of a Software ISV and a VP and CISO of a Global Hospitality Resort Chain. So you had three out of the for, Erik, were really in industries that are getting hit hard. Obviously the software company maybe a little bit better. But maybe you can add some color to that. >> Well actually the software company, unfortunately, was getting hit hard as well because they're a software ISV that actually plays into the manufacturing space as well. So, this particular panel of CIOs and CISOs were actually in a very hard hit industries. And are going to make sure we do two more follow-ups with different industry verticals to make sure we're getting a little bit of a wider berth and collect all of that information in a better way. But coming back to this particular call, the whole reason we did this, and as you know, you spoke to my colleague and friend, Sagar Kadakia, who is the Director of Research for ETR, and we were nimble enough to actually change our survey while it was in the field, to start collecting data on what the real-time impact was on the COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to take that information, extrapolate it, and then say okay let's start reading out to these people and dig deeper. Find out why it's happening and even more so, is it permanent? And which vendors are going to win and which vendors might lose from it. So that was the whole reason we set up the series of calls. We've only conducted on so far. We have another one this coming Tuesday as well with four entirely new panelists that are going to be from different industry verticals because, as you astutely pointed out, these verticals were very hard hit and not all of them are as hard as others. So it's important to get a wider cross-section. >> So, guys let's take a look at some of the budget impacts the anecdotal evidence that we gathered here. So let me just scan through it and then Erik, I'll ask you to comment. So, you know, like Erik said, some hard hit industries. All major projects, anything sort of next-generation, have been essentially shelved. That was the ISV. And then another one, we cut at least 70% of the big projects moving forward. He mentioned ServiceNow actually calls them out, but the ServiceNow is a SaaS company they'll probably, you know, weather the storm here. But he did say we've put that on hold. The best comment, you know, "As-a-service has Saved our SaaS." (Erik laughs) That one's great. And then we're going to get into some of the networking commentary. Some really interesting things about how to support the work from home. You know, kind of shifting from a hardened top into remote workers. And then a lot of commentary on security. So, you know, that's sort of a high level scan and there's just so much information here Erik, but maybe you could sort of summarize on some of that commentary. >> Yeah, we should definitely dig into each of those sectors a little more, but to summarize what we're seeing here was the real winners and losers are clear. Not everyone was prepared to have a work from home strategy. Not everyone was prepared to send their workers out. Their VPN wasn't, they didn't have enough bandwidth. So there was a real quick uptick in spending, but longer term we're starting to see that these changes will become more permanent. So the real winners and losers right now, we're going to see on the loser's side traditional networking. The MPLS networking is in a lot of trouble according to all the data and the commentary that we're seeing. It's expensive, it's difficult to ramp to up bandwidth as quickly as you need and it doesn't support remote. So we're seeing that lose out and the winners there are in the SD-WAN space. It's going to be impossible to ignore that going forward and some of our CIO and CISO panelists said that change will be permanent. Also, we're seeing, at the same time, what they were calling a "SaaS and Cloud". Now, we know these trends obviously were already happening but they're being exacerbated. They're happening even more quickly and more strong. And I don't see that changing any time soon. That, of course, is at the expense of network, I'm sorry, data centers. Whether it be your own or hosted. Which has huge ramifications on on-prem hardware. Even the firewall providers. So what we're seeing here is obviously we know things are going to be impacted by this situation. We didn't necessarily expect all of our community members and IT decision-makers to talk about them being possibly permanent. So that on a high level was something that was extremely interesting. And the last one that I would bring up is that as we make this shift towards working from home, towards remote access, you also have to align yourself with the security that can support that. And one of the things that we're seeing in our data side on ETR, is a widening bifurcation between the next-generation security vendors and the more traditional security or the legacy security players. That bifurcation just keeps getting wider and wider and this situation could be the last straw. >> So I want to follow up on a couple of those things. You're talking about sort of the network shift you know, towards the SD-WAN. What people have described to me is that they got a, you know, a hardened top. It's a hierarchical network. It's very well understood and it's safe, right? And now all of a sudden you got all those remote workers and so you've got to completely soft of rethink your whole network architecture. The other thing I want to drill into is your Cloud commentary. There's a comment that I saw, Erik, that really stood out. One of the folks said, "I would like to see the data centers "be completely deleted, if you will, or closed down." I think we're going to see, you know, a lot more of this obviously. Not only from the standpoint of, and you heard this a lot, the kind of paid by the drink. But just generally getting rid of all that sort of so-called non-differentiated heavy-lifting as we often hear about. >> That is a extreme comment. I don't think everyone feels that way. But, yes, the comment was made and we've heard the comment from other people. As you and I both know, the larger the enterprise the harder that is to go completely SaaS. But yeah, when a situation like this has and see the inflexibility of their on-prem infrastructure, yes it becomes something that really has to be addressed and it can become a permanent change. I was also shocked about that comment. That gentleman also stated that his executives outside of the ITs area, the CEO, the CFO, had never ever, ever wanted to discuss Cloud. They did not want to discuss work from home. They did not want to discuss remote access. He said that conversation has changed immediately and to the credit of the actual IT companies out there, the technology companies, they're doing everything they can with this opportunity to make that happen. >> Yeah, and so you're right the whole work from home conversation. To your point earlier, Erik, big chunks of COVID, the post-COVID world are going to remain permanent. Guys bring up the SaaS slide if you will. The SaaS commentary, "As-a-Service Saved our SaaS." "The wittiest quip award" going to the ETR. You know, but you had, what's very interesting to hear folks, in fact I think somebody even called out, "Hey," you know, "we expected Oracle to," you know, "be auditing us but they're actually being supportive "as is IBM." Salesforce was an interesting common, Erik. One of the folks said they would share accounts on-prem, but when they all do the work from home they had to actually buy some more. You also got Cisco with big props. Microsoft was called out. A lot of organizations actually allowing them to defer payments. So the SaaS vendors actually got very high marks didn't they? >> They really did and even I wrote that summary and it was difficult to write that about Oracle because we all know that they're infamous for auditing their own customers in 2009 right after we came out of financial crisis. They have notoriously been a-- I don't know if they found religion and they decided to be nice to their customers, but every-single person mentioned them as one of the vendors that was actually helping. That was very shocking. And we all know that when bad situations happen people become opportunistic. And right now it's really seeming that the SaaS vendors understand that they need a longterm relationship with these customers and they're being altruistic instead. Which is really nice. >> Yeah I think that anybody with a Cloud realizes that hey, we have an opportunity here that the lifetime value of that customer, whereas maybe in 2009 when Oracle didn't have a Cloud, they had to get people in a headlock to try to persevere their, you know, income statement. Let's go to the networking drill down guys, that next slide because Fortinet, some of the things we've been reporting on is the sort of divergence in evaluations between Fortinet and Palo Alto before this whole thing hit, Fortinet has done a really good job with its Cloud offerings. Palo Alto struggles a little bit with trying to figure out the sales compensation, is maybe a little bit behind. Although both companies got strong props and I've talked to a number of customers, Palo Alto is going to be in the mix. Fortinet, from a Cloud standpoint, seems to be doing quite well? Obviously networking, Cisco is the big gorilla there. But we also got call outs from guys like Trend Micro which was interesting, from some of the folks. So, your thoughts on this Erik. >> Yeah, I'll start on the networking side because this is something that I've really, I've dug into quite amount, in not only this panel, but a lot of interviews and it really seems as if as networking refresh starts to come up, and it's coming up with a lot of large enterprises, when your network refresh comes up people are going to do an RFP for SD-WAN. They are sick and tired of paying MPLS network vendors and they really want to look at something else. That was even prior to this situation. Now what we're hearing is this is a permanent change. I particularly had one person say, I wanted to find this quote real quickly if I can, but basically they basically saying that, "From a permanency perspective, the freedom from MTLS "will reduce our networks spend by over half "while more than doubling or tripling our bandwidth." You can't ignore that. You're going to save me money and triple my bandwidth, and hey by the way, my refresh is due. It's something that's coming and it's going to happen. And yes, you mentioned the few right? There's Viptela, there's Velocloud, there's some big players like Cisco. The Palo Alto just acquired CloudGenix in the midst of all of this. They just went and got an SD-WAN player themselves. And they just keep acquiring a portfolio to shift from their on-prem to next-generation. It's going to take some time, because 70% plus of their revenues is still on-prem hardware, but I do believe that their portfolio that they're creating is the way the world is moving. And that's just one comment on the traditional networking versus the next-generation SD-WAN. >> And the customers have indicated, you know it's not easy just to get off of their MPLS network. I mean it takes time, it's like slowly pulling of the bandaid. But, like many things, COVID-19 is sort of accelerating that. We haven't talked about digital transformation. That came up as a maybe more strategic initiative. But one that very clearly has legs. >> You know, David, it's very simple. You just said it. People, when things are going well and they're comfortable, they don't change. And that's the same for an enterpriser company. Hey, everything's great, our revenue's fine. Why would we do this? We'll worry about that next year. Then something like this happens and you realize wow, we've been dragging our feet. That digital transformation that we've been talking about, and we've been a little bit slow to accept, we need to accept it, we need to move now. And yes, it was another one of the major themes and it sounds silly for researchers like you and I because we know this is a theme. We know Clouded option is there, we know digital transformation is there. But, there are still a lot of people that haven't moved as quickly as they should and this is going to be that final catalyst to get them there, without a doubt. Quickly on your point of Fortinet, I was actually very impressed with the commentary that came from that because Fortinet is sometimes one of those names that you think of that maybe plays in a smaller pool or isn't as big as some of the 800 pound gorillas out there. But in other other interviews besides this I've heard the phrase coined of "Forti-everything". So through RND and through acquisition, Fortinet has really expanded the portfolio and right now is their time to shine because when you have smaller satellite, you know, offices and branches that you need to connect, they're really, really good at it. And you don't always want to