foreign welcome back to thecube's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here at Moscone West we're with about seven to ten thousand folks here so really good attendance at this first event since 2019 and the First with the new name Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jeff seraki the senior director of product management at Lumen as our next guest Jeff great to have you thank you for having me welcome so looked at the website I always love to see what taglines are and and lumen's website says welcome to the platform for amazing things talk to the audience a little bit about Lumen it's Mission Vision value prop would love to so much like a lot of the Enterprises that are out there today in the market lumens in the process of transforming we're transforming to a technology company from our Network routes but we also have roots in the I.T infrastructure business so we're bringing those together and creating that platform for amazing things uh we believe that our purpose is if you further human progress through technology and how we do that is we're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution so moving in to the digital age where everything is it's all about data it's about real-time use of that data you machine learning artificial intelligence autonomous Cars Smart cities so the key tenet that we have around the fourth Industrial Revolution is data you need to acquire it and once you acquire it you need to analyze it then you need to act upon it because when you think about it data is just growing and growing and growing from the phones in your pocket to the devices that are sitting in front of us it's not going to stop and information that data is critical to driving business value and outcomes for customers so um so with that the I totally lost my train of thought sorry um uh the ability to to leverage that is critical um you know driving driving the revenue from that so for example like machine learning you can't have machine learning without data to feed the machine so they can start learning so they can look at pictures like oh look this is a picture of a dog this is a picture of a kangaroo so that's what our platform enables and that's what we're building we're building it brand new sitting on top of the Lumen networking capabilities of Global Network one of the largest IP backbone providers so we're super excited about what we have so these days every company has to be a data company to be competitive to you know well even to survive talk a little bit about enabling lumens customers to become data companies while enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution those two seem to be hand in hand yes so with the services that we provide particularly with our partnership with VMware we provide private cloud services that we can deploy on the customer premises or so whether it's a corporate office manufacturing facility a you know logistical facility so we can provide compute there or we can provide it in one of our plus 60 Edge data centers that are located in plus 60 metros so you don't have to put equipment on premises that's all connected by the Lumen Network Dynamic networking capabilities that connect from a customer Prem to Edge data center third party data center all the way into the public Cloud so we can stitch all of that together so I know you mentioned that you know you're you're you know based on your history you're moving further up the value chain with your customers but I'm still fascinated by kind of the history of lumen and when you when you refer to this Lumen Network um tell us a little more about that because that that's kind of a secret sauce ingredient to what you're doing yes so roots and Telecom roots and fiber and we have one of the largest fiber networks in the world and with that comes not only breath but also capillarity going to the markets we have over a hundred and eighty thousand fiber fed Enterprise buildings so with that imagine if your compute's there or if it's in a one of our Edge data centers how quickly you can transmit information from that Prem to the compute all the way into the cloud to acquire analyze and act on that data so that's really kind of the secret sauce we have that as you mentioned is that is that fiber backbone so I'm going to use the word capillarity at least once a day for the next week that's one of my favorite words awesome awesome word in it because and it actually it's evocative of exactly what I know you're what you're referencing but so you you guys are experts in latency bandwidth throughput those underpinnings of making sure that you can get data where it needs to be you can communicate between between environments um you've got that you've got that down so that's a very very strong Foundation to build off of is I guess the point that I wanted to see if I was correct definitely understanding and um just with that capability it really it comes down to outside the data is the user experience and with application performance you know one of the levers you can pull to drive application performance is is network but also location so you can put more bandwidth at it you can take put it on a network with less hops that's one of the advantages of our large backbone or you move the compo compute closer to the point of digital interaction which is what we're doing with our Edge platform so whether it's an edge data center on-prem yeah one thing one thing at the cube that we like to do is we we dive into those things that sometimes people think are inane and banal because we know how important they are we have a whole series on the question of does Hardware matter and so so we understand that you're delivering higher value to your customers but we also want to acknowledge just how important it is for you to have that Foundation yes underneath yeah and we're I mean the customers that in the marketplace they're expecting more and more services up this stack they don't want to have to worry about speeds and feeds well the way we're looking at it is the network has compute endpoints on it and everything has compute customers want to run their applications they don't want to worry about everything underneath it so that's why we're moving up so we want to be able to create that platform you worry about your applications you worry about development and execution of your applications and we'll take care of everything else talk a little bit about the VMware partnership I see Lumen Edge private Cloud on VCF talk a little bit about that how you guys are working together and some of the value of what's in it for me as a customer okay we've been working with for VMware for decades they're one of our best partners and our Flagship private Cloud product is based upon the cloud Foundation and it's a tried and true platform that the market understands and they have confidence in so it's something that they can relate to and they already have experience in so they're not trying to learn something new like trying to go out and find resources that can manage kubernetes like that's probably one of the hottest jobs out there probably took the wrong career path but anyways it's it's new it's emerging whereas VMware people know it there's a lot of people that know it so why spend time as an Enterprise retooling and learning and going to a different platform so with that VMware brings that foundation and the security of that that cohesive ecosystem that comes with VCF so we can provide that dedicated solution to our customers that they know and they Trust trust is critical right I mean it's it's table Stakes for businesses and their vendors and suppliers you know here we are at the VMware explore event that called uh the center of the multi-cloud universe which just sounds like a Marvel movie to me haven't seen any superheroes yet but there's got to be somebody around here in a costume in any event talk about how Lumen and VMware are enabling customers to navigate the the multi-cloud world that they're in by default and really turn it into a strategic advantage uh sure it's tied to the network um as much as I'm trying to say we opsificate it but it's um network is the critical part to it because you do have to physically connect things and the cloud is their computer somewhere so there is a physical behind everything but with the connectivity that we have and the partnership with VMware and the ability to take that platform and either from on-prem Edge data center third party data center or we can also provide that service with uh vmc and AWS we can provide it in the cloud so you have a ubiquitous platform that looks and feels the same no matter where it is and then that's critical to our customers again that the switching costs of learning it's it's a great product VMware is a great partnership to help bring that all together so what is a delighted customer sound like you're interacting with a delighted customer they're not gonna they're not going to pick up the phone and tell you you know what I love your network what what are they going to be what are they going to tell you they're happy about a delighty customer wouldn't talk about our infrastructure at all our virtual machines work our applications work our software Engineers they can develop against it our costs are optimized that's what they're going to care about if they start talking about oh our virtual machines or servers and that means there's probably something wrong so we need to make sure that platform that we're providing as a service and managing works so it's really if your application if you want to talk to me about your application that's what's top of mind for you we're doing our job now you share that love with the folks in your organization responsible for making sure that that infrastructure works right yes you let them know it's like look no no one is no one is touting what you do but it really still is important it is very you want to make sure keep those folks happy yes very important talk a little bit Jeff about how your customer conversations have evolved over the last couple of years as we saw you know two and a half years ago businesses in every industry scrambling to go digital have you seen priorities shift up the c-suite stock over to the board in terms of the infrastructure and the network that powers these organizations yeah I mean over the past couple years with the proliferation of public cloud you know the edicts of got to go to the cloud we got to go Cloud go to the go to the cloud so everything goes to the cloud it's great it's good for a lot of applications but not for all applications and the customer conversations were having a lot of it are okay what what comes back because with Cloud cream and costs it just yeah if you're looking at a permanent VM basis you know public Cloud works but when you have an entire ecosystem of virtual machines and applications to support entire Enterprise that cost can get out of hand pretty quickly are you saying that we we yeah we hear the term repatriation yes used are you saying a fair fair amount of that yes we're seeing that then the other part that we're seeing is getting out of the data center business that's expensive especially if an Enterprise has their own like that's you're talking about 10 million dollars per megawatt just of capital cost there so and then if they're in a third party you still have physical space and power you have servers there you have to assume someone's optimizing those servers and even if you have a hypervisor sitting on top of it that's a lot of work that's a lot of resources and human capital that our private Cloud solution with VMware takes away so that they can again they can worry about their applications providing business value providing customer experience versus is there anything on this server or not does somebody need this virtual machine what are all these public Cloud spend items we have how's this out of control it allows them to focus so that's kind of how things have have evolved and changed over the years one of the things that VMware talked about this morning in terms of the journey the cloud journey is going from cloud chaos which is where a lot of businesses are now to Cloud smart how does Lumen facilitate that transition of a business from cloud chaos to Cloud smart what is a cloud smart strategy from lumen's lens look like first of all you have to have a strategy as an Enterprise you'd be surprised how many of those that are out there that they don't know what to do and part of not knowing what to do is do we even have the right people looking at this and so what Lumen what we bring is that consultative capability to start breaking down some of those issues so maybe they do have a hybrid Cloud strategy okay have you implemented it no why not we don't have enough people okay those are resources we can bring in because not only you provide network and infrastructure but we also have managed surface capabilities managed Services capabilities we can sit on top of that we have Cloud migration practices we have centers of excellence around sap and other services so let us help dissect your problem let's take a let's look at the landscape you have out there find out where everything's buried and dig it up and then we figure out okay how do we move from one place the other you don't just lift and shift and so that those are the other services that Lumen brings in and that's how we help them and our private Cloud product we have it sitting on our Edge right in those 60 metros they can spin up a private Cloud instance tomorrow and they can start moving virtual machines from their data center to that cloud as a staging point to either keep it there you know move it to another place or move it into the public Cloud if that's where the application needs to live I'm curious about lumen's go to market strategy customers have a finite number of strategic seats at the table when it comes time to planning things out like what you just were referencing you know what what do we do next uh what's lumen's path to a seat at that table are you are you generally seeking to directly engage separately with that end user customer or are you going in partnering with others what does that look like in the real world in the real world it's Partners working together no one single entity can provide everything we have to work together and with our infrastructure layer we want to find the right partners that can help provide vertical specific Solutions that then you know they can be Hardware Partners they can be software Partners but then we can collectively go talk to the market talk to our customers about what we can help them with and then with our managed Services capabilities that's how we can kind of glue it all together so that's the direction we're going in so be very focused we're focused on manufacturing you're focused on retail because we see the largest opportunities there that's where we have a strong customer base strong customer relationships and that's how we're doing it we don't want to have an infrastructure conversation we want to outcome and application conversation that's what every customer is talking about it's all about outcomes is there Jeff a favorite customer story in manufacturing or retail that you think really articulates the value of what Lumen and VMware are delivering together yeah