call a Palo Alto and pay that price when you have smaller branch offices. And I actually, I was glad you brought up Fortinet because it's not a name that we get to herald that often and it was deserving from this panel. >> Yeah and, you know, companies that can secure gateways, secure endpoints, obviously going to have momentum. Zscaler came up, you know I think that, and I'll tell ya, looking at, I've done a couple of breaking analysis on security and Fortinet has been strong in two dimensions. You know ETR is, as our audience is I think getting to know. We really look at two key metrics. One is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and the other is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness. And companies like Fortinet, in security, show up on both of those dimensions so it's notable. >> Yes, it certainly is, it is. And I'm glad you brought up Zscaler too. Very recently by client request, we did a very in-depth research on Zscaler versus Palo Alto Prisma Access and they were very interested. This was before all this happened, you know. Does Palo Alto have a chance of catching up, taking share from Zscaler. And I've had the pleasure, myself, personally hosting Jay the CEO of Zscaler at an event in New York City. And I have nothing but incredible respect for the company. But what we found out through this research is Zscaler, at the moment, their technology is still ahead, according to their answers. There's no doubt. However, there doesn't seem to be any real secret sauce that will stop Palo Alto from catching up. So we do believe the parody of feature set will shrink over time. And then it will come down to Palo Alto obviously has a wider and user base. Now, what's happening today might change that. Because if I had to make a decision right now, for my company on secure web gateway, I'm still probably going to go to Zscaler. It's the name. If I had to choose that in a year from now, Palo Alto might have had a better chance. So in this panel, as you brought up, Zscaler was mentioned numerous times as just the wave of the future. Along with CASB brokers right? Whether you're talking about a Netskoper or Forcepointer. All those people that also play in CASB space to secure your access. Zero trust is no longer a marketing-hype term. It is real and it is becoming more real by the week. >> And so, I want to kind of end on one of the other comments that really struck me because we're constantly talking about okay, do you go with a portfolio of a suite of services or do you go with best of breed? What about startups? Are startups more risky in a crisis like this? And one of your panelists, I just love this comment, he said, "One of things that I've always done," he said, "You always hear about the guy, "oh we're going to go to the gardener, we're going to "check out the magic water, we'll pick out three guys "in the upper right hand corner and test them out." He says, "One of the things I always like to do, "I'll pick two from the upper right "and I'll take one from the lower left." One of the emerging, text, "And I'll give em a shot." It won't win every time, but then he called out FireEye as one of the organizations that he found early that gave them competitive advantage. >> Right. >> Love that comment. >> It's a great comment. And honestly if you're in charge of procurement you'd be stupid not to do that. Not only just to see what the technology is, but now I can play you off the big guys because I have negotiating leverage and I can say oh, well I could always just take their contract. So it's silly not to do it from a business perspective. But from technology perspective, what we kept hearing from these people with the smaller vendors. My partner Peter Steube, my colleague and I, we did the host together, we asked this question really believing that the financial insecurity of the moment and the times would make smaller vendors not viable. We heard the exact opposite. What our panelists said was, "No, I'd be happy "to work with a smaller vendor right now "because they're going to give me pricing flexibility, "they're going to work with me right now. "I don't need to pay them upfront "because we're seeing a permanent shift from CapEx to OpEX, "and the smaller vendors are willing to work with me and I can pay them later." So we were actually surprised to hear that and glad to hear it because, to connect to your other point, the other person who was talking about security and the platform approach versus best of breed, he said "Listen, platform approaches you're already "with the vendor, you can bundle a little bit. "But the problem is, if you're just going to acquire "a new technology every time there's a new threat, "the bad guys are just going to switch the threat. "And you can't acquire indefinitely. "So therefore, best of breed with security "will always beat platform." And that's kind of a message to Palo Alto and Cisco, in my opinion, because they seem to be the ones fighting that out. Even Microsoft now, trying to say they're a platform approach in security. >> Well and this says to me the security business, as we predicted, is going to stay fragmented because you're still going to get that best of breed. You know, just like Cloud is going to be fragmented and it's, you know, multiple vendors. Ever since I've been in this business people are trying to consolidate the number of vendors, but technology moves so quickly, it gives competitive advantage. Erik, awesome! Thank you so much for joining us. I'm looking forward to next Tuesday with the next vendor and love to have you back and talk about it anytime. You're a great guest, thanks so much. >> Certainly, I'll do my best to get a better AV connection the next time guys, I apologize for that. But it was great talking to you tonight. >> Hey we're all learning, you know so, thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering AWS executive. Something brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of the ex Censure Executive Summit here in AWS. Reinvent I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Fang Deng. She is the big data and an Advanced Analytics program. Lead analytic Seo hee at Novartis. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. We have low eq zero. He is Novartis head of Analytic Seo Hee. Thanks so much. Look, and Vika sinned. Wan Hee hee is applied intelligence delivery lead at Accenture. Thank you so much. Thank you. So I want to start with you. Look, no. Novartis, of course, is a household name. It's one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. But that left you to just walk our viewers a little bit through your business and sort of the pain points you were looking to solve with this journey Thio to the cloud >>you think you ever care? So I think if I if we look at the company, I think Wayne realized that it is more and more difficult to bring new trucks to market, so it takes about 12 years and on $1.2 billion to find a new trick. So at the same time, we see that there's more and more patient that need access to medicines. So in the last two years, I think we tried toe clear the new strategy where we're trying to re imagine medicine for user's data and technology. So in 2018 we've recruited a new studio that's came and I tried to build a digital ambition which is around fabulous, which is the innovation, the operation and the engagement on the innovation. What we're trying to do is to find new compound, will application off existing compounds into our business, make sure that I think patients can get access to drugs much faster and earlier on in the operation. We are trying to optimize the backbone off day to day processes, beat in the manufacturing or in the supply chain, or in the commercialization to ensure that the patient also get access to that much faster in the engagement. We're trying to healthy a cheapie and the players and then the and the patients to better understand the tracks reproduce as well as on the medication they need to have to receive treatment. So if you look at these three pillars, the cloud strategy is an essential portion of it. Because in all of its processes we have a lot of data and full cloud. I think we can make use off his data to help to innovate, open, right and engage. >>So as you as you said, it's really about reimagining medicine. I mean, from the drug discovery process to how it's helping patients live, live longer, healthier lives. Thanks. So talk about the vision for the Formula One platform. >>Yeah, aside, like a mission before we trying to re imagine our products for the patient. And we're trying to use more the more data history data and also the public data try to support our products. And the Formula One is our future enterprise data and the next perform for our new artists. So our objective is trying to love you all the new technology and also trying to consolidate over data in our Macleod and build up this platform for the whole notice Users support our business, do better products full patient. >>So when it comes to these these new new platforms, new technologies that are being introduced. We know that oftentimes the technology is the easy part. Or at least the more straightforward part I should say. But it's it's sort of getting people on board the change management. What are some of the challenges that you that you know of artists faced in terms of of the culture and the skills for your for your workforce? >>So if you look at that, the are in disgrace, very traditionally nature. And when we embarking the details confirmation, I think the first thing we had to change the culture of the company. So when you when you listen to our CEO, I think you tried to promote this invoice culture where all of us are Syrian leaders. And then we walk, you know, as a thing as an organization where we try to help each other and more and more collaborate when it comes to digital transformation. When we started this having this period, we've realised actually that workforce was not trained, so the first few things that we did disease is a tight wire new workforce, but also try to actually identify the advocate ambassadors. I could go and then go into residual confirmation early on to be able to help and to guide the office to get for that. So it's actually it's totally immaterial, Johnny. And then we are now in the second year and we've seen already a tremendous four guys, right? >>Can you describe some of the changes that you've seen him? I mean, I'm really interested in what you talk about. The ambassador's, the people who are going to spread the good word. What are what are some of the changes that you've seen in your workforce? Yeah, we can mention >>that. It's like you mentioned before. Um, like, talking about regarding overall catch a bus back to tried to leverage a new attack. Knowledge like the delivery perspective. We trying to do more automation, and the May 1 side is trying to get more efficiency and also another side. Try to ensure the intern responsibility for one product to be produced and also at the same time, let me through more automation to think about this secret inside the compound inside. Help us a lot of in pulling that part also, because >>maybe I can compliment that so I think if you look at it when the initial studying part of our journey, I think that a lot of people were reluctant to go and then tie to work on a cloud and to work with digital technology. So we found few projects where we felt there's a good ready for money. And as we can deliver fast in fact, Andi to things like, I don't get reviewed t piece every. Make sure that when we went, our field falls, go then and talk to the hippies. They know what to talk about an orphan, and then which format. We also look at that we can reduce costs internally and for the food, different projects and then on product that we've established, we build credibility within the organization that helped to disseminate the cultural transformation. >>So once others air seeing, seeing the benefits that that captured, they're more likely to to feel good about the cloud work. >>Yeah, that's that's the true and also notes of the news. Things like our teams, they are interesting about that. You see more and more people talking about our driveway and also talk about the UAV's and how can we improve the did he re efficiency and the same time is come back to say that teams think about how to make themselves to be a product owner and the product the way of the great. Let's the glistening for the whole team >>because I want to bring you in here a little bit. So talk to me about how ex Center is helping Novartis, particularly in in this eight of us. Caught initiative. >>Six incher is a leader in business and technical i t transformation programmes. So what we're bringing on the table is in the expertise with not only the technology and the AWS elements, but also the business and technical transformation expertise that have we have over the years in the firm. On additionally, I think you know, it's not only about technology change. As you mentioned, it's all a lot of change and operating model and and also kind of working with a very blended team. Across that expertise and experience is what you bring to the table >>a blended team, culturally, regionally, actually, all of it >>one of that belief. I mean, just to give an example. We are working across steams in roughly about six geography ese from various cultures. Where's countries? And it's it's, ah, various time zones, which makes it quite challenging to make it all work together. So you started the journey. I hope you succeed in it. And, uh, you know, it's working well, so far, >>so Cloud is is really a megatrend right now. What are the differences that you're seeing across Regions, countries, industries? >>So I think it's this many answers many parts of the answer to the question. So I think if I talk about, um, industries So you know, initially when clouds started, we had seen a major up take off the cloud technology and the company that manufactured the clown technology and telecommunications, and you know where the older infrastructure and technology aspects were, Whereas companies like health care and media and metals and mining, We're kind of behind the curve in adoption rates because off their respective, you know, concerns around compliance and security of data. But I think that trends is slowly shifting. US. Companies are becoming more open. I think I've seen how the public cloud has matured. The security models, you know, are speaking for themselves. People can understand the benefits from moving to the cloud in terms off, you know, cost rationalization from producing maintenance costs, focusing their proteins on things that they were not able to divert their attention on. >>The fact we had, I think I will say for me and then where I've seen a Novartis if it is access to innovation. So I think loud offering brings a lot off innovation at happy face. That's one hand and also access to extend our collaboration. So when you're in, you know, inside focus I think the relatives from over there wants to walk and collaborate with you. But when you work on the cloud, everybody goes on the cloud. So that's really a stream manifested ate a collaboration with Nextel Partners. >>So how is that changing the culture of Novartis itself? In terms of there, there are more opportunities to collaborate. And it also is maybe changing the kinds of workers you attract because it is is people who want to be doing that in their day to day. >>Well, if you look at it, um, in the past, I think we used to have our own workforce, and then we tried to do a lot of things with our own workers, but I think he's in the on Monte. Workers are full of us, so we have more and more partnerships being announced, and this publishing, I mean used actually to help the company to in revenge himself. So that's actually on one hand on the other side. As you said, I think that to attract with talents I think you need. You also need to have a different future. But you need also to be able to give them the flexibility to work and do the things they like, and we're in a context and a framework. >>One of the things that we hear about so much at the's technology conference is this buzzword of digital transformation and of artisans obviously embarking on its own digital transformation as well as his journey to the cloud. There happen. They're powering each other, they're accelerating each other. How would you describe what is happening to the industry and to know Vargas with it within this, the pharmaceutical industry? >>Yeah, I think, based on our knowledge, to send the why this may be the first. The company can't be trying to build this kind of enterprise level data and also an Alex platform, and based on that, we will be able to counseling date off the history potato intended date on public date, huh? And the Human Industry Day. Then they tried to help us to produce the better products for the patient the same time it gave also the team a chance as you mentioned before, and the look at former more opportunities and the China to leverage in your technology particles of Kayla. >>It's also changed the way that we work every day. So if you look at it now, um, we won't be virtual assistant. We I think we use machine learning elements politics to be able to talkto you are a cheap piece. We actually monitor clickers, Kyle real time having using common centers. So every single day, I think the use off, digital at work and atom in the physical man thinks. And I think we have seen that the adoptions has increased since we have I ever to launch successful products. And I think >>one of the things which, which I really like about working in the bodies, is also I think there's there's an ambition to drive business value quickly. So you know you take a very agile use case, best approach on things rather than having to wait for very long years of time. Plus, the company kind of encourages a culture which is based on mutual cooperation and sharing knowledge, which is great >>because Novartis is really on the vanguard of companies in terms of how much it's embraced, the cloud and how much it's using it. What do you think? Other companies, pharmaceutical companies, but maybe even in other industries as well could learn from the nerve artists example. >>I think one thing people really shy about is, you know, when they moved to the cloud is the security aspect. I think what people probably had failed to realize in the past that there's been so much developments on security in the public cloud, which has bean key focus areas, something nobody's has taken the challenge and has understood that very well. And I think companies can learn from all the different aspects of security that you know were built into our entire transformation work, starting from ingesting data, the user management to access and all of that thing, so that's kind of one thing. Similarly, compliance related aspects as well, you know, So we've g x p compliance is at the core off how we're building our solution. So I think on dhe, if you understand how we built the rules around compliance. But in architecture, I think couples can learn from that a swell and build that is integral part off your not only technology solution, but the process that goes along with it. >>We started our conversation talking about Novartis and its quest to reimagine medicine. How How do you think that your industry is gonna look 5 10 years from now? I mean, the drug discovery process is slow on purpose. I mean, we need to think of patient health and safety for most. But how do you think it really could change the course of how we treat people? >>If if you look at it is more and more treatment required that actually I used and required data as a service or are being actually process for data. So when I am, when we look at the things the way that the industry is changing, I think the times to develop drugs, yes, takes longer. But I think for your use off the data that you have. I think you can try to reduce I cycle. So one of the objective is to reduce the cycle by one firm. Between that, we could bring the day. Is a new director market in eight years, rescues 12 years Today. The other thing is that way for user's data. You can monitor them patient, and you can recommend it the treatment of 80% off foundation. They don't go in and finish her treatment. So I think if we can show the audience to treatment, then there's a lower risk off the admissions to the season and sickness that they have. >>So it's not even not not just Novartis seeing the value of the date. It's the patients themselves, efficiency >>and the d. A r C as well, right? Because I think if you're if the situation is not six and I think the insurance doesn't have to pay. So I think all the value chances is being comes from >>well, sang Loic, because thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It was a really fascinating segment. Thank you. I'm Rebecca night. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of the Ex Center Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit

(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another CUBEConversation where we go in-depth into the topics that are most important to the technology industry with the thought leaders who are actually getting the work done. I'm Peter Burris, and we've got a great conversation today, and it all starts with the idea of how do you get smart people outside of your organization, in-service organizations to help you achieve your outcomes? It's a challenge because as we become more dependent upon services, we discover that service companies are often trying to sell us bills of goods or visions that aren't solving our exact problem. There's a new breed of service company that's really fascinated by your problem, and wants to sell it. Starts with engineering, starts with value add, and then leads to other types of potential relationships and activities. So what do those service companies look like? Well, to have that conversation, we've got Greg Tinker, who is the CTO and founder of Serene IT. Greg, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Peter, glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about Serene IT. >> So Serene IT is a, well we call it a next generation bar. So what do I mean by that? We mean that we are an engineering-first firm, so our staff is big, we're across the U.S., we have multiple branches and we just went international into Canada, with Serene IT Canada. We have other international branches that we coming online next year. So with that being said though, the key to our growth, the key to our success is the fact that we're an engineering firm first. We have very few sales staff. Our sales staff are more of an account management style, more of a nurturer or a farmer, we would call it, versus a hunter that means someone going out, because the customers are coming to us with their problems because they need a smart engineering bench to help them. They're not looking for somebody else's to bring them askew, or resell them a product. That can be easily done by some of the large conglomerates that are already out there, not to mention, spend 30 seconds on Google, you can pretty much buy anything you want. >> Yeah, and you know Fred Brookes said a million years ago, when I was, even before I got into computer science, wrote "The Mythical Man Month", and made the observation that the solution to a hard problem typically, is not more people, >> Right. >> It's working smarter, and working more with the right people. So tell a little about how you're able to find the right people from the industry, and bring them together to turn them into the right team. >> It's a great question, Peter, so I've been very fortunate. I loved my career at Hewlett Packard. I left on good terms because I saw a problem in the industry that I wanted to go and tackle head-on. It's easy for people to sit back and talk about it, it's more difficult to actually go and try to solve the problem, and I'm trying to solve the problem. The problem is, there's a lot of orders out there that bring very low value today, they bring a lot of resale. And that's great for those clients that just know what they want. The vast majority of customers don't know what they want today because the technologies are so advanced, they need help to get from where they were, a legacy model, to a more modern software-defined ecosystem. >> And the business problems are so complex. >> Yes. >> It's that combination of complex business problems, 'cause your competitions and your customers are pushing you, and now advanced technologies that have to be marshaled to solve those problems. >> That's exactly right, so with that being said, I set out build an engineering firm and resale would be something later, but we sell through the engineering consulting firms to solve those business problems for our clients. And so our engineering bench is comprised of engineers from Cisco, from Dell, from HPE, from a lot of big conglomerates that everybody all knows. But when you work in this industry, in the labs of these big conglomerates, me coming from HPE, when you do that, you get a lot of friends across the pillars. >> Sure. >> You build networks. >> You build networks. And quite frankly, it's the Marvel lab guys that own today Q-Logic. We all know each other, and with that being said, some of these guys want to go out and try to solve these big problems with companies like myself, and so with that being said, that's how we're building Serene IT, is engineering-first, and we have a very large technical bench today. Just think about it, the company came online in 2017 with just two, so today, we are significantly bigger than that. We're approaching a 50-plus headcount, and we continue to expand with multiple branches, and our growth rate is almost double every six months. And it's something I'm having a great deal of fun doing. The key thing here though is solving