it's a yeah we kind of use this one a lot but it's it's uh it's a really good one um and we've seen um uh clones of this and and other opportunities manufacturing smart manufacturing you need to have the equipment that takes that information again that data from all the iot devices analyze it operate your manufacturing facility because most of it's all automated now so you can run that facility at optimal production with that compute you don't necessarily want that compute you know a thousand miles away you want it as close as possible particularly if you look at what if there's a fiber cut your network goes down okay then your factory goes down that's millions of dollars so with that compute there we allow that smart manufacturing capabilities and that's running on Lumen private cloud based upon VMware on vcloud foundation and it's working great and it's it's an opportunity for us to continue to expand I've seen similar use cases in logistics it's yeah I mean it's phenomenal what we can do when you're in conversations with prospects what's the why what's the pitch that you give them about why they should be working with Lumen to help them really maximize the value of their Edge Solutions it's really the resources we bring to bear like you know we we keep talking a lot about Network and uh trying to get away from the sniper that's my cousin the network is is key to the value proposition but it's not what people look at first but it's those other resources the ability to to manage I.T infrastructure which have been doing for decades a lot of people don't know that but we've been doing this a very long time and then with those areas of expertise managed Services it's providing that all together and with lumen's history the Partnerships we have I mean we have a lot of Partnerships so we have the ability to bring all these resources to provide the best solution for the customer and we like to use the term best execution venue so each application has an optimal place to live and we'll help help customers find that out and it's really I mean it's that simple we just need to sit down and have a conversation we can figure out where we can help you and we can get started as soon as the customer is ready so obviously some some changes coming up for VMware in the next few months or so what are you excited about as you continue this long-standing partnership and evolving it forward I'm most excited about us working together even more because we have not only do we have our private Cloud products uh we're leveraging them for kubernetes but also our sassy product we're partnered with VMware on that so we're really tight at the hip with these Cutting Edge Products that we're taking to Market to help customers solve those problems that we were just talking about so I'm just looking forward us coming together more and just getting out there and helping people threatening of the partnership excellent Jeff thank you for joining Dave and me on the program talking about what's going on with Lumen how you're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution enabling customers to really become data companies we appreciate your time on your insights thank you for Jeff saraki and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022. you're watching thecube the leader in Live tech coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm talking next with Sanzio Bassini, the Head of High Performance Computing at Cineca, at DELL technologies customer. Sanzio, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure, it's a pleasure. >> Likewise, nice to see you. So tell us a little bit about Cineca. This is a large computing center, but a very large Italian nonprofit consortium. Tell us about it. >> Yes, Cineca been founded 50 years ago, from the university systems in Italy. For a statutory mission, which is to support, the scientific discovery, and the industry innovations, using the High Performance Computing and the correlated methodologies like a, Artificial Intelligence, which is one of the, you see the more, in a, in a adopted in those days, but together with the big data processing and and simulation. Yes, we are a consortium, which means that this is a private not-for-profit organizations. Currently, our member of the consortium, almost all the universities in Italy and also all the national agencies for those selected structures. Uh. The main quarter of Cineca is in Bologna, which is in the heart Nation, with the bunch of presence in Milan, in Rome and in Naples, so we are a consultation organization. >> And I also read that you were, are the top 10 out of the top 500 of the world's fastest super computers. That's a pretty big accomplishment. >> Yes. That is a part of our institutional missions, the last 10 to 15 years we have been to say, frequent flyers in the top 10. There been at least two, three systems that have been ranked at the top 10. Apart, the.., whatever would be the meaning of such an advance market, there's a lot of its criticalities. We are well aware. The idea is that we're enabling the scientific discovery, by means of providing the most advanced systems and the co-designing, the most advanced HPC systems to promote and support the, what is the, excellence in science. And that being part of European high-performance computing IT system. That is the case. >> Excellent. Now, talk to me about some of the challenges that Cineca is trying to solve in particular, the Human Brain Project. Talk to us a little bit about that and how you're leveraging high-performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery. >> Um, The Human Brain Project is one of the flagship project that has been co-founded by the European commission and that the participating member states. Is not as another situations that are undertaking, it's definitely a joint collaboration between members states and the European commission. There are two different right now, flagships together with another, that is in progress, which is that the quantum of flagship, the first two flagship abroad that that has been lost. The commission for operation with the participating states has been one on the digraph vein on which also we are participating in directly together with the CNR, is the national business counselor. And the second for which we are core partners of the HPC that is, the Human Brain Project. That, that is a big flagship, one million offer, of newer investment, co-founded by the participating states and that the European commission. The project it's going to set up, in what to do be the, third strategic grant agreement that they will go over the next three years, the good, the complete that the, the whole process. Then we see what is going to happen at Africa. We thought that their would be some others progress offer these big projects. It's project that would combine both the technology issues, like the designing the off high-performance computing systems that meet the requirements of the community and the big challenge, scientific challenges correlated to the physiological functions of the human brain center, including the different farm show survey to do with the behavior of the human brain. A from the pathological point of view, from the physiological point of view, that better understand the could be the way for, for a facing that. Let's say the pathology, some of those are very much correlated with respect to aging, and that it would impact the, the health, the public health systems. Some other that are correlating with what would be the support for the physiological knowledge of the, of the human brains. And finally that they, let me say, technological transfer stuff that represented the knowing off at the physiological, behavior of the human brain. Just to use a sort of metaphor to have happen from the point of view of there computational performance, the human brain is a, a, a, more than Exoscale systems, but with a energy consumption, which is very low, we are talking about some hundreds of Watts. So some hundreds of watts of energy, would provide a an extreme and computational performance. So if would could organized the technology of the high-performance computing in terms of interconnections now we're morphing the computing systems and exploitations of that kind of technologies, in I build a system that it might provide the computational power that would represent a tremendous and tremendous step ahead, in order to facing the big challenges of our base, like energies, personalized medicine, try not to change food for all those kinds of big socioeconomic challenges that we are facing. >> Yes I was reading that besides, sorry Sanzio I was reading that besides the Human Brain Project, there are other projects going on, such as that you mentioned, I'd like to understand how Cineca is working with Dell technologies. You have to translate, as you've mentioned a minute ago, the scientific requirements for discovery into high-performance computing requirements. Talk to me about how you've been doing that with partners like Dell technologies. >> Yes, in particularly in our computing architectures, we had the need to address the capability to facing the data processing involved with backed off the Human Brain Project and general speaking that is backed off the science vendor, that would combine the capability also to provide the cloud access to the system. So by main soft containers technologies and the capability also, to address what would be the creation of a Federation. So Piper problems with people proceeded in a new world. So at the end that the requirements and the terms of reference of the would matter will decline and the terms of a system that would be capable to manage, let's say, in a holistic approach, the data processing, the cloud computing services and the opportunity before for being integrated that in a Federation of HSBC system in Europe's, and with this backed off, that kind of thing, we manage a competitive dialogue procurement processor, I think I the sentence would share together with the different potential technology providers, what would be the visuals and those are the constraints (inaudible) and those other kinds of constraints like, I don't want to say, I mean, environmental kind of constraints and uh, sharing with this back of the technology provider what would it be the vision for this solution, in a very, let's say hard, the competitive dialogue, and at the end, results in a sort of, I don't want to say Darwinian processes, okay. So I mean, the survivors in terms of the different technology providers being Dell that shown the characteristics of the solution that it will be more, let's say compliant. And at the same time are flexible with respect of the combinations of very different constraints and requirements that has been the, the process that has been the outcomes of such a process. >> I like that you mentioned that Darwinian survival of the fittest and that Dell technologies has been, it sounds like a pretty flexible partner because you've got so many different needs and scientific needs to meet for different researchers. Talk to me about how you mentioned that this is a multi-national effort. How does Cineca serve and work with teams not only in Italy, but in other countries and from other institutes? >> Definitely the volume commitment that together with the, European member states is that by means of scientific merits and the peer review process, roughly speaking the arc of the production capacity, would be shared at the European level. That it's a commitment that, that there's been, that there's been a shared of that together with France, Germany, Spain, and, and with the London. So, I mean, our, half of our production capacity, it's a share of that at the European level, where also of course the Italian scientist can apply in the participates, but in a sort of offer emulations and the advanced competition for addressing what it would be the excellence in science. The remaining 50% of our production capacity is for, for the national community and, somehow to prepare and support the Italian community to be competitive on the worldwide scenario on the European and international scenario, uh that setting up would lead also to the agreement at the international level, with respect of some of the options that, that are promoted the progress in a US and in Japan also. So from this point of view, that mean that in some cases also the, access that it would come from researchers the best collaborations and the sharing options with the US researchers their or Japanese researchers in an open space. >> Open space for, it sounds like the Human Brain Project, which the HPC is powering, which has been around since 2013 is really facilitating global collaboration. Talk to me about some of the results that the high-performance computing environment has helped the Human Brain Project to achieve so far. >> The main outcomes that it will be consolidated in the next phase that will be need the by rural SPC that is the Jared undertaking um entities, that has been created for consolidating and for progressing the high-performance computing ecosystem in Europe. It represented by the Federations of high-performance computing systems at European level, there is a, a, an option that, that has been encapsulated and the elaborated inside the human brain flagship project which is called the FEHIPCSE that stand for Federation of a High-Performance Computing System in Europe. That uh provide the open service based on the two concepts on one, one is the sharing of the Heidi at a European level, so it means that the, the high demand of the users or researchers more properly. It's unique and Universal at the European level. That didn't mean better the same, we see identity management, education management with the open, and the access to the Cineca system, to the SARS system in France, to the unique system in, uh Germany to the, Diocese system in a Switzerland, to the Morocco System in a Spain. That is the part related to what will be the federated, the ID management, the others, et cetera, related to what will be the Federation off the data access. So from the point of view, again, the scientific community, mostly the community of Human Brain Project, but that will be open at other domains and other community, make sure that data in a seamless mode after European language, from the technological point of view, or let's say from the infrastructure point of view, very strong up, from the scientific point of view, uh what they think they may not, will be the most of the options is being supported by Cineca has to do with the two specific target. One is the elaboration of the data that are provided by the lands. The laws are a laboratory facility in that Florence. That is one of the four parts, and from the bottom view of the provisions of the data that is for the scattering, the, the data that would come from the mouse brains, that are use for, for (inaudible) And then the second part is for the Mayor scale studies of the cortex of the of the human brain, and that got add-on by a couple of groups that are believing that action from a European level their group of the National Researcher Counsel the CNR, that are the two main outcome on which we are in some out reference high-performance computing facilities for supporting that kind of research. Then their is in