business problems and helping customers. >> Well let's talk about that, because every IT organization faces the challenge that they've been so focused on the hardware assets for so long, or the application assets. Now they're trying to focus on the data assets, but they find themselves often in conflict with the business They're not doing a particularly good job of translating a business opportunity into a technology solution still. >> True. >> You've got these great engineers. How are you getting them to also speak business, so that you facilitate that domain expertise about the business so it can be turned into a technology-reliable solution? >> Like any good engineering firm, you have to have levels right? So we have a knock all the way to level four, and our level four engineers are our master technologists that are usually patent published or some varied nature thereof, with usually a multitude of master ASC certification structures to be able to state the fact that they are level four. We also have some college kids that are coming up that are wanting to learn with us, which is good. But I want to tell you on that same point though, is we only allow those elite, the level three, the level four guys, to be in front of our clients, because they've been in this industry a long time. Like myself, we can understand the business problems, as well as the technology problems, and help a client go from zero to hero. That's what we do well. >> So you're bringing in people who have been business people, but have strong engineering backgrounds >> Correct. >> In product domains, in service domains, in the industry, and you're bringing them together and saying, let's go back to being engineers, that can still talk business. >> That's exactly it, that's the key differentiator with us, is the fact that we're not talking just essays, a lot of ours, in our mindsets have essays they call engineers. We don't hire anyone that can't put fingers on a keyboard. If they can't make magic happen on a keyboard, they're of no value to us, they're of no value to our clients, which is what they need help with. So if we're not able to sit down and have a conversation and pull out a laptop and make some some magic happen with, name it, Ansible, Puppet, Shell, Saltstack, that's just in automation CodeLogics, C-code we've got all the cool stuff in that space. But if we can't sit down and write Python, Ruby on Rails and whatnot, and make something tangible to a client in very short order, we didn't do our job. >> So a lot of companies that I've experienced, a lot of customers I've talked to, have what I would call the "goldilocks" problem with their service providers. By that I mean, some of their service providers don't have the technical chops to just throw numbers at it, so they're too cold. Some of their service providers are too smart, or pushing too hard and they get suspicious of them. How do you be that just right, stay focused on the problem bringing the other team, the engineers or the IT folks that you're working with along with you, so you get that natural technology transfer so the business gets the capability that it can run and you can go do something else? >> So that's a good point, Peter. I mean, we're still working out some of those details, I'll tell you, to be honest with you on that stuff. >> Everybody is. >> Yeah. We're getting better at it, you know customers. If we get to aggressive, and tell the customers this is what's wrong with your problem, this is where you need to go, we call their baby ugly, it puts a lot of contention right on the onset, so it causes problems. So we have to be very cognitive of what they have, and where they want to go, and show them where we're going and why we're doing it, and not just focus on "You did it the wrong way". We don't want to focus on that. That's already done, that ship's already sailed, why bash it? I tell my engineers don't talk negative, there's no good going to come of it. Focus on what you have, and where you need to go with it, and how we're going to get there. Keep it a positive message, and you'll find it'd be more receptive, and it's working for our team. >> Well I'll tell you, one of the things I've heard about Serene IT is that you guys especially developed competencies in technologies that have worked in the past. >> You can say that. >> It seems as though one of the things you're able to do is you're able not to make something so new and so distinct that the client can't see how they can possibly operate it without you. You're taking a lot of open-source, a lot of established tried-and-true technologies and using your smarts to put them together in new and interesting ways so the customer says, "Oh that was smart, that was smart. "I can do that, oh yes, now I get it". Is that, am I mis-characterizing your guys? >> No, you're not, you're actually spot-on. We actually have one of the largest ZFS file systems on the planet right now with 142 million users hitting it and-- >> ZFS? >> Yeah, it's old school. >> With 142 million, okay. >> Yeah, it's old-school But if what's old is new again, we're just putting a new wrapper around it. It worked great in its day, but you put that old technology, the file system itself that's been around for a long time, one of the biggest file systems at 128 bit. You take that file system and you put that on today's Red Hat, Caldera, SUSE, name your favorite. You put that on a big machine, a Linux machine today, a large scale like an HPDL380 with NVME drives with a back-end data store, like a 3PAR or Primäre, or name whatever you want on the back end with a big fiber channel, you'd be surprised what we can do with that thing. So we're able to keep customers' costs down by showing them we can take a old-school technology and make it far bigger than you ever imagined, and give you more horsepower and at less cost, and customers are really receptive to that. Now is that perfect for every footprint? No, that was a unique situation. Not everybody's got 142 million users.(chuckles) >> Well, that's true. And so let me build on that, because the other thing that the CIOs I talk to and senior IT people and also business people, increasingly, is they want to make sure that the solution works now, but that it's not going to end-of-life options for them. >> Yeah. >> How do you do this using tried-and-true technologies combined into new and interesting ways, in a way that still nonetheless gives customers future growth options or future application options? >> I'm not a fan of vendor-locking, I'm not a fan of Franken-monsters. Our team of engineers, we have a mandate that they do not build anything like that, I won't approve it. Because I don't want to have a customer locked in to Serene IT. That was never the intent. We want them to choose us, we want them to come to our team and get our value, so we can show them how to grow their business, and do it in a nice, sustainable way, so we can show their staff how to support it. That takes us into our managed services component. Most of the big things we design and do, we're what we call an adaptive managed services, an AMS model. What do I mean by that statement? We're not a WITO. What's a WITO, you ask? It's a "Walk In, Take Over". That's the big boys, that's the DXEs of the world, that's the Assentras, that's what they do. And they do that well. We're not here to compete with that. But what we're here to do is say, to a company or business, whoever they might be, you probably don't need us to take over everything in your IT shop, and really, we're not going to be the best at that, nor are they in some cases, the other vendors. I'll tell you, you know your business the best. We know infrastructure the best, and we can show you where you can build your skillsets up and get better at it. We can automate a lot of it and show you how to manage the automation, and there'll be certain key points that maybe you guys don't want to own for various reasons, and we will manage just that key component, and we do that today with a lot of our big clients. >> Greg Tinker, CTO and founder of Serene IT, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, I want to thank you for participating in this CUBEConversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this cube conversation. This is part of our CIO series and Jason Thomas is here, he's the CIO of Cole, Scott, and Kissane. CSK is Florida's largest civil defense law firm. Cube along Jason Thomas, great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, let's talk a little bit about, the firm. largest firm in Florida, the focus is on Civil Defense, so you got lawyers, you got paralegals running around, you got demanding clients. What's the business like that's driving your technology strategy? >> so when I I'm new to legal, so this, I've been here about almost four years now, so I started January. a whole different world. I came from, from Startup Biotech, that line of business and a completely different animal. it's some of what you imagine, very always on the go, very busy, lot of business, we open dozens of cases a day, new cases, so a lot of things going on. >> Really event driven? >> Yeah very, very busy, so and you know technology's, you know the firm has taken stance that, technology is very important, to the firm and, we want to use the best technology possible, to make us as efficient as possible, so that's the chief driver, for tech at the law firm. >> So tech, you know, 15 years ago, whatever it was like, take an email to SaaS, right? So, but I would imagine you're focusing a lot on just attorney and employee productivity, maybe collaboration, document management, compliance. Are those some of the hot topics? And how are you applying technology to deal with those? >> Yep, so that is a big drive, efficiency, using technology to be efficient, and to make our folks productive. What we don't want to see, and that you see sometimes, you throw a whole bunch of technology at folks thinking that it's going to make them efficient and productive, and actually, it could be the greatest technology in the world for one place, and apply it, and you put it in another firm, and it makes us unproductive, so that's kind of the magic there. Kind of a trick to figuring out, what is it that actually is going to make us productive? >> Are there pretty clear swim lanes in your firm? Or is there a lot of shadow IT going on? Because I would imagine a lot of the frustration of, you know, IT folks is, you get the shadow IT, they bring in a point product, and that IT goes, "CIO's calling clean up this crime scene," and is that a problem in your firm specifically? Or even your industry? Or is it pretty much hey, let the tech folks figure out what the right tool for the job is? >> so in my mind the trick here is, it's not going to be any one person, or any practice group that's going to define what's the best option, what's the best tech. I mean thankfully for me, I do try and drive most of the tech out the firm, but the key is, you have to understand how the business runs. Just because it's cool tech, or it's working at one firm, doesn't mean it's going to apply or work in others. So, I spent a lot of time, in conversations with, a lot of the partners and associates. I try to make myself available as much, just to chat, see what they're doing. see what could make them more efficient. Sometimes if you don't ask, they don't even tell you, but if you ask the question, you can learn a lot in 20 minutes from somebody. And that kind of helps me decide, okay, what is going to make sense, or what's the next thing I should be looking at, to help folks out. >> So basically, Columbo questions, for those of you who remember Columbo, kind of ask your basic questions? What about work flow, how do you spend your time? What kinds of questions would you ask attorneys? >> honestly they could be calling about something completely unrelated to what, you know, what I'm thinking. It just could be as simple as, "Hey I'm this thing with this program where I'm trying to do X and this is the way we're doing now. Is there a better way to do it?" Or, it could be as simple as, we just kind of fall into the conversation based on other things. You know. They just want to talk to somebody sometimes. But they're not necessarily going to bring it up, or just don't have the time, they don't have the time. >> So a lot of times in theCUBE we get caught up, We love the tech, we talk about data science, and machine learning, and block chains and everything else, but then there's this basic blocking and tackling, that the CIO has to worry about. I wondered if you could share your perspectives based on your experience, just in terms of, some of the advice you might give to, organizations that are maybe growing, maybe haven't had the experience of a CIO that's been around the block, maybe in different industries? But some of the basic blocking and tackling that you see, that maybe doesn't happen in organizations, that really needs to happen. >> the expectation, or when you're thinking about, thinking about what the next thing is for the firm, or for your company, you also want to kind of think, you want to think long term as well. You want to think three to five years out. So, if we do this now and based on our current, growth projections, will this work for us in three years? Will this work for us in five years? Or what's our game plan? Maybe we start small, and, expand from there, but you don't want to just plan for the immediate you want to plan for the future. That's kind of, I think that's what CIO should be doing. It's not just about the tech, or is it going to work in our environment, but is it going to work for us down the road. Because we don't want, nobody, CFOs don't want to hear, and CEOs don't want to hear that, hey, yeah we just bought this thing last year, but, yeah we're going to have to buy something new now because it doesn't work anymore. >> But it does happen sometimes? >> It happens all the time, you know. >> Right, I remember, it goes a ways back now, but the federal rules of civil procedure, I think it was 2006, and everybody was rushing to plug holes because the courts ruled that electronic material was evidentiary, for whatever, seven years or something. So everybody was like okay, we need to have a system that allows us to comply. So, they went out and bought email archiving systems, which they knew they were going to have to throw away in three or four year. So how do you deal with it? Do you face that? Especially in a compliance oriented world, and you just try to sort of balance the cost and the throw away nature of that initiative with something more strategic? How do you deal with that? And how do you communicate that to the powers that be? >> Number one, no one likes to be held at gunpoint, number one, and especially my boss, so. I mean he gets it right, I mean there's regulations. But I will say, nothing happens as fast as everyone says it's going to happen. so there's always that idea. There's always this panic, oh we've got to put this in, and honestly I feel like tech folks use an excuse, and of course I do too. Say like, oh you all this is awesome. You know, we get to put something new in and, you know no one's going to say no and, it's not always the best approach, and again you kind of have to look at it long term, holistically for the business. You know, what is really going to happen in a few years? Is this technology going to even be a thing in a few years? Or is it just like, just to satisfy an immediate solution? Because again, I don't want, the last thing I hate doing is putting something in and telling my boss that it has to be replaced. He hates hearing that, and I don't want to tell him that either, quite frankly it's embarrassing. >> I don't blame your boss. >> Yeah it's embarrassing, it's just, let's do it right the first time. >> How do you do planning? I mean obviously there's a technology component, of planning, but I'm inferring from what you say that the end of technology is kind of the, the last thing you should be worrying about. You should be worried about the direction of the firm, the business, the growth plan, how do you do, as CIO, planning and how do you align that with the business? >> conversations, so lots of conversations. Lots of conversations with the attorneys. continued conversations with my boss, the CEO, and sometimes I'm not really great about it sometimes. And, you know, weeks will go by, you know, and I won't even have a conversation with him, about what's going on, and he wants to know what's going on. He doesn't understand all of it, but in those, you know, 15, 20 minute conversations, you'll be surprised what you'll learn. What's going on in the business that you didn't, or I didn't know about, and from there I can make decisions about, you know, six months from now, or next year, or during budgeting season, what it is that we need because, budgeting season is not really the time that you need to try and figure out what you want to do for next year. You want to have a plan months before that. You know, You already want to have kind of an idea of what you want to do, I mean, I've been talking to my CFO since, the beginning of summer about things we want to do for 2020. you know, six months, nine months, ahead of time, so. >> So, do you do basically annual planning? Do you try to look out further? Do you formally document that stuff? >> Every quarter, so we have, we kind of have most of the conversations with our, with my CFO and COO. every quarter we have kind of a list of projects/ what is it we want to do for the next couple quarters. We just kind of, track that and based on what we're seeing and how we do, then we, basically we plan each quarter, is how it comes down to. And we have a, we'll call it a white board, a virtual white board of what we're doing and what we want to do. >> But relatively near the midterm planning, you know doing like five year plannings though right? >> No. >> Waste of time to try to do that, or? At least in your business, maybe in pharmaceuticals? >> At least for us it was really, it's hard for us, to do that because of how quickly we grew over the last, again I've only been here almost four years, but even when I started, in 2015, I think we had somewhere around 300 plus attorneys. Now we're somewhere in the 475 range, I'm not saying no one saw that happening, but I don't think we expected that. I mean business has been great and we're happy, and we're fortunate to have it, but you can only plan so much. but do the best you can with the data you have. >> And for organization structure, you report to the CFO, is that correct? >> CEO. >> CEO? Okay so the, so you're a peer essentially of the CFO, is that right? >> Yeah. >> So you talk to the CFO about budgeting? >> Yeah. >> So you've got the CEO's >> More of the nitty gritty you know the details and numbers. >> What's that conversation like? Is it obviously you've got to justify, show a business case, or is it more sort of hate space? >> So here's the good news. I got lucky again. the CFO is very technology forward and so he understands that it drives a lot of efficiencies within the firm. So he gets it but he's been in the history long enough to get it and knows that we can, again he's efficiency a lot, but there's just a lot of efficiencies, and a lot of inefficiencies seen in a lot of what folks do in law firms that no one takes the time to sit down and say okay why do you do it like this? there's got to be a better way. Well this is the way I just do it, and so, we've been able to kind of adjust a lot of those work flows, or change those work flows to make it more cost effective for the business. Like even things simple as, just manage print service, you know, do we store 100 toners in the back somewhere and then wait for someone to, say that they're out of toners? That's not very efficient. and it's very expensive actually, so you put in a much more efficient process in place for toners. Because we're a paperless firm, but you know, I mean we still have to print, so. >> So, the joke about the paperless office was something like paperless bathroom. So, the other way around, I want to ask you about security. Are you the defacto Chief Information Security Officer, or do you have a CISO, or? >> I do not have a CISO that is me, so that'll be me. >> So, that is you. Alright so let's talk security. So, what is the state of security and as you see it? it's constantly evolving. Security practitioners tell us that they got so many tools, they got, they might have a SEC ops team, you may or may not, it may be something embedded in your team, but they've got to respond, they've got to respond, sometimes it's hard to figure out what they should respond to, prioritization, the data, keeping up with the bad guys, all that stuff. What's your state of security? >> so I think these days, it's not really, it's not really about having the best firewall, or the best, outside protection, so I think a lot of the attacks that are happening now, not that they don't happen form the outside, but a lot of it is a lot of social engineering, and a lot of everything. They're taking advantage of the the ignorance of the users, for lack of a better way to say it, so a lot of it's coming in through email, malicious links, and they're taking advantage of the inside, and bad practices, and bad policies, and/or lack of So, I think based on what we see in the news now, and what you read about, it seems like there's a breech every week somewhere. And when it comes down to it you find out that X company didn't, didn't use a strong hashing. For assaulting, on the hashes for their passwords. Like simple simple, just basic basic stuff. It's not like some massive operation like you see in a movie where you know, they're making this big plan to break in a building and it pans out and they're sneaking in you know, from the ceiling and all that kind of stuff. They're just basic stuff, they're just passwords. How can passwords, reused passwords, just databases of passwords everywhere, out in the dark where you can just buy, and they're just utilizing simple stuff like that. It's not even complicated anymore, it's just, it's a lot of social engineering. >> Often times I say that bad user behavior trumps good security every time, I wanted to ask you about the state of the self security in the industry. So you are reinforced, we were there, and Steven Schmidt stood up and he said, "Look at this narrative from the vendor community that says security is broken, isn't productive. It hurts the industry at the same time." I was at VM world recently a couple months ago, last month actually, Pat Kelsinger basically stood up and said security is broken and we're here to fix it, they bought, you know made a big acquisition of carbon black a local company, so you have these two different, you know, polarizing opinions, I don't necessarily feel like the state of security is great. I look back every year I say do I feel more secure or not, you know remember art cove yellow, every year RSA would write his letter. but what are your thoughts on that? Are you basically saying hey, it's, a lot of times it's user behavior, it's things that maybe, you know it's education, is security a do over? I guess is my question. >> A do over in the sense that I think it just comes out to basic education. I have, you'd be, we're in tech and we understand security and we have all these grand ideas and technologies and vendors and software that we use to do different things on all these fancy dashboards. But, if you ask the basic person off the street about, I think I saw a skit on Twitter the other day and you know there was this guy going around asking them, asking people, you know, what's your Facebook password, or you know how complex is it and they'll just give them their passwords and stuff you know, and I mean there's just a lack of basic education, so all us security buffs walk around, and they don't understand what we're talking about, but they don't need to understand what we're talking about. We just need to be able to look, to just have a basic security awareness and training with folks. I have a friend who works in industry, or in a nonprofit that does, that helps folks who've been you know kind of, harassed or abused online. And she's saying, she's telling me, she's like, "Look you guys are great you're really smart, but these folks, they don't know the basic stuff like hey you know someone keeps logging into my internet, and I keep seeing someone, you know, these weird things in my yard, like cameras in my yard and, can I do this with my phone, and oh well I can't use, like, my dogs name for my Facebook password? Like this is just basic stuff that nobody knows. It's not because they're stupid it's just, they just don't know." And so, like we're up here, and your average everyday person is just on this level. >> How about ransom ware? Obviously a hot topic in the business. what should people be, what should they know and what should they be doing? >> at a basic level security ware is training, it's very simple to do, there's a lot of, no that I'm, pushing products there's plenty of products out there. Secure great ones that kind of help your user, or teach them what not to do, or what to look for. we run a fishing campaign in our firm every once in a while and at this point no one clicks on anything without asking. I mean I get direct emails and I say hey, how's this look? Does it look like I should click it or, you know, does it look legit, I mean it's great. They ask now, they know not to do it. Whereas, I mean that's how they get you. That's how they get most of these places. Especially from we get a lot of, we constantly hear about small firms or smaller clients/companies getting hacked, we constantly get emails from them all the time. They'll get hacked and then we'll get the the emails with the links or whatever. that's one on the user side. On