some situations they combinations of the performance a, capability of the Federation systems for addressing what will be the simulations of the overall human brain would take a lot of performance challenge simulation with bacteria that they would happen combining that they SPC facility as at European level. >> Right! So I was reading there's a case study by the way, on Cynic that Dell technologies has published. And some of the results you talked about, those that the HPC is facilitating research and results on epilepsy, spinal cord injury, brain prostheses for the blind, as well as new insights into autism. So incredibly important work that you're doing here for the Human Brain Project. One last question Sanzio, for you, what advice would you give to your peers who might be in similar situations that need to, to build and deploy and maintain high-performance computing environments? Where should they start? >> (coughs laughs) I think that at, at a certain point, that specific know how would became sort of a know how that is been, I mean, accumulated and then by some facilities and institutions around the world. There are the, the federal labs in US, the main nation model centers in Europe, the big facilities in Japan. And of course the, the big university facilities in China that are becoming, how do you say, evident and our progressively occupied increasing the space, that to say that that is somehow it, that, that, that the, those institutions would continues collaborate and sharing that there are periods I would expect off what to do, be the top level systems. Then there is a continuous sharing of uh knowledge, the experience best practices with respect off, let's say the technologies transfers towards productions and services and boosterism. Where the situation is big parenta, in the sense that, their are focused what it would be, uh the integration of the high-performance computing technology into their production workflow. And from the point of view, there is the sharing of the experience in order to provide the, a sort of, let's say, spreads and amplifications of the opportunity for supporting innovation. That is part of are solution means, in a Italy but it also, eh, er sort of um, see objective, that is addressed by the European options er supported by the European commission. I think that that sort of (inaudible) supply that in US, the, that will be coming there, sort of you see the max practice for the technology transfer to support the innovation. >> Excellent, that sharing and that knowledge transfer and collaboration. It seems to be absolutely fundamental and the environment that you've built, facilitates that. Sanzio thank you so much for sharing with us, what Cineca is doing and the great research that's going on there, and across a lot of disciplines, we appreciate you joining the program today. Thank you. >> Thank you, it's been a pleasure, thank you very much for the opportunity. >> Likewise, for Sanzio Bassini. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (calming music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DevOps virtual forum. Brought to you by Broadcom. >> Hi guys, welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of DevOps and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where DevOps needs to go. In order to be successful next year. So our guests today are you've seen them all before. Jeffrey Hammond is here the VP and Principal Analyst serving CIO at Forrester. We've also got Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom Enterprise Software Division. And Glyn Martin, the head of QA Transformation at BT. Guys welcome back. Great to have you all three together. >> Hi Lisa. (Serge speaks faintly) >> Good to be here. >> All right. So we're all very socially distanced as we talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with. Jeff, we're going to start with you spiritual colocation. That's a really interesting topic that we've uncovered. But how much of the challenge is truly cultural? And what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you, then Serge, then Glyn, Jeff take it away. >> Yeah I think fundamentally, you can have all the technology in the world. And if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization. You still won't be effective. Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece. Where I did a bunch of research around what made high performance teams software delivery teams high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the Agile Manifesto. Let's take that today. Where developers are on their own in their own offices. if you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy. And they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, and got their teams in the right place. And their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions. Have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that have become the challenge is not. Are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual colocation is so important. Because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a shared purpose. There's a Surgeon I worked together a long, long time ago, so just it's been what, almost 15-16 years, since we worked at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual colocation, between us. because of this shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen in the industry, and that's a really powerful tool to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available to build shared purpose on. To the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual colocation. To the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place. They can be incredibly valuable, especially when we don't have the luxury of physical colocation. Hope that makes sense.(chuckles) >> It does. I should have introduced this last segment as we're all spiritually colocated. All right. So Serge, clearly you're still spiritually colocated with Jeff. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of colocation. The cultural impact and how technology can move it forward? >> Yes, so I think, while I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think it starts with kind of shared purpose, and understanding how individuals teams contribute to kind of a business outcome. What is our shared goals our shared vision with what is it we're trying to achieve collectively. And keeping kind of the line to that. And so it really starts with it Now, the big challenge always is over the last 20 years, especially in large organization has been specialization of roles and functions. And so we all have started to basically measure which we do on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome. Or is it on purpose. We kind of revert that to Okay, what is my database uptime? What is my cycle time? Right. And I think which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens for these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing. In the context of benefiting this business outcomes. So, probably one of my theories experience was to actually witness at one of our large financial institution. Two stakeholders across development and operations staring at the same data. Like which was related to economy changes, test execution results, coverage, official liabilities, and all the overran direction of incidents. And when you start to put these things in context, and represent that in a way that these different stakeholders can look at from their different lens. And they can start to basically communicate, and understand how they jointly or complement to do that kind of common vision or objective. >> And Glyn, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation and the cultural part of technology impact? >> Yeah, I mean I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, the people and culture are the most important thing. Actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you. Who you can work with have the same end goal in mind. And we would constantly found that with our continuing relationship with Broadcom. What it also does, are those tools can accelerate what you're doing and can drive consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BT's Flagship Transformation Program, where we're trying to as it says, simplify the number of system stacks that we have. The number of products that we have, actually at the moment we've got different value streams within that program. Who have got organizational silos who are trying to rewrite the wheel. Who are still doing things manually. So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT. Which is such a complex and very different environment, depending on what area BT you're in. Whether it's consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations. We found that we need tools that can drive that consistency. But also flex to Greenfield Brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as it's a from a number of different aspects. That you have the right partner, and to drive the right culture here, and the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate, They can't do that on their own. But they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do. And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a quite a bit of a buzz phrase. And they're kind of testing well at the moment. But I could talk about things like Continuous Delivery Director to Broadcom tools. And it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own. It allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams around could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of Continuous Delivery Director. But it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >> Thanks, Glyn So we kind of sum that up autonomy, collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics. From your perspective, what are the metrics that matter Jeff? >> Well, I'm going to go right back to what Glyn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to to make decisions with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we looking at. How do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable? That could be sales revenue, it could be Net Promoter Score, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization. Or other teams picking up the services that you've created. One of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys. And then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose. 'Cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey. The value associated with it. And we're all measured on that. There are flow metrics, which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out. From the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it. There are quality metrics, some of the classics or maybe things like defect density or meantime to response. One of my favorites came from a company called Ultimate Software. Where they looked at the ratio of defects found in Production defects found in pre production. And their developers were in fact measured on that ratio and told them that guess what quality is your job too. Not just the test departments group. The fourth level that I think is really important in the current situation that we're in, is the level of engagement in your development organization. We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric. How how full was the parking lot at 9, and how full was it at 5 o'clock. I can't do that anymore, since we're not physically colocated. But what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCCM environment, you can look at the relative rates of churn, you can look at things like well are our developers delivering during longer periods. Earlier in the morning, later in the evening? Are they delivering on the weekends as well. Are those signs that we might be heading toward burnout, because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. So all of those in combination, business value, flow, engagement and quality. I think form the backbone of any sort of metrics program. The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data. And that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say. "How is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing? And then what do we do to remove those blockers to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams, the context that they need to do their job in a way that creates the most value for the customers?" >> Great advice, Jeff. Glyn over to you metrics that matter to you that really make a big impact. And also how do you measure quality kind of following on to the advice that Jeff provided? >> I mean, Jeff provided some great advice. Actually, he talks about value, he talks about flow, both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. But there was a time, listen to a speaker called Mia Kirsten, a couple of months ago, he talked very much around how important flow management is. And remove and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, making software changes. What is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to? So where are those areas where it takes too long. So I think that's a very important thing. For us, it's even more basic than that at the moment. We're on a journey from moving from waterfall to agile. And the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is, with waterfall, the the business had a kind of comfort that everything was tested together, and therefore it's safer. And with agile, there's that kind of how do we make sure that you know, if we're doing things quick, and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, that that's ready to go? Or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence. And some of the metrics around that and how healthy those releases are and actually saying we spend a lot of money, in an investment setting up agile teams training agile teams. Are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly? And are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment. But I think it's also about, generally bringing it all together DevOps. We've got the kind of value ops, AI Ops. How do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions, and making sure that we are delivering the biggest bang for our partners. >> Absolutely biggest bang for the partners. Serge your thoughts. >> Yes I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. These are one of the most important metrics and ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across I highly functional teams is engagements, right? When you see a team that's highly functional, and that's agile, that practices DevOps everyday. They are highly engaged. That definitely true. Now back to you, I think, Jeff's points on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that organizations traditionally have been kind of, setting up benchmarks. Right. So what is a good cycle time? What is a good mean time? What is a good mean time to repair? The problem is that this is very contextual, right? It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. And so one of the things that we really need to evolve as an industry. Is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about are these flow metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric. To the business outcome. So that's one thing. The second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood, is that when you have a bad cycle time or what you perceive as being a bad cycle time or bad quality. The problem is oftentimes like, how do you go and explore why, right? What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics. And not on the I type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. If you look at for instance things like, lead time for instance. It's very common that organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to bad lead time. And so I think that there is reviewing the metrics, there is I think a lot of work that we need to do in terms of classifying this untied PaaS. Back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of Water-Scrum Fall as a key pattern in the industry or anti-patterns. >> Yeah >> But Water Scrum Fall, right. Is the key one right? And you will detect that through kind of a defect rival rates. That's right, that looks like an S curve. And so I think it's the output of the metrics is what do you do with those metrics. >> Right. I'll tell you Serge, one of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is. I think those of us had been in industry for a long time, we know the anti patterns, 'cause we've seen them in our career,(laughs) maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. So hopefully something that we'd see in the future with DevOps tools. 