the IT side, we just really need to take it back to the basics, let's make sure we have, backups, and a backup policy, and a data protection policy, and an instant response plan. Let's have a plan here, let's not react when something happens, let's just have a plan. Honestly at our firm, we do have backups, we have layered strategy, but there's just some basic things that we don't do, like you know, IT folks, we don't, we don't keep things on our desktop. Let's start with us, you know we're supposed to be the leadership, in this regard, so let's not keep stuff on our desk let's keep stuff on the network. Let's keep it protected. Make sure it's part of the backup schedule. things like that, I think you just start there, because I was you know, I was just reading about, there's an article that came out yesterday, I think it was Washington Post, and it was talking about the ransomer incident in Baltimore a few months ago. They're just now finding out that the, even the IT folks had stuff on their local computers that couldn't be recovered, important documentation. So, this is just data protection 101. You know, we've got to take it back to the basics, take it back. >> Last question, is just kind of your career, so you mentioned before, you were in, I think you said health care, or? >> Yeah so I worked with MSP, so I worked with a lot of start ups. >> So, how'd you get here how'd you become a CIO? People out there may be, you know people in tech, they aspire perhaps to stay in tech, but they want maybe more of a management role. What was your path, and what kind of advice would you give them? >> what I would say is, so it worked out where, I was I was a lead at the company I was at here in Mass at the time, and so long story short my wife had an opportunity in Orlando, we moved, and I said I would never work for a law firm, ever. because I was, when my current boss found out I was coming we have a, a long relationship. When I was in, grew up in Florida and so part of that yeah, okay so I was in the right place at the right time and I knew somebody, that's why it's important to stay on top of networking. Always be networking, not for any other reason, just get to know people, you know. the tough thing that I had growing in the industry, I didn't get involved early on, which I should've. I should've gone to events, things like that. Get to know folks because if the people don't know you, why are they going to hire you? It's easier to get in somewhere, or get an opportunity, if they at least know you, or know your name, or know somebody that knows you. That's number one, so I'm big on that. as soon as I moved back here I've already started, I have quarterly lunches with some of the CIOs at different firms, I just put myself put there. Just hey I'm here, want to get together for lunch? It's that simple. number two make sure this is what you want to do, it's a lot of it, and you hear this all the time, a lot of it has to do with personalities and people. You're managing personalities and people half the time. You are not just doing the tech. If you think you're just going to be doing tech, or you're just going to be doing cool stuff, not the case. So, make sure you can, you know, make sure you know what you're getting into because it's, it's very challenging. >> Now that's great, great advice, so network, it's not, I like to say it's not who you know it's who knows you, so get out there. And then, Love it because, a lot of times I would imagine it's thankless. Right, you hear, >> Yep. >> You hear a lot of the chatter when something goes wrong, >> It's like a defense of a football team, you know, it's fine until, >> Until somebody scores. >> And someone gets sacked you know what I mean, otherwise no one cares. >> Alright Jason well thanks for the update, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE again. >> Thank you. >> Alright you're welcome, alright keep it right there buddy. We will be back with our next segment, right after this short break. (mood music)

[Announcer] From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the CUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. We're here again with Jason Thomas who is the CIO of Cole, Scott and Kissane, CSK, Law Firm in Florida. And we're going to talk tech a little bit and specifically going to focus a little bit on the infrastructure, architecture, some of the tools and products that Jason is using. How he is applying technology. Good to see you again, Jason. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So we know about your law firm. Largest civil defense law firm in Florida. Very fast growing. You know, I think you said 400 plus attorneys, right? So, growing for the last three or four years from about 300 or so, right? So very fast growing, dynamic. Doing awesome, that's great. Congratulations. I want to talk about your infrastructure. So, paint us a picture of what your shop looks like. And we'll get into it. >> Yup, so I am very big on centralization. So, when I first arrived at the firm we had a lot of data sprawl is the best way to put it. You know, just kind of servers everywhere. Different offices. And I said the first thing we need to do is take all of this. We need to get everything in the data center. That's just going to make life much easier, as much as possible. So, at this point all we really see in any given office is a main controller and a print server. That's it. And, other than that, everything else is in the data center where we use Pure Storage on the back end for our SAN, for our high performance type applications. For our document management where we've moved or in the process of moving all of that to the Cloud. That's much more efficient that way. Sitting on an all FlashArrays is not, does not make sense as far as PDFs and word documents go you are not going to see the crush or data reduction there. And so, we've got that there so, we've got kind of a multi-layer strategy. Not to say that I'm paranoid, but I'm kind of paranoid when it comes to data protection and data loss. And so we started as simple as our file servers, for example, we have shadow copies enabled. That's the simplest, it's free. So, if someone deletes a random file or something, rather than going to our, we don't even have to go to our backup system. We just take a look, some snapshots, go back and restore that. If it's, you know, something simple like that. That way, even if we wanted to let an end user restore a file, we could, but we handle that. >> So it's not self-serve. >> Yeah, it's not self-serve but we do it for them. But, it's a basic tech can do that. You don't have to call the system admin to handle that. Anything further than that, then yeah, we go to the backups and then part of our backup... Our next step in our backup strategy, we are a Rubrik shop, so we have a brick, a brick as they call it in our data, in our backup data center. We have another data center just for backups. So, that all gets stored. The Rubrik, it's completely immutable, and it's got decent retention on that. So... >> Did you bring in RubriK, or was it there? >> I brought in Rubrik, yeah. >> OK, why did you bring in Rubrik? >> We were using, and you had mentioned earlier in the segment, when we started out, we were much smaller than we were years ago. We were using a product that was probably geared more towards SMB, and we needed something a little more enterprise. So, we brought in Rubrik a couple of years ago. >> OK. >> And we've done some, we haven't had to use it, thankfully haven't had to use it much. It's there and we do obviously do testing on it on a regular basis. I have spun up a VM on it which is awesome that I might personally ruined a VM myself it wouldn't boot But luckily it was a test VM so I was able to spin one up there. So it works as advertised. It's awesome, very fast. And then we've also got another data center outside the state of Florida where we have another, basically, it's basically a replica or duplicate of what we have in our main data center and we replicate Pure to Pure. We have another Pure Storage unit in that data center and we use their replication technology and snap-shotting to put everything there as well. >> OK, and what about the network? What's that look like? >> So, we have, right now we have thirteen offices now and they're all on MPLS private network and we've got secondary and third internet connections for backup or internet in general. We're looking at some type of SD-WAN strategy, it means a lot of things to a lot of folks, but for us we like to kind of take advantage of those secondary and third connections and create our own kind of private network if we have an issue with the MPLS. >> And you're a VMware shop, right? >> Yup. >> And you're also, you put stuff in the Cloud. What's your Cloud provider? >> Yup, so, and then our kind of final layer in that, part of that strategy, is I did want to have the option and look in the future to put, to replicate to the Cloud, so I got in touch with Clumio, they're pretty new, new on the street, but the CEO and I know a few of the folks there from other industries and other places and I have a lot of trust in what they're doing. Basically, we are basically replicating all our servers to the AWS Cloud using Clumio, so it's... it integrates in the vCenter and basically sends all of the date up to the AWS cloud. And so, I get the same type of retention as a Rubrik. We get seven years retention, and it's immutable as well, so that's my, kind of my backup of the back up plan. In the future, who knows. We may not even need the DR site anymore. We may just go straight, if we need a failover, we just failover to AWS vCenter in the Cloud. We've got our Clumio backups there and we have the ability to spin up VMs there as well. >> So, okay. So you've got a VMware running on AWS. >> mm-hm >> And that's what you're using in Clumio to protect correct. And why Clumio and not Rubrik if you are a Rubrik shop? >> The management piece. The simplicity of the interface. It's...I like the way they manage everything for you, so you don't even need to have agents on the servers. You basically, it's under their account, you simply install a appliance locally in your environment, a virtual appliance, and they take care of the rest. And you're just presented with an interface, a GUI interface to do whatever, whether it is to do restores, or monitor, or check up on the indexing of the data. That's all, it's pretty simple. There's really not much to do. It's the simplicity of the solution that was really attractive and it's in my mind, it's a no brainer as far as cost and effectiveness. >> And, it's Pure SaaS model is my understanding, >> Pure SaaS. >> Correct? So you're not installing any hardware or >> Nope, no hardware. No agents. It's simply an integration into vCenter and you just let it do it's thing. And that's it. >> It's interesting, I mean you look at the history of SaaS. It kind of started with CRM, kind of went from CBL, to Salesforce, you had Exchange, went to Gmail, and then eventually Office 365. You saw ServiceNow actually took a while, they kind of disrupted BMC, but that took about, you know a decade. Workday was much faster, right? Workday took, who was it... PeopleSoft I guess was the main HR product. So do you feel like a backup is next, or sort of this hybrid world, this mix of sort of on-prem backup folks, and traditional backup and SaaS, or do you think like many of these other, not that these other companies go away, I mean Teradata's going to be doing still well. You have Snowflake disrupting them. But do you see the SaaS backup as something that's going to have legs? >> Yeah, because when you talk about Cloud, it's still, depending on what you want to do, putting your entire infrastructure on the Cloud, it, I mean, it's expensive. You, everyone is preaching Cloud, Cloud, Cloud, but you kind of have to look at it and say, okay, does it really make, from a cost perspective, it doesn't always make sense. It's very expensive to spend above the Azure or AWS. You know once, once you put all the storage and compute costs. But, things like backup, it totally makes sense, and honestly it's been going on at least a decade right, between Carbonite and Mozy and all these players >> Sure, right, and Endpoint. >> You know, so people have been doing it, I mean, Clumio, what they have done has just taken it to the Enterprise and they're taking advantage of different storage tiers in Amazon. I mean, it's not, there's nothing, there's nothing complex I would say, or they didn't come up with something amazing. They just figured, they took something and made... >> Don't tell that to the engineers (jovial laughter) >> I'm sure, listen guys, I'm sure there's a lot of complexity to the engineering behind it, but basically all they've done is put a nice interface on top of something, and they've taken all the complexity out of, you know, setting up your own AWS account. And managing all your buckets. And all that, you know. They're handling, taking care of all of that and doing it for you, basically. And how they do it, you know, I don't know. But definitely different storage tiers and mixes of that to make all of that happen. But they just make it super simple and super affordable, is the other piece. It's very affordable in my mind as opposed to other directions I could go with Cloud backup. >> Yeah, you've mentioned that a couple of times. First, it's amazing to me how, it's like you're compressing the innovation cycles and backup. I mean it was. It just feels like recently you were Cohesity, Rubrik, and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was all about simplicity... >> Yup. >> And they, each of those companies, as I'm sure Veritas and Dell EMC, and Commvault. They all have Cloud plays, right, so I'm still trying to understand what's different about Clumio. It sounds like it's Pure SaaS, that's a different.. I mean you've mentioned cost a few times. Maybe add some color to that. >> They basically done, what they've done they've taken what Rubrik has done. So I'll back up to when I first look at Rubrik. Basically, the phone call that I got was "Hey man, I'm telling you this is like totally disruptive and it's going to blow you away." And I'm like "Dude. It's backups. You're not going to blow my mind. Give me a break." And he's like, "Just give me a chance." And I was like, "All right, all right. Come in and blow my mind." And literally I was like man, why didn't I think of this. >> It blew your mind. >> It blew my mind. (laughter) And I was like literally like... You put a web interface on top of the entire thing and you basically have to do nothing. It does all the indexing. It's like a search. If I want to search for a file, I just simply type the name of the file like I would in Google, and it just searches across. I don't have to know where it exists. I just need to know that it's there. And basically, what Clumio has done, they've just taken that and just put it into the Cloud. They've done this similar thing: they index all of your VMs, and then if I need to restore a file or search for something, I just type the name of the file and it says here's all of the hits that I got, what do you want to restore? You know, where as, I remember back in the day, or more like two years ago, if you needed to restore something, you kind of, okay, where was it? What was the location? What was the exact path? And you got to go D drive, and this folder and this folder. There's none of that anymore even. It's just they've even taken the work out of that so you don't even need... the same reason we went with Pure is you don't need a storage admin and you don't really need a backup admin, per se. You don't need a person spending a lot of time, or devoting a lot of time to the process. It just works. You don't need a babysitter is what it comes down to. So where as, you have one of these legacy type storage arrays or backup systems, you have to babysit it. Nobody has time to babysit that. >> So they've abstracted all of that complexity away and it's going to be interesting to see how the industry responds. It's like the NFL, this industry is a copycat industry, and so at the same time they have a big install base. And people don't generally like to migrate, right, off of something to something else. >> So here's, so what I'll say to that is, and that part stinks, no one likes to migrate off of anything but you're not really migrating off of anything. You don't really have to do much. You just pop something in, you just pop an appliance in, and it really takes care of the rest, like even with Rubrik and Clumio, once you pop that appliance in your environment, hardware or virtual, it integrates integrating into your vCenter environment and it knows what's in there and just asks you, "Hey, which of these do you want to back up; What kind of policy do you want on; how often do you want to backup?" And you just check a box, check boxes. >> So Clumio is not physical hardware? >> No, it's virtual. >> Virtual appliance. >> I think it's like does the management on-prem, it's kind of like a data mover of sorts. >> Today, it's just narrow, right? It's VMware on AWS. >> Correct. >> Presumably there's a road map there. >> I believe there's a road map for my understanding. I would have to think so. I'm not, I'm kind of Cloud agnostic as far as who the player is. Whether it's AWS, Azure, or TCP. But I have colleagues who, they're an Azure shop and that's what we do. And I get that, and so I would imagine, I understand that they probably have Azure and TCP on the road map. >> Well they raised a bunch of dough so I'm sure they've got a road map. >> They've got to do something with it, right. (jovial laughter) Because the backup is so simple, so there's not a lot of engineering. >> Okay. So you don't have a dedicated storage admin or backup admin. >> No. >> Did you used to? >> Before I got there, there was no SAN actually, so there was no storage, but yes, there was a lot of time spent on the backup piece. Managing the backups. Just monitoring it, make sure things were... a lot of time devoted to that. Now there's not a lot of time spent on that. >> And was it qualified people doing it or was it lawyers and paralegals doing the backup? >> Definitely lawyers. (jovial laughter) So yeah, it was our sys-admins. Now they worry about other stuff that's important. >> What do they worry about? How have you shifted that resource? >> A lot of our focus now is moving to exchange in the Cloud. Office 365. So there's quite a bit of work that goes into that, especially given our, some integrations that we have with our case management software and all that. So there's a lot time being devoted to that right now. So our plan is to move next year. >> Okay. So a lot of tactical stuff that you have to get done. >> Yup. >> Last question. I always love to ask this. Things that vendors do that drive you crazy, that you want to tell them "stop doing this?" >> There is not, everyone has a solution for something, and not everybody needs that solution for your one niche. I mean, you go to some of these conferences now and there's billions of vendors, well not billions, but there's just dozens and dozens of vendors and it's almost like some of them are just kind of monetizing that one little thing that I don't really need. So, backups. I need Cloud backups. Storage. I need storage. Outside of that, there's just... and the best way to put it is that I've talked to some colleagues and they're just going through what we like to call vendor fatigue. It's just continuous. It's just all of the time. Someone always has a solution for something. It's not that I don't want anybody to do something, but your solutions are just not for everybody. And it just doesn't work. >> Well the thing is that you're getting pitched all the time and you're experienced. So look at, tell me what it is, what it does, what it costs, and give me five minutes and I'll tell you if it fits my business or not. If it does, I'm going to want to know more. If it doesn't, hey, respect my time. >> Yeah. Usually it's for me, I'm approaching them, I'm approaching a vendor for a solution, not the other way around. If you're approaching me, I'm probably, yeah, I don't have time to answer every call or email. I try to. But usually it's me saying, "hey, we need something for this." And then every once in a while you'll get a Rubrik or Clumio or a Pure come around and well that looks cool. >> Now, is that going to blow your mind? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, sure. >> But then you find out. >> If it doesn't, then I owe you dinner. All right, all right. >> Then they blow your mind. And that happens. Remember, I'm not saying that doesn't happen. It's just very rare. >> Well a big part of this is that so much venture capital has poured into the tech business in the last ten years. And what do they do with that VC: they promote. They hire sales people. >> Yup. >> They hire go to market so they're under a lot of pressure and are churning through those guys. So they're calling guys like you, trying to get you in a headlock to buy something. It sounds like sometimes it's counter-productive. >> Yeah, I get it, and that's their job that they have to do. I have a policy, I try to answer every email, at least, "I can't" or "I'm not interested." At least that much. I try not to ignore folks, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. >> Good, well thank you for sharing all that insight, Jason. It's great to have you back on. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, welcome. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from the CUBE. See you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with David Martin who's the senior director, project management threat response at Open Systems. Dave, thanks for coming in. >> Thanks, John, very much for having me. >> So we were talking before we came on camera. We've both been around the industry for a while, seen a lot of different waves of innovation. Security is the top one. We're seeing it being a really important, not just part of IT, and we want to get into a deep dive on the complexities or on the security architecture versus cloud architecture. And it's just not another IT, so I want to dig deep with you. Before we start, talk about your product. You're the senior director product management. You get the keys to the kingdom. You're working on the positioning, the next generation. Take a minute to just to talk about the product. >> Sure, happy to share the product. Starting point is Open Systems in general. We're a global provider of secure SD-WAN, and essentially we deliver that as a service. So we deliver the connectivity and all of the security that you need to make sure you can conduct business reliably and safely. I'm personally responsible for some of our managed services, managed continuous monitoring services, and essentially what we're doing is looking for advanced threats that have bypassed whatever a company's existing security controls are in an effort to identify those and then ultimately contain them. >> We were at the Amazon Web Services first cloud security conference, Re:Inforce, and it was interesting 'cause it wasn't like your traditional industry event like RSA, Black Hat or DEF CON. It was really more of a cloud security, so it was really more of the folks thinking about the impact of cloud and what that means. So cloud certainly is relevant. It's expanding capabilities with application. The on-premises piece really is the hybrid. And obviously, every company pretty much has multiple clouds, that's multi-cloud. But hybrid really is the top conversation. It's been really kind of on the table since 2013 timeframe, but now more than ever it's actually part of the operational thinking around architecting next generation infrastructure systems. >> Yes. >> How does security fit into those two things? Because you've got to have the on-premise operational model. You've got to have the cloud operational model. They've got to be seamless through working together. How does security fit within cloud and hybrid from you guys' perspective? >> That's a great question, and certainly introducing the cloud into the equation adds complexity to the overall issue. And as you've highlighted, companies are now operating in a hybrid mode. They have assets on-premise. They have assets in the cloud, and security teams, certainly over the course of time, as this business transformation has happened, had to rethink how are we going to approach and secure these assets correctly. And it is non-trivial, and the key is that you want to get telemetry from all your potential attack surfaces. And you want to be thoughtful about how you're pulling in this data. This is a mistake that we unfortunately see a lot of customers making which is in a rush to provide visibility, they just aggregate and accept all log data from all different sources without much thought into what is the security-relevant data there, and what are my default rule sets going to be? How am I going to use this data in a threat-detection kind of a capacity? And these are kind of the typical pitfalls that a lot of companies make, but to kind of bring it back to your point-- >> Hold on, I just want to get that one point. They take in too much data, or they're just ingesting way too much? Is that the issue? >> It's not necessarily the volume. It's more about the quality of what they're getting, and a lot of the vendors, there's a product many interviewers will see, SSIM, essentially is a log collector, and security teams use this piece of software to try and identify threats. And of course for compliance and other reasons, a common thing to do is just throw data at the SSIM so you could start collecting it. And that makes sense if you're just trying to store data, but when you're trying to actually figure out has someone infiltrated my network, that really a nightmare because you're sort of inundated. And you've heard terms like the work fatigue and so on, and this is what happens. And so we have a practice that we're essentially when you bring in and ingest a log source, do some upfront work about that log source and how are you going to use the data. What are the relevant fields that you're going to parse out and index on? And have a purpose for doing that versus just sort of throwing it out there. >> Yeah, I mean data quality and data cleaning and going into a pile of data versus a front-end kind of vetting process, being intelligent about it. >> That's right, that's right. Yeah, and it's a tough thing, right, because all the vendors in that space, they want you to use the tool. Enterprises have made this investment. But we find that a lot of companies aren't getting the value out of some of their security tools because it's sort of a broader design. What is the architecture of the detection we're going to use to cover our potential attack surfaces? >> Yeah, that comes up a lot in our data science conversations, and you hear correlation versus causation. A lot of data science naturally love correlation. They love the data. They get knee-deep in the data. But then they can correlate, but they might not be understanding actually what's going on. This is highlighted with threat response because the acute nature of what a threat means to the business is not just knowing how to have the right ad serve up or some sort of retail sales proposition. Threat detection and threat response is super critical to the business because if you miss it, there's some consequences and you eventually go out of business. So that's really kind of a key focus. How do you guys do that? How do you work with customers? Because that's the core issue, how do I get the best data, the fastest way in? How do I identify the threats first and fast? >> Yeah, I think you're on an incredibly important point which is as an industry, we have to ask ourselves why do damaging breaches continue to happen despite best efforts, right? There's very knowledge, talented people. There's a lot of money being spent. There's over $100 billion per year as an industry spent on security and security-related software, and yet these damaging breaches continue to occur. And I think a big challenge, a big reason for this is that as an industry we've pursued a technology-driven security model. And for years, we've sort of had the idea that if we purchased the latest anti-virus or the latest IDS or web proxy or now we're starting to shift into ML and AI and sort of more higher-level things that we'll be protected. That was sort of the idea and the promise. And I think that in general, people are realizing that that is a failed model, and that really, the best way to minimize risk is to combine those types of technology with continuous monitoring. And obviously we're in that business. We monitor people's networks. But there are many companies that do that, and security's a very complex system that doesn't have a feedback loop without continuous monitoring. And just like in life, any complex system should have a feedback loop to have it operating properly. >> Well, let's talk about that complex system. So I want to spend the next couple minutes with you talking about the security architecture versus cloud architecture. We cover a lot of experts talking about cloud architecture. Here's how you architect for cloud. Here's how you architect for hybrid and so on. And it's super important. You've got the data layer. You've got to understand how data moves, when to move compute versus data, all kinds of things that are factoring in. Essentially, it's like an operating system kind of design. So it's distributed computing, and everyone kind of knows that that's in the business. But when you add in security as now the key driver, security architecture might supersede cloud architecture and/or distributed architecture. So I got to ask you, if security is a complex system and not just an IT purchase, what is the customer's ideal configuration? How do they either replatform or course correct what they're currently doing? What's your thoughts on that? >> Sure. >> Well, do you agree that it's a complex system? It's not just another IT procurement. >> Absolutely, I think it's a great way to say that, and that really is the way that sort of forward-thinking companies think about minimizing risk is they look at it for exactly as kind of you characterized it. And I think the key is to essentially look at your individual technology. Today they're in silos, largely, and you need continuous monitoring to kind of pool all of that data that you're getting together and then use that to adjust policy. And you need to do that continually over time. I like to say security's a journey, not a destination, right? You're sort of never done if you're doing it well because threat actors evolve their techniques and the detection needs to evolve, too, right along with that. And so getting into that practices is good practice to do to minimize your risk >> And CISOs are now being established, either working directly peering with the CIO or for the CIO or vice versa. They're becoming more prominent, so the role of security, I'll say agree, it's always on. It's never off 'cause it's never going to stop. But the question is how do you implement that because if I have continuous monitoring, which I see as clearly valuable, do I have one firm for that? Can I have multiple firms for that? And then of the tools, if I'm the CISO, I'm probably trying to downshift into only a handful, not dozens of companies. >> No, you're absolutely right. >> Shrinkage, better monitoring, it's the trend. What's your response? >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I think there's been studies that have shown the average large enterprise has about 32 security vendors that they have to deal with. And so certainly from a CISO perspective, a lot of the ones that I speak to are in the mode where they're trying to consolidate and simplify that landscape 'cause it just makes things a lot easier. But I think in terms of the cloud and that whole piece, I'll give you one practical example. All these cloud vendors have APIs, administrative APIs, and certainly you can monitor who's accessing the cloud. But you can also deduce things from these APIs. You can look for signs that the infrastructure may have been compromised, instances stopping and starting, certificates that have been uploaded. So even though you may not have complete visibility, and by the way, it's getting better. All three major infrastructure as service providers are starting to provide access to packet data which is helpful in this context. But even just looking at it from the outside, the administrative layer, there are things, abnormal behaviors with the way that infrastructure's working that you can use to indicate that yeah, there might be an issue here. And then you'll want to go and use other data to figure that out, for sure. >> You got to really dig into it, and so again, on the technology side, you guys had success with a product. You guys are not a new company. You've been around for decades. Great reviews on the product side, so congratulations. >> David: Thank you. >> What makes the product so successful? What are some of the notable highlights? Can you share the most successful pieces of the products? Why are people liking it so much? >> Sure, sure, well, I mean all of the reasons why people look to outsource things, certainly we provide the value, less cost, more responsive. But I think what's unique about what we do is our delivery model. There's a very popular DevOps sort of model in fashion these days where essentially you have developers and QA people testing together and there's various definitions. But from a network operations perspective, the people that run our network and our SOC are the developers. They're the ones writing and optimizing our platform. And so when there are issues, customers talk to knowledge people about that. It's not a traditional call center model. And then the other thing from a threat detection perspective is we're working on a model where we have essentially security analysts responsible for some number of customers. And they get to know that environment really well. And that really informs the quality of the threat detection because the better you know the environment that you're monitoring, the better the accuracy of the threat detection's going to be. And as an outsource provider, a lot of companies don't do this. It's an expensive thing to do, but it does result in a better product. So that's one thing to focus on. >> Awesome, I want to ask you, Dave, about AI. I'm a huge fan of AI, love it because unlike IOT, which I love that too 'cause it's a exciting area, my kids aren't talking about IOT at the dinner table, but AI, the young people are getting energized and really it's attracting a lot of people to the computer industry, which I think is awesome. But also, AI is not really as big as people think it is. Certainly, it's going to be important. AI's machine learning with some bells and whistles. But most people say, "I'll just throw AI at the problem." AI is not that yet advanced, I mean, what AI really, truly can become. So I want to get your thoughts around that classic, knee-jerk response that a customer might get fed from a supplier. "Hey, we have AI Ops, so we're an AI-driven company." What the hell does that even mean? I mean, why is it important, and where does it really matter? Where are people using technology that is going to be a road map for AI? Is it machine learning? How do you guys see that customer equation? What's the snake oil pitch from others? What's real, what's not? >> Sure, yeah, I often tell customers that I wouldn't want to be in their shoes 'cause it's very confusing. All the vendors throw around the terms ML and AI with the promise that's it's going to cure all problems. And it's really difficult to tell the value that you're going to get from those technologies. And so I'll share with you my perspective on that which is that certainly there's a legitimate technology there, but I think we are in this kind of hype cycle where there's an overpromise of what it can deliver. And in a security context, I think techniques like machine learning and AI can be used to reduce noise and amplify signal. And I think the mistake a lot of people make is let's take the human out of the equation here. And I have to tell you that the human is fantastic in the little gray areas that threat actors love to exploit. Looking and saying this doesn't look quite right to me because I know this environment and this is not usually here. And you'd get that by working with the data, but in order to position yourself for success on that, you have to use sort of this technology you're highlighting to take care of the commodity kind of things that would otherwise create it. >> So augment, do the non-differentiated stuff. It's like heavy lifting that you want to assist the human. >> You want to assist the human in the process. That's exactly right. >> That's not replacement of the human. >> That's right, and I think a lot of companies go wrong thinking that AI can replace this wholly. And maybe there's some very specific applications where that's true, but in general where you're managing very large, diverse environments, you need to use these type of technologies, to again, reduce noise and amplify the signal for the human part of it. >> One of the things we've been riffing on theCUBE, certainly we can talk about it on another topic on another time is that this whole movement of using machine learning and the AI infrastructure that's developing really fast which is really exciting is that's going to create a whole new creative class within IT and security where the creativity of the human becomes the intellectual property for the opportunity. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> Do you see that? >> I do, I think that's fair. I mean, I think we're kind of early on in the development cycle of these types of technologies, and they show a lot of promise. And it's the classic don't overindex on it. And again, even in the security context, you have a lot of SSIM vendors now, essentially adding analytics modules and AI. And, again, these can be helpful, but don't count on them to solve all the problems. They need to be rationalized and purposeful. >> Well, certainly security is really growing from a discipline within an enterprise to a much more holistic feel, the aperture, whether it's management, the technology experts and practitioners, it's expanding rapidly. >> David: Yeah. >> David, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Dave Martin, senior director product management threat response at Open Systems, breaking down their opportunity in security and talking about some of the trends here on theCUBE, CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)