'Cause as a manager that maybe only a 10 year veteran or a 15 year veteran. You may be seeing these anti patterns for the first time, and it would sure be nice to know what to do when they start to pop up.(chuckles) >> That would right? Insight, always helpful. All right guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on the fit one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for. and to put on our agendas. For the next 12 months. Jeff will be back to you. >> I would say, look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see. First of all, as we shift to remote central working, we're unlocking new pools of talent. Where it's possible to implement more geographic diversity. So look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low code tools. To very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers. That agile and DevOps are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative workers with algorithmic capabilities. >> Peanut butter and chocolate. Glyn where do we go from there? What's the one silver bullet that you think that needs to be on the look out for? >> (indistinct) out I certainly agree that low code is next year, we'll see much more low code. We've already started going moving towards more of a SaaS based world but low code also. I think as well for me, we've still got one foot in the kind of cloud camp. We'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last thing for me is, how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of the life cycle When I heard the word scrum for it kind of made me shut it. 'Cause I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment. So we need to get beyond that we need to be releasing changes more frequently into production. And actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production and going straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Yeah, thank you. I haven't got any food analogies unfortunately. (laughs) >> We all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right Serge, Just take us on that sir. What's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas? >> That's interesting, right? So a couple of days ago, we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's all about velocity, right? It's all about we still are perceiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me the key advice is, in order to create kind of this spiritual colocation in order to foster engagement. We have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams. To understand how they're delivering value into allowing everything they do from a metrics to delivery to flow to those metrics. And only with data, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to to restart to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive not just speed, but business outcomes. >> All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me. Today and our guests, I think this was an incredibly valuable, fruitful conversation. And we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually colocate with us today. Guys, thank you. >> Thank you Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Hammond, Serge Lucio and Glyn Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the Broadcom DevOps virtual forum. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Veem on 2020 brought to you by beam. >>Hi buddy. Welcome back to the cubes. Ongoing coverage of Veem on 2020s Veem online 2020 I'm Dave Volante and Rick van overs here as a senior director of product strategy at Veem. Rick, it's always a great pleasure to see you. I wish we could see each other face to face. >>Yeah. You know, it's different this year, but, uh, yeah, it is always great to be on the cube. I think, uh, uh, in 2018 had an eight year gap and it's a N a couple of times we've been back since and yeah, happy to be back on the cube. >>So how's it going with you guys with the online format? I mean, breakouts are big for you cause you're, you're profiling some new products that we're going to get into, how's it all working for you? >>Well, it's been different. It's a good way to explain it in one word different, but the reality is I have a, uh, pardon, the language, a side hustle here, where at Veeam, I've worked with the event team to kind of bring the best content. And for the breakouts, that's an area that I've been working a lot with our speakers and our, some of our partners, external experts, users, and people who have, you know, beaten ransomware and stuff like that. But I've worked really hard to aggregate the content and get the best blend of content. And we kind of have taken an interesting approach where the breakouts are that library of content that we think organizations and the people who attend the event really take away the most. So we've got this full spectrum from R and D deep level stuff to just getting started type of stuff, and really all types of levels in between. And yeah, we want the breakouts to focus on generally available products, right? So I've worked pretty diligently to bring a good spread across the, uh, different products. And then a little secret trick we're doing is that into the summer, we're going to open up new content. So there's this broadcast agenda that we've got publicized, but then beyond that, we're going to sneak in some new content into the summer. >>Well, I'm glad you're thinking that way, because you know, a lot of what a lot of people are doing. There's a church trying to take their physical events and mirror it to the, to the digital or the virtual. And I think so often with physical events, people forget about the afterglow. And so I'm glad you guys are thinking about it upfront. >>Yeah. It has to be a mechanism that we've used it a couple of different ways, one to match how things are going to be released. Right? Cause being, we're always releasing products across the different set. I mean, we have one flagship product, but then the other products have their own cycles. So if something works well for that, we'll put it into the summer library. And then it's also a great opportunity for us to reach deep and get some content from people that we might not have been able to get before. In fact, we had one of our engineers who's based in Australia and great resource, great region, strong market for us, but I can't w if we were to have the in person event, I can't bring somebody from Australia for one session, but this was a great way to bring her expertise to the event without, you know, having the travel burden and different variety of speakers and different varieties of content. So there's ways that we've been able to build on it. But again, the top level word is definitely different, but I feel like it's working for sure. >>So Rick, give us the helicopter view of some of the product areas that we should be really be aware of as it relates to what you guys are doing at Veem on 2020. And then we'll, we'll drill in give us the high level though. >>Yeah. So for people attending the event and online, my advice really is that we're spread across about 75 to 80% of the content is for technical people. 20% of the content in the breakouts is going to be for decision makers or executives, that type. And then within that, the context of the technical content, we want to have probably 10 to 15% being like presenters from our R and D group. So very technical, uh, low level type discussions, highest level architect type stuff, kind of after that generic use cases, a nice and in the middle area, because we have a lot of people that are getting started with our products, like maybe they're new to the office three 65 backup, or they're new to backing up natively in the cloud. We have a lot of contexts around the virtual machine backup and storage integration, all those other great things, but the platform is kind of spread out at Veeam. There's a lot to take in. So the thought is wherever anyone is on their journey with any of the products and not some, that's a hard task to do with a certain number of slots. We want to provide something for everyone at every level. So that's the, that's the helicopter view. >>So let me ask you a couple of follow ups on that. So let's start with office three 65. Now you guys have shared data at this event, uh, talking about that most customers just say, Oh yeah, well, I trust Microsoft to do my backup. Well, of course, as we, well, well know it, backup is one thing, but recovery is everything. And so explain why, uh, what will explain the value that you guys bring? Why can't I just rely on the SAS vendor, uh, to, to do my backup and recovery? >>Well, there's a lot to that question, Dave, the number one thing I'll say is that at Veeam, we have partnerships with Microsoft. You have where HPE, all the household brands of it. And in many of these situations, we've always come into the market with the platform itself, providing a basic backup. I'll give windows, for example, anti backup, right? Yeah. Those, you know, it's there, but there's always a market for more capabilities, more functionality, more portability. So we've taken office three 65 is a different angle for backup. And we lead with the shared responsibility model, Microsoft as well as the other clouds, make it very clear that data classification and that responsibility of data that actually sits 100% with the customer. And so, yes, you can add things to the platform, but if we have organizations where we have things like I need to retain my content forever, or I need a discovery use case. >>And then if you think about broader use cases like one drive for business data, especially with the rapid shift of work from home organizations may not be not so much using the file server, but using things like one drive for business, for file exchanges, right? So having a control plane over that data is, is very important. So we really base it on the shared responsibility and Microsoft is one of our strongest partners. So they are very keen for us to provide solutions that are going to consume and move data around to, to meet customer needs in the cloud and in the SAS environment. For sure. So, you know, it's been a very easy conversation for our customers and it's our fastest growing product as well. So, uh, this, this product is doing great. Uh, I don't have the quarterly numbers, but we just released the mid part of Q4. We just released the newest release, which implemented object storage support. So that's been the big ask for our customers, right? So it's a, it's that product's doing great. >>Yeah. So, you know, that notion of shared responsibility, you hear that a lot in cloud security, you're applying it to cloud data protection, which, you know, security and data protection are now, you know, there's a lot of gray area between them now. Uh, and I think it's, you know, security is a, or data protection is a fundamental part of your security strategy, but that notion of shared responsibility is very important. And one that's oftentimes misunderstood because people hear, Oh, it's in the cloud. Okay. My cloud vendor has got to cover it, but what does, what does that shared responsibility mean? Ultimately, isn't it up to the customer to own the end end result. >>It is. And I look at, especially Microsoft, they classify their software for different ways on prem software, uh, software as a service, the infrastructure as a service. Uh, I forget what the third one is, but they have so many different ways that you can package their software, but in all of them, they put the data classification for the customer and it same for other clouds as well. And when, if I'm an organization today, if I'm running data in a SAS platform, if I am running systems in iOS platforms, in the hyperscale public clouds, that is an opportunity for me to really think about that control plane of the data and the backup and restore responsibility, because it has to be easy to use. It has to be very consumable so that customers can avoid that data loss or be in a situation where the complexity to do a restore is so miserable that they may not even want to go do it. I've actually had conversations with organizations as they come to Veeam. That was their alternative. Oh, it's just too painful to do. Like, why would you even do that? You know, so that, that shared responsibility model across the different data types in the cloud and on-premise well, and SAS models, that's really where we find the conversations go pretty nicely. >>Right. And if it's too complicated, you won't even bother testing it. So I want to ask you something about cloud native. You mentioned cloud native, your cloud native capabilities, um, and I'm, I'm inferring from that, that you basically are not just taking your on prem stack and shoving it into the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the native cloud services. Can you, can you explain what's going on there and maybe some product specifics? >>Sure. So, you know, Veeam has this reputation of number one, VM backup, you know, here in my office, I have posters from all over the years and somewhere down here is number one, VM backup. And that's where we cut our teeth and got our name out there. But now if you're an Azure, if you're an Amazon, we have cloud native backup products available. In fact, the last time you and I spoke was that an Amazon reinvent where we launched the Amazon product. And then last month we launched the Azure product, which provides cloud native backup for Azure. And so now we have this cloud feature parody and those products are going to move very quickly as well. We've had the software as a service product for office three 65, where we keep adding services. And we saw in the general session, we're going to add protection for a new service in office three 65. >>So we're going to continue to innovate around these different areas. And there's also another cloud that we announced a capability for as well. So, you know, the platform at Veem it's growing, and it's amazing to see this happen cause you know, customers are making cloud investments and there's no cloud for all right. So some organizations like this cloud that cloud are a little bit of these two clouds combined. So we have to really go into the cloud with customer needs in mind because there's no one size fits all approach to the cloud, but their data, everybody knows how important that is. >>So to that end though, each, each cloud is going to have a set of native services and you've got to develop specific to that cloud, right? So that you can have the most, the lowest, highest performance, the most efficient, the lowest cost data protection solution backup and recovery possible is that, I mean, taking advantage of those native cloud services is going to be unique for each cloud, right? Because AWS has cloud and Azure cloud. Those are, those are different, you know, technically underneath, is that, is that right? >>You're absolutely right. And the cost models, they have different behaviors across the clouds. In fact, the breakout that I did here at the event with Melissa Palmer, those who are interested in the economics of the cloud should check that out because the cloud is all about consuming those resources. When I look at backup, I don't want backup to be a cost prohibitive insurance policy. Basically I want backup to be a cost effective yet resilient technology that when we're using the cloud, we can kind of balance all these needs. And one of the ways that beam's done that is we've put in cost estimators, which it's not that big of a like flashy part of the user interface, but it's so powerful to customers. The thought is if I want to consume infrastructure as a service in the cloud, and I want to back up via API calls, snapshots to ECE, two instances only nice and high performance, nice and fast. >>But the cost profile of that if I kept them for a year is completely different than if I used object storage. And what we're doing with the Veeam backup for Azure and Amazon products is we're putting those numbers right there in the wizard. So you could say, Hey, I want to keep two years of data. And I have snapshots and I have object storage, totally different cost profiles. And I'll put those costs testaments in there. And you can make egregious examples where it'll be like 10 and 20 X the price, but it really allows customers to get it fast, to get it cost efficient. And more importantly, at the end of the day, have that protection that they need. And that's, you know, that's something that I've been trying to evangelize at this cost. Estimator is a really big deal. >>Yeah. Provides transparency so that you can let the business, you know, drive sort of what the, what the data protection level is as opposed to sort of either, whether it's a one size fit all or you're under protected or overprotected and spending too much, I asked Anton is going to kind of, how do you prioritize it? Because basically his answer was we look at the economics and then ultimately you're giving tools to allow the customer to decide, >>Yeah, you don't want to have that surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. You don't want to have, um, you know, waste in the cloud and Anton's right. The economics are very important. The modeling process that we use is interesting. I had a chat with one of the product managers who is basically in charge of our cloud economic modeling and to the organizations out there. This is a really practical bit is, think about modeling, think about cloud economics, because here's the very important part. If you've already implemented something it's too late and what I mean by that, the economics, if they're not right when you implement it, so you're not modeling ahead of time. Once you implement, you can monitor it all you want, but you're just going to monitor it off the model. So the thought is, this is all a backwards process. You have to go backwards with the economics, with the modeling, and that will lead you to no surprises down the road. For sure. >>I want to ask you about the COVID impact generally, but specifically as it relates to ransomware, I mean, we've had a lot more inquiries regarding ransomware. There's certainly a lot more talk about it in the press. What have you seen, uh, specifically with respect to ransomware since the pandemic and since the lockdown. >>So that's something that's near and dear to my heart on the technology team here at product strategy, everyone has like a little specialization industry specialization. Ransomware's mine. So good ask. So the one thing that sticks out to me a lot is identifying where ransomware comes in and around. I have one data point that indicated around 58 or so percent of ransomware comes in through remote desktop. And the thought here is if we have shifted to remote access and new working models, what really worries me, Dave is when people hustle, when people hurry and the thought here is you can have it right. Or you can have it right now in mid March, we needed to make a move right now. So I worry about UN UN incomplete security models, right? People hurrying to, um, implement and maybe not taking their security, right. Especially when you think about most ransomware can come in through remote desktop. >>I thought fish attacks were the main attack vector, but I had some data points that told me this. So I have been, and I just completed a great white paper that those watching this can go to dot com and download. But the thought here is I just completed a great white paper on tips to beat ransomware and yes, Veeam has capabilities, but here's the logic. Dave. I like to explain it this way, beating ransomware. And we had a breakout that I recorded here at the event, encourage everyone to watch that I had two users share their story of how they beat ransomware with Veem. Two very different ways too. Any product is, or is not necessarily ransomware resilient. It's like going through an audit. And what I mean by that is people ask me all the time is being compliant to this standard or that standard it's 100% dictated how the product's implemented, how the product's audited, same with ransomware. >>It's 100% dictated on how Veem is implemented. And then what's the nature of the exploit. And so I break it down to three simple things. We have to educate. We have to know what threats are out there. We have to know who is accessing, what data. And then the big part of it is the implementation. How have we implemented Veeam? Are we keeping data in immutable buckets in the cloud? Are we keeping data with an air gap? And then three, the remediation when something does happen, how do we go about solving that problem? I talked to our tech support team who deals with it every day and they have very good insights, very good feedback on this phenomena. And that they've helped me shape some of the recommendations I put in the paper. But, uh, yeah, it's a 30 page paper. I don't know if I can summarize it here. That's a long one for me, but, uh, the threats real, and this is something we'll never be done with. Right. I have, I've done two other papers on it and I'm going to have another one soon after that, but we're building stuff into the product. We're educating the market. And, um, you know, we're winning, we're seeing like I had the two customers, um, beat ransomware, great stories. I think I learned so much hearing from someone who's gone through it and that you can find that in the, in the Vermont broadcast for those attending here. >>Well, you've touched on a couple of having them take advantage of the cloud guys who have these immutable mutable buckets that you can, you can leverage. Um, a lot of people don't even don't even know about that. Um, and then, like you say, create an air gap and presumably there's best practice around how often you write to that bucket and how often you create, you know, that air gap you may be, you may be change up the patterns. I don't know other, other thoughts on that. >>Well, I collectively put, I've created a term and uh, nobody's questioning me on it yet, so that's good, but I'm calling it ultra resilient storage. And what I'm referring to is that immutable backup in the cloud. And if we, it becomes a math calculation, you know, if you have one data point in there, that's good. But if you had a week's worth of data points, that's better. If you had a month's worth of data points, that's even better. But of course those cost profiles are going to change. Same thing with tape tapes, a an air gap, removable media, and I go back and forth on this, but some of the more resilient storage snapshot engines can do ultra resilient techniques as well, such as like, uh, pure storage, safe mode and NetApp snap fall. And then the last thing is actually a Veeam technology. It's been out for three, four years now, insider protection. >>It's a completely out of band copy of backup data that that Veeam cloud connect offers. So my thought here is that these ultra resilient types, those are best defense in these situations. And, you know, it's, it's a, it becomes a calculated risk of how much of it do I want to keep, because I want to have the most restore options available. I want to have no data loss, but I also don't want it old. Right. You know, there's a huge decline in value taking your business back a year ago, because that's the last tape you had, for example, I want today's or yesterday's backup if I'm in that type of situation. So I go through a lot of those points in my paper, but I hope that, um, those out there fighting the war on ransomware have the tools. I know they have the tools to win with them. >>Well, it's like we were talking about before and ransomware is a really good example of the, the blurring lines between security and backup and recovery. Of course. Uh, what role do analytics play in terms of providing transparency and identifying anomalous behavior in the whole ransomware equation? >>Well, the analytics are very important and I have to be really kind of be transparent, you know, VMs, backup company, right? We're not a security tool, but this is it's getting awfully close. And the, I don't want to say the long form historical definition of it. Security was something around this thing called a CIA triad, maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. So security tools are really big on the confidentiality and integrity side of it. But on the availability side, that's ravine can come in. So the analytics come in to our play pretty naturally, right? We have, the Veem has had for years now, uh, an alarm that detects abnormal behavior in regards to CPU rights or CPU usage and disk, right IO. Like if there's both of those or abnormally high, that this is what we call possible ransomware activity. Or if we have a incremental backup, that is like 100% change rate, that's a bad sign, right. >>Things like that. And then the other angle is even on PCs desktops like this computer, I'm talking to you now on w we have just simple logic of, once you take a backup eject the drive. So it's offline, right? So analyzing where the threats come from, what kind of behavior they're going to have when we apply it to backup. Veem can have these built in analytic engines that are just transparently there for our customers. There's no deep reeducation necessary to use these, but the thought is we want a very flexible model. That's going to just provide simple ease of use, and then allow that protection with the threatscape to help it help the customers where we can, because no two ransomware threats are the same. That's the other thing. They are so varied in what they do everything from application specific to files. And now there's these new ones that upload data. The ransom is actually a data leak. They're not encrypting the data. They're just the ransom is to take down potentially huge amounts of data leakage, right? So, um, all kinds of threat actors out there for sure. >>You know, it's a last kind of line of questioning here. Rick is, as I've said, a number of times, it's just, it's ironic that we're entering this new decade in this pandemic hits. And everybody talks about the acceleration of certain trends. But if you think about the trends, you know, last decade, it's always performance and costs. We talked a lot about granularity. We talked about, you know, simplicity, you guys expanded your number of use cases. Uh, the, the support, the compatibility matrix, if you will, all those things are sort of things that you've executed on. As you look forward to this coming decade, we talked about cloud. I mean, we were talking about cloud, you know, back in the, in 2008, 2009 time frame, but it was a relatively small portion of the business. Now everybody's talking cloud. So cloud cloud, native DePaul discussion on ransomware and maybe even broader business resiliency, digital transformation, we've been, we've been given lip service in a lot of cases to digital transformation. All of a sudden that's changed. So as you put on, you pull out the telescope and look forward to the trends that are going to drive your thinking in themes, decision making. What do you look toward? >>Well, I think that laser focused on four things, backup solutions for cloud workloads, and there's incredible opportunity there, right? So yes, we have a great Azure story, great Amazon story. And in the keynote, we indicated the next cloud capability, but there's still more, there's more services in the cloud that we need to go after. There's also the sass pocket. We have a great office, three 65 story, but there's other SAS products that we could provide a story for. And then the physical and virtual platforms. I mean, I feel really confident there we've got really good capabilities, but there's always the 1%. And you know, what's in the corner. What's the 1% of the 1%, right? And those are workloads we can continue to go after. But my thought is, as long as we attack those four areas, we're going to be on a good trajectory to deliver on that promise of being that most trusted provider of cloud data management for backup solutions. >>So my thought here is that we're going to just keep adding products. And it's very important to make it sometimes a new product. We don't want to just bolt it on to backup and replication via 11 or be 10 for that, for that matter, because it'll slow it down, right? The cloud native products are going to have to have their own cadence, their own independent, um, development cycles. And they're going to move faster, right? Because they'll need to, so you'll, you'll see us continuing to add new products, new capabilities, and sometimes it'll, it'll intermix, you know, and that's, that's, that's the whole definition of a platform when one product is talking to another, from a management side, a control plane, given customer portability, all that stuff. So we're going to just go after a cloud, virtual, physical SAS, and new products and new capabilities to do it. >>Well, Rick, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Your home studio looks great. You look good. And, but, but nonetheless, hopefully we'll be able to see each other face to face here shortly. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, Dave. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Everybody's Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage of the Mon 2020, the online version of right back, right after this short break.

>> Announcer: From Santa Clara, California, It's theCUBE! Covering Technovation World Pitch Summit 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Now, here's Sonia Tagare. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonia Tagare, and we're here at the Oracle Agnews Campus in Santa Clara, California, covering Technovations World Pitch Summit 2019, a pitch competition in which girls from around the world develop mobile apps in order to create positive change in the world. With us today, we have a Technovation executive, Devin Dillon, who is the Senior Director of Partnerships at Technovation, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> So, before we start, for people who don't know, can you tell us more about Technovation World Pitch? >> Sure, so Technovation World Pitch is sort of the culminating event of a program that we run for young girls around the world. So we invite girls to solve problems in their community. This year, we had over 7,000 girls from 57 countries participating. So lots of girls with lots of ideas. And then this World Pitch is the culmination of that. So it's a competition, and our winners from around the world are invited to come here and share their ideas. And a really exciting part is they get to meet all of their peers that are also working on solving problems and exploring technology, so it's a really great week. >> That's awesome, and can you tell us more about how you got involved in Technovation, and what your role is at the company? >> Sure, so I got involved in Technovation about seven years ago, the program was small. It had just gone international. I think our first year, we had less than 10 countries that were participating, but I really liked the idea of putting education online, accessible to anybody. Anyone can lead it, and solve a problem in their community, and learn a little bit as they were doing that. So that's how I got involved. And then, the program has grown, and we now have this big celebration event. So it looks different, but yeah, that's how I got involved. >> And can you tell me more about your role? >> Sure yes. So, I lead the program. So we have two programs at Technovation. We have Technovation Girls, which this World Summit is the celebrating event for, then we have Technovation Families, which is an educational program for our younger audience. It invites families to solve problems with AI. So my role is really to make sure that our programs are awesome, and helping people to learn. Our resources are good, and we're supporting our leaders around the world. So, our Technovation team never actually leads programs, we invite everyone from around the world to lead the programs, so we do a lot of work to make sure that the quality is there, and that the programs are having a great impact on the kids. >> Wow, and I recently heard that Iridescent became Technovation, so can you tell us more about that change, and why that decision was made? >> Yeah, I'm happy to. So, like I mentioned, we have two flagship programs. They previously had names that were pretty different and our organization was called Iridescent. And Technovation, it was this program, it was like a program that had gotten a lot of global scale and participants. So much so, that when we would say Iridescent, people would recognize us. So we changed our overall organization name to Technovation, and this program is now called Technovation Girls. We challenge girls to solve a problem in their community, using coding, and create a mobile app and a business plan, and then our other program, Technovation Families, challenges families to solve a problem using AI. >> And so I heard the girls had an amazing week. What was the schedule like, who did they get to meet? >> Sure, so it's a busy week. We have flown in girls from all over to be able to see a little bit of the Bay Area, to be able to meet each other, so we have lots of activities. We've had field trips to a lot of tech companies, so we were able to visit Uber, we were able to visit Autodesk, Google Ventures, where the girls are able to see and hear from different mentors in the industry, meet people that are working on technology, ask the questions, and then the other component is we invite the girls to connect with each other. It's a powerful moment where we have a lot of girls representing different cultures and different ideas, so we have fun things like dance parties and opportunities for them to get to know each other also. >> That sounds like a really bonding sleep over. >> Yeah, we try to create that atmosphere. Of course the girls can be shy, and they're coming maybe the first time to the United States. Many of them, English is their third or their fourth language, so it can be a little scary at first, but I think by today, they have been able to hopefully create some lasting friendships. >> That's amazing, and along with the friendships, for the people who do win, what kind of prizes do they get? >> Yeah, so we are giving away this year, over $50,000 worth of prizes. $30,000 of that is scholarships so the students can continue their education since they're young girls, they're able to sort of put that to their education how they would like, and then another option is that they can continue developing their idea. So the girls have crated a mobile app and a business plan, and so they're able to continue developing that if they would like to. >> And do they have mentors guiding them through that? >> Yes, and the exciting thing is, a lot of the mentors are here. So the way that the competition works, is that the girls are working on their idea for many months. They are creating an idea, they're coding, they're learning a lot of different things, they can be creating business plans, and the mentors are really there to support them, to help them build a relationship with someone who's maybe in the tech industry, but also just someone to give encouragement and to help them work together on their problem. >> And have you seen an increase in participant in Technovation over the years? >> Yeah, so this year, like I mentioned, we had 7,000 participants, which is a large year for us. The past two years, we've had great growth, because the program is online, and it's freely accessible. We've really been able to see a lot of take up from different people around the world. >> What countries do you hope to reach to eventually? >> Yeah, good question. Well we had submissions from 57 countries this year, so you know, each year, the submissions kind of change. So we're growing in a lot of really exciting places, I always love to see ideas from all different areas of the world, so tonight, we have some great ideas represented from Nigeria, and Cambodia, and Bolivia, and Canada, like really right there, like lots of corners of the world, so it's always exciting to see. >> And like what criteria do finalists have to pass to make it to this stage? >> Yeah, good question. So they need to submit a lot of different things to be invited to the competition. So the girls really work on pitching their idea, because we know that if you have an idea, not just in technology, you need to be able to understand how to present it and develop you know a business plan, and how you want others to understand what you're doing. They have created a mobile app, so they've coded something. They've probably learned technology or some technology skills, and then, what are our other components. They like develop their idea. So a large part of it is really thinking of an idea, making it batter, developing an actual product, so. >> Wow, and how do you think Technovation is helping the overall girls in tech, women in tech community? >> Yeah, so we're hoping it could get girls interested. So our girls are young, but we really hope to spark an interest and get them involved in the community, hopefully, this is a step on their path. Maybe they will keep taking classes that are technology related, or maybe they'll make some friends that are into technology and form a community. Maybe they'll go to college for this. Maybe some of them will become computer scientists, or engineers, or someone in technology, so it's pretty open, we want to create problem solvers and problem solvers so a lot of different things in our world, including impact technology. >> And going off of that, are there any success stories that really stand out to you? >> Yeah, I'm trying to think of some girls from this year. I think what always stands out to me, from the girls, is that they aren't just building like a mobile app. A lot of them are collaborating with people in their community, with their governments, with different non-profits. So, one of the girls this year, she's working on opioid addiction, and she's been collaborating with a lot of researchers in different universities, she's been thinking about how to create a prototype. Another girl this year is working on supporting farmers and invasive species. So she's been working with different invasive species groups to understand how this program is affecting people, so I think it's always really fun to see how the girls are not just thinking about themselves, or collaborating just on their team, they're really thinking about their community and making an impact with different people and different groups. >> And how do you hope Technovations going to continue to improve and impact more girls? >> Well, I hope we continue to create girls that feel empowered to make the world better. Which you know, is idealistic, but I think that's power of education, is that you help people to think about how to make the world better at the end of the day, and I hope we're giving them those tools. Hope we continue giving them the tools to make their lives and their communities better. >> That's awesome, and thank you so much for being here. >> Devon: Sure, thank you so much. >> This is Devon Dillon, and I'm Sonia Tagare. Thanks for watching The Cube. Stay tuned for more. (upbeat funky music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we've been live all day at Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier. John, this is the second annual Boomi World, the first time theCUBE is here. We've had a great day. Started things off with Michael Dell, who I really found it very telling that Boomi, as a business unit of Dell Technologies, that the CEO of Dell Technologies comes here to kick things off this morning. What is your impression after talking with Michael and some of the folks from Boomi, what is your impression of Boomi? >> Well I think Michael Dell has talked about, he always talks the same talking points, 'cause we've done them so many times, he's got the traditional Dell business, Dell Technologies business foundation, you've got EMC merger of equals, but he's quietly been incubating some key flagship directions. One is VMware, which hasn't been incubated, it is quite a market leader in virtualization, the relationship with Amazon, so VMware is kind of its own, the main flagship. Pivotal has been really core. So he talks about VMware, Pivotal, and the portfolio of Dell Technologies. So I think for me the big takeaway from this event is that Dell Boomi is the third flagship of the kind of armada of Dell's future. So having Michael be here, he could be at VMware in Europe, in Barcelona, he's here. He sees Boomi as a core linchpin to connect into the growth of Pivotal, which has been growing off VMware, and now you've got Boomi coming up the rear, saying, hey, we could actually tie stuff together. And they solve a problem that the average productivity developer or IT person, who doesn't want to write a lot of code, they call it low code, to deliver kind of the assembly and integration of the next generation applications. So net new applications while improving existing. And this is under a category called Integrated Platform as a Service at an enterprise level. So I think Boomi is becoming a strategic part of the Dell playbook. I think that's a big surprise to me because Boomi is known, but their growth has been phenomenal, 80% numbers he said. So this has been kind of a coming out party for Boomi in the sense that this is real. >> I'm curious, though, why do you think, so the Dell Technologies companies Pivotal, RSA, VMware you mentioned, Dell EMC, Virtustream. Why is it that you think that Dell Boomi is a business unit of Dell Technologies and not one of those, part of the seven-eight standalone companies. >> Well they bought them eight years ago and it's evolving, so it's organically grown and it's on a relevant weight. The relevant weight is cloud native, cloud scale with data as a value proposition that's the scale horizontally. So from different database you want to pull that data into realtime. That's a key integration point whether it's APIs for stateless applications or having statuses with data. This is the battleground you're seeing with Kubernetes, you're seeing it with network services at the micro services level, so they solve a big problem. The rest of Dell is just a massively huge portfolio of products that solve the enterprise other problems. So why have 26 vendors, he said, when you can go to Dell and get all the basic things you need but have an enabler for the future. And that is really about having that bridge to the future and that's what Michael wants and that's what Dell's doing is just saying, look it, VMware runs your stuff and a lot of stuff around it Pivotal's going to integrate you in with cloud, cloud-native, cloud-foundry, and do all these things, and Boomi's going to help tie it all together. That's a nice value proposition, that gives customers comfort in my opinion. I think that's a good story and I think Boomi could be a big part of that piece of the puzzle. >> We heard a lot about trust today, we hear a lot about trust, John, at every event, talking about data needs to be trusted, but Dell Technologies, and Dell Boomi as well, as a trusted advisor, you mentioned the growth numbers, I think 80% last quarter that Michael Dell shared this morning. Chris McNabb, the Boomi CEO, also talked about that. But they've also grown this, it's doubled in its second year. It's gotten too big for San Francisco. They have 7,500 plus customers and counting globally. They're adding five new customers a day. One of the things that I heard pervasively throughout the day is how symbiotic Dell Boomi is with their customers, with their employees, and with their partner ecosystem. So they now come and say, with the iPaaS market, fifth year in a row as a leader in the partner MQ, but now they've come out and said today, we want to redefine the I in iPaaS. iPaaS is a well established market, they're now saying, we're going to use intelligence, and I think it was north of almost 30 terabytes of anonymous metadata, and as Michael has said a number of times, companies need to be using their data as a way to identify their competitive advantage, and they're doing that. >> That's a core value proposition and I think Boomi is undervalued in my opinion the way the market sees them because no one has yet valued how important the insights are out of it. Because people are just now starting to operationalize this notion of, well, I can get insights out of a legacy, value critical mission system in a cloud native environment. So these new value propositions that are emerging and Boomi, it's easy to say, hey, on the face of the numbers, okay, the purchase price per customer is low, but the value's high, the value of the data's high, so I think the only thing Boomi's got working against it is its own success could be a problem on the ticket. So there's a lot more revenue around Dell than what Boomi's doing on a straight product basis. They've got a great product market fit, check the box there, that's a great thing. Question is, if I'm a competitor, I could say, oh, I'm going to put them in a box, but they do more. There's so much going on around Boomi that I think Dell's smart in saying, okay, the purchase price that they're going to get in bookings revenue is x, but the value's high enough, that's why the growth is there on the sales side, but the actual contribution to overall Dell is much higher. So I think Boomi could be a very strategic piece of the puzzle for Dell. >> It really sounded like that today from Michael Dell on down. And they came out today and said boldly, Dell Boomi is your transformation partner really carrying on the theme of Dell Technologies World which theCUBE was at just about six months ago which was all about digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation, workforce transformation. That theme at Dell Technologies World of the platform of the possible extended here with Boomi, unlimited possibilities. >> Yeah, I think people look at the cloud and then they try to figure it out and I think it's pretty clear that the SaaS business model shows the scale. But there also used to be an analogy in business where it's kind of like McDonald's or fast food and people always move from station to station. In IT people are now wearing multiple hats so you're going to see that the trend move towards multiple hats, people wearing multiple hats and managing multiple things. Boomi allows that to happen because when they do integration they don't have to go back and fix it. So you can ship it and move on to the next thing which could be another task. So I think the people management side of the culture of DevOps is a big thing. >> And Michael talked about that, the people culture, the change management. That's really challenging. And we asked him to share, well, Dell Technologies now, 34 years after he started his business in his dorm room with $1,000, probably couldn't have imagined it is becoming what it is. But this is an organization that has transformed itself dramatically, and had to transform its people and culture to, I would argue, be the fuel for that digital IT security transformation. >> It's the fuel for the rocket ship, and that's what Dell was talking about. It's very interesting to see how they play it out but I think Boomi's got some upside big time for Dell and I think that the customer traction shows that the data value in integrating fast and having that low code automation is a winning formula. It's in line with where VMware's going, it's in line with what Pivotal's doing, and it's in line with this digital transformation trend. I think that's what they're talking about. >> Well I enjoyed hosting with you today, John. I think it was a really interesting event and I love unpacking things like integration. It's so much more than that, and they did a great job of articulating that. >> We talked about Kubernetes too, when Kubernetes came out on theCUBE too. Always good to get those Kubernetes soundbites. >> We talked about blockchain as well, and how Boomi and partners are enabling customers to really take advantage of a blockchain. They're announcing some support with that. IoT, as Michael said, speaking of boom in Boomi, there's going to be a boom at the edge. Again, that was a theme from Dell Technologies World that came here today, and some of the customers, the last customer we just had on-- >> Yeah, I mean, the thing that I'd say too is Boomi's got this cool vibe going on, but remember Boomi was born in the cloud that means they're cloud native. All their stuff is cloud, so they understand the culture that they're selling into. And I think that gives Dell a cool factor here and very cool and relevant with the trend lines. So I think they've got a good opportunity. Great to host with you, great time. >> Excellent. Well, thanks John. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin for John Furrier from Boomi World 18. Thanks for watching, we'll catch you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and this is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Think 2018, the inaugural event, IBM's consolidated a number of events here, I've been joking there's too many people to count, I think it's between 30 and 40,000 people. Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek is here, she's the president of >> Michelle: Good job. >> Global Marketing, Michelle B-B, for short >> Yes. >> Global Marketing, business solutions at IBM, and John Bobo, who's the managing director of Racing Ops at NASCAR. >> Yes. >> We're going to have, a fun conversation. >> I think it's going to be a fun one. >> Michelle B-B, start us off, why is weather such a hot topic, so important? >> Well, I think as you know we're both about to fly potentially into a snowstorm tonight, I mean weather is a daily habit. 90% of all U.S. adults consume weather on a weekly basis, and at the weather company, which is part of IBM, right, an IBM business, we're helping millions of consumers anticipate, prepare for, and plan, not just in the severe, but also in the every day, do I carry an umbrella, what do I do? We are powering Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, So if you're getting your weather from those applications, you're getting it from us. And on average we're reaching about 225 million consumers, but what's really interesting is while we've got this tremendous consumer business and we're helping those millions of consumers, we're also helping businesses out there, right? So, there isn't a business on the planet, and we'll talk a little bit about NASCAR, that isn't impacted by weather. I would argue that it is incredibly essential to business. There's something like a half a trillion dollars in economic impact from weather alone, every single year here in the U.S. And so most businesses don't yet have a weather strategy, so what's really important is that we help them understand how to take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage. >> Well let's talk about that, how does NASCAR take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage, what are you guys doing, John, with, with weather? >> Oh, it's very important to us, we're 38 weekends a year, we're probably one of the longest seasons in professional sports, we produce over 500 hours of live television just in our top-tier series a year, we're a sport, we're a business, we're an entertainment property, and we're entertaining hundreds of thousands of people live at an event, and then millions of people at home who are watching us over the internet or watching us on television through our broadcast partners. Unlike other racing properties, you know, open-wheeled racing, it's a lot of downforce, they can race in the rain. A 3,500 pound stock car cannot race in the rain, it's highly dangerous, so rain alone is going to have to postpone the event, delay the event, and that's a multi-million dollar decision. And so what we're doing with Weather Channel is we're getting real-time information, hyper-localized models designed around our event within four kilometers of every venue, remember, we're in a different venue every week across the country. Last week we're in the Los Angeles market, next week we're going to be in Martinsville, Virginia. It also provides us a level of consistency, as places we go, and knowing we can pick up the phone and get decision support from the weather desk, and they know us, and they care as much about us as we do, and what we need to do, it's been a big help and a big confidence builder. >> So NASCAR fans are some of the most fanatic fans, a fan of course is short for fanatic, they love the sport, they show up, what happens when, give us the before and after, before you kind of used all this weather data, what was it like before, what was the fan impact, and how is that different now? >> Going back when NASCAR first started getting on television, the solution was we would send people out in cars with payphone money, and they would watch for weather all directions, and then they would call it in, say, "the storm's about ten miles out." Then when it went to the bulky cell phones that were about as big as a bread box, we would give them to them and then they would be in the pullover lane and kind of follow the storm in and call Race Control to let us know. It has three big impacts. First is safety, of the fans and safety of our competitors through every event. The second impact is on the competition itself, whether the grip of the tires, the engine temperature, how the wind is going to affect the aerodynamics of the car, and the third is on the industry. We've got a tremendous industry that travels, and what we're going to have to do to move that industry around by a different day, so we couldn't be more grateful for where we're able to make smarter decisions. >> So how do you guys work together, maybe talk about that. >> Well, so, you know, I think, I think one of the things that John alluded to that's so important is that they do have the most accurate, precise data out there, right, so when we talk about accuracy, a single model, or the best model in the world isn't going to produce the best forecast, it's actually a blend of 162 models, and we take the output of that and we're providing a forecast for anywhere that you are, and it's specific to you and it's weighted differently based on where you are. And then we talk about that precision, which gets down to that four kilometer space that John alluded to that is so incredibly important, because one of the things that we know is that weather is in fact hyper-local, right, if you are within two kilometers of a weather-reporting station, your weather report is going to be 15% more accurate. Now think about that for a minute, analytics perspective, right, when you can get 15% more accuracy, >> Dave: Huge. >> You're going to have a much better output, and so that precision point is important, and then there's the scale. John talks about having 38 race weekends and sanctioning 1,200 races, but also we've got millions of consumers that are asking us for weather data on a daily basis, producing 25 billion forecasts for all of those folks, again, 2.2 billion locations around the world at that half a kilometer resolution. And so what this means is that we're able to give John and his Racing Operations Team the best, most accurate forecast on the planet, and not just the raw data, but the insight, so what we've built, in partnership with Flagship, one of our business partners, is the NASCAR Weather Track, and this is a race operations dashboard that is very specific to NASCAR and the elements that are most important to them. What they need to see right there, visible, and then when they have a question they can call right into a meteorologist who is on-hand 24/7 from the Wednesday leading up to a race all the way till that checkered flag goes down, providing them with any insight, right, so we always have that human intelligence, because while the forecast is great you always want somebody making that important decision that is in fact a multi-million dollar one. >> John, can you take us through the anatomy of how you get from data to insight, I mean you got to, it's amazing application here, you got the edge, you got the cloud, you got your operations center, when do you start, how do you get the data, who analyzes the data, how do you get to decision making? >> Yeah, we're data hogs in every aspect of the sport, whether it's our cars, our events, or even our own operations. We get through Flagship Solutions, and they do a fantastic job through a weather dashboard, the different solutions. We start getting reports on Monday for the week ahead. And so we're tracking it, and in fact it adds some drama to the event, especially as we're looking at the forecast for Martinsville this upcoming weekend. We work closely with our broadcast partners, our track partners, you know, we don't own the venues of where we go, we're the sports league, so we're working with broadcast, we're working with our track venues, and then we're also working with everyone in the industry and all our other official sponsors, and people that come to an event to have a great time. Sometimes we're making those decisions in the event itself, while the race is going on, as things may pop up, pop-up storms, things may change, but whether it's their advice on how to create our policy and be smarter about that, whether it's the real-time data that makes us smarter, or just being able to pick up a phone and discuss the various multi-variables that we see occurring in a situation, what we need to do live, to do, and it's important to us. >> So, has it changed the way, sometimes you might have to cancel an event, obviously, so has it changed the way in which you've made that decision and communicate to your, to your customers, your fans? >> Yeah, absolutely, it's made a lot of us smarter, going into a weekend. You know, weather is something everybody has an opinion about, and so we feel grateful that we can get our opinion from the best place in the country. And then what we do with that is we can either move an event up, we can delay an event, and it helps us make those smarter decisions, and we never like to cancel an event cause it's important to the competition, we may postpone it a day, run a race on a Monday or Tuesday, but you know a 10, 11:00 race on a Monday is not the best viewership for our broadcast partners. So, we're doing everything we can to get the race in that day. >> Yeah so it's got to be a pretty radical condition to cancel a race, but then. >> Yes, yeah. >> So what you'll do is you'll predict, you'll pull out the yellow flag, everybody slows down, and you'll be able to anticipate when you're going to have to do that, is that right, versus having people, you know. >> Right. >> Calling on the block phones? >> Or if we say, let's start the race two hours early, and that's good for the track, it's good for our broadcast partners, and we can get the race in before the bad weather occurs, we're going to do that. >> Okay, and then, so, where are you taking this thing, Michelle, I mean, what is John asking you for, how are you responding, maybe talk about the partnership a little bit. >> Well, you know, yes, so I, you know the good news is that we're a year into this partnership and I think it's been fantastic, and our goal is to continue to provide the best weather insights, and I think what we will be looking at are things like scenario plannings, so as we start to look longer-range, what are some of the things that we can do to better anticipate not just the here and now, but how do we plan for scenarios? We've been looking at severe weather playbooks too, so what is our plan for severe weather that we can share across the organization? And then, you know, I think too, it's understanding potentially how can we create a better fan experience, and how can we get some of this weather insight out to the fans themselves so that they can see what's going to happen with the weather and better prepare. It's, you know, NASCAR is such a tremendous partner for us because they're showcasing the power of these weather insights, but there isn't a business on the planet that isn't impacted, I mean, you know we're working with 140 airlines, we're working with utility companies that need to know how much power is going to be consumed on the grid tomorrow, they don't care as much about a temperature, they want to know how much power is going to be consumed, so when you think about the decisions that these companies have to make, yes the forecast is great and it's important, but it really is what are the insights that I can derive from all of that data that are going to make a big difference? >> Investors. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Airlines. >> Airlines, utility companies, retailers. >> Logistics. >> Logistics, you know, if you think about insurance companies, right, there's a billion dollars in damage every single year from hail. Property damage, and so when you think about these organizations where every single, we just did this great weather study, and I have to get you a copy of it, but the Institute of Business Value at IBM did a weather study and we surveyed a thousand C-level executives, every single one of them said that weather had an impact on at least one revenue metric, every single, 100%. And 93% of them said that if they had better weather insights it would have a positive impact on their business. So we know that weather's important, and what we've got to do is really figure out how we can help companies better harness it, but nobody's doing it better than these guys. >> I want to share a stat that we talked about off-camera. >> Sure. >> 'Cause we all travel, I was telling a story, my daughter got her flight canceled, very frustrating, but I like it because at least you now know you can plan at home, but you had a stat that it's actually improved the situation, can you share that? >> Right, yeah, so nobody likes to have their flights canceled, right, and we know that 70% of all airline delays are due to weather, but one of the things we talked about is, you know, is our flight going to go out? Well airlines are now operating with a greater degree of confidence, and so what they're doing is they trust the forecast more. So they're able to cancel flights sooner, and by doing so, and I know nobody really likes to have their flight canceled, but by doing so, when we know sooner, we're now able to return those airlines to normal operations even faster, and reduce cancellations in total by about 11%. That's huge. And so I think that when you look at the business impact that these weather insights can have across all of these industries, it's just tremendous. >> So if you're a business traveler, you're going to be better off in the long run. >> That's right, I promise. >> So John I have to ask you about the data science, when IBM bought the weather company a big part of the announcement was the number of data scientists that you guys brought to the table. There's an IOT aspect as well, which is very important. But from a data science standpoint, how much do you lean on IBM for the data science, do you bring your own data scientists to the table, how to they collaborate? >> No no, we lean totally on them, this is their expertise. Nobody's going to be better at it in the world than they are, but, you know, we know that at certain times past data may be more predictive, we know that at different times different data sets show different things and they show so much, we want to have cars race, we want to concentrate on officiating a race, putting on the bet entertainment we can for sports fans, it's a joy to look at their data and pick up the phone and not have to figure this out for myself. >> Yeah, great. Well John, Michelle, thanks so much for coming. >> Thank you. >> I'll give you the last word, Michelle, IBM Think, the weather, make a prediction, whatever you like. >> Well, I just have to say, for all of you who are heading home tonight, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, so good luck there. And if you haven't, this is the one thing I have to say, if you haven't had the opportunity to go to a NASCAR race, please do so, it is one of the most exciting experiences around. >> Oh, and I want to mention, I just downloaded this new app. Storm Radar. >> Oh yes, please do. >> Storm radar. So far, I mean I've only checked it out a little bit, but it looks great. Very high ratings, 13,600 people have rated it, it's a five rating, five stars, you should check it out. >> Michelle: I love that. >> Storm Radar. >> John: It is good isn't it. >> And just, just check it out on your app store. >> So, thanks you guys, >> Michelle: Love that. Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate it. And thank you for watching, we'll be right back right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018. (light jingle)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube. Covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017. This is the Cube, a flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the host of the Cube. Our next guess is Lima Rice, who's the chief data officer Global Enterprise Data Analytics for Allegis Group. Salema, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> So you won the Informatica Innovation Award Monday night. Congratulations. >> Salema: Thank you. >> You're also a chief data officer, so we love to have conversations with because really, what does that mean? (laughing) You're the chief of everything now. Data's at the center, you're like the heart surgeon of the organization. What was the award for? Tell us a little bit about Allegis Group. >> Sure. So the award was really about how we're innovating with data. So for us, it's really about using data as an asset and how we really want to transform our company the way that we transformed the industry almost 30 years ago. So we've really partnered with Informatica to build out our Master Data Management, data as a service, data quality, everything that would help us to find the right person for the right position at the right time. >> Talk about what you guys do at Allegis Group and how it fits into your parent company. A lot of folks, you guys are very large, but tell us a little bit about your firm. >> Sure. So Allegis Group is the largest talent solution company in the world, largest privately held one. We have almost 450,000 contract employees worldwide. We have over 500 offices in 53 countries that we service. Our two flagship companies are Tech Systems and Aerotech, which make up probably a little over 75% of our organization. >> So you guys match talent that's in your network with opportunities that they are fit for. >> That's correct, for most of the operating. For Tech Systems and Aerotech, which makes up that large portion, that's exactly what they do. Then we have service organizations and we have managed service programs and vendor management solutions and other operating companies that service other types of industries. >> You mentioned as we were getting started that you use data as a competitive strategy weapon, if you will, key asset. >> Absolutely. >> I kind of weaved in competitive strategy. If you're doing well, it's also competitive strategy. >> Right. >> If you're successful. That's the key conversation here at Informatica World this year and in the industry worldwide as they look at the assets differently. It's not just an accounting thing. Most CFOs know where the plant and equipment are, the depreciation schedule, itemization schedule, all that stuff is kind of like in Financial 101. Data now is coming in as an asset where sometimes they don't even know where the data is, that's one problem. How are you looking at that? Because take us through what that means to make data as the asset, and how do you wrangle it in, how do you get your hands on it so to speak, metaphorically speaking, and then, also, how do you deploy it as an asset? How does it get paid back to the company? >> So that's a lot of questions in there. I'll start with, we believe that being able to ingest any data from anywhere in any format and use that in order to enable our producers which are our recruiters and our account managers to make better, faster decisions and really reduce our risk is a way that we can help produce and make quality, fact-based decisioning. So it all starts with great quality data. When you think about the journey that somebody goes through of getting a job, there's probably not, maybe two other times in your life that are more traumatic, right? So, birth, death, and you know? >> John: I know. >> Getting married, maybe? >> John: That too. >> And changing careers, right? So we try to use data and we try to make the best out of each situation so that people feel like they're really becoming part of our Allegis family and not just taking a job. >> Or a piece, a resume that's on file so to speak. >> Salema: That's right. >> Take us through an example of a use case that someone could relate to with you guys or applying data and the benefit to you guys and your customer. >> So at any given time, we have roughly 55 million resumes that we're parsing through and trying to identify and make the perfect search and match for our customers. And that's really the core part of our business. >> 55 million. >> 55 million resumes. (chuckling) So within that search and match process, it's really important that my team help enable that search and match team with good quality data so that, when you think about, if you have bad data, you're going to make bad decision matching rules. And so the better quality the data, the better we can help that team. >> I mean, everyone's had an experience where they've gotten an email or something where you can see some sort of form was inserted Dear Placeholder, my name, they didn't insert my name. That's just a random example, but that's the kind of example where it's not personalized. It's not a fit for me. I'm like, hey, I'm a machine, you're talking to me, I'm a person, I instantly delete it if it's not already in my spam folder. >> Right. >> Similarly with your, it's a high touch and again, it's intimate-- >> Very much so. >> Very intimate to the user. How will you guys doing that personalization and what's the data angle on that? >> That's very important to us, actually. So when our founders created the company almost 30 years ago, they made three promises. They made a promise to the customer that they would work harder than any other vendor ever worked for them. They wouldn't stop until they filled that rack. To the consultants coming in, they made a promise that they'd never just sling their resumes. That they would get to know them intimately. They would find out their likes, their dislikes, what are things that they want to do to make a life? And then to the people working in-house, they promised that if you would work harder than you ever thought was possible, the company would pour into them and those three things are still the core value of what we do today. So while our competition looks very different today than it used to, I mean, for probably 20 years our competition looked exactly like us. The same model, the same comp model, everything. Until about four years ago, and we started seeing competition that had no brick and mortar, that has no recruiters. We have 25,000 recruiters, we have 500 offices. >> Where was the competition going? All online automated? >> They're going algorithm, so they're going bionic recruitment. The thing for us is that that relationship is what really sets us apart. The relationship means that much to us that we want to use data to enable our recruiters and enable our producers so that they can become more talented advisors and career coaches. >> You know, there's two things that jump in my head. One is, you don't want to be a slave to the algorithm. >> That's right. >> Or slave to process, you want the process to work for you. >> Absolutely. >> The second one is, we always talk about the start-up community and growing companies is that you always hear people, "Oh, he and she is a good fit." You know, being a good fit for a job really is key because you could be in a job and be unhappy and no one wins. >> That's right. >> So getting the fit is critical. So you guys are using humans with machines-- >> That's right. >> Together so you're making the data work for the human process which is a hybrid. >> That's right. We look at it as we use data to have a competitive advantage by empowering our producers and really using that combination of human touch and technology to deliver the best customer experience. >> Okay, talk about the marketplace. As you look back, and you notice your Informatica customer, we'll get to that in a second, but there's a lot of solutions out there. People are peddling software. You got to be kind of a skeptic, but you don't want to miss the wave. >> Salema: That's right. >> The data wave, that that's something you obviously as a Chief Data Officer. So you got to squint through the BS of the fog or the smokescreens that are out there. How do you tell, well first of all, what is the current landscape from your perspective? What's the right solutions that you see emerging out of this new modern era of data at the center? With software, with algorithms, and obviously mixed with humans. What's the big industry trend that you like, and what don't you like? >> Yeah, I love what Informatica's doing. I love that they're combining the best of artificial intelligence and machine learning into every application that they create. That's really critical to us, and I think to every company is we always say as we're teaching our children, if you learn from your own mistakes, you'll be smart. But if you can learn from the mistakes of others, you're going to be a genius. Well, when we make mistakes, if our applications can learn from them, but what if those applications can learn from all the customers and from the information that they're putting in? So Informatica embedding AI with Claire now, I think is genius. I think that it's going to set them apart and really set their customers apart. So that's why we like partnering with them. >> You mentioned data quality. It's one of my favorite topics, and I always talk about dirty data, it's bad for you. Clean data, good data, is really instrumental. >> Salema: That's right. >> How are you guys refreshing the data? Someone from Informatica was on, talking about heartbeat of data as the, but also that implies the heart is a critical organ so you need a surgeon for that, heart surgery. But sometimes, data hygiene. You need a data hygienist. So there's a spectrum of data interaction points. What's your thoughts on data quality? What are the key things you keep on top of to keep the data high quality? >> It's really important to us. We use, so if you think about one of the things that makes a great match for somebody, it's about the proximity to your position. So making sure that the addresses are clean. We use Informatica's data as a service. And we do all world geo lat long, and we do Address Doctor and address verification. Email verification is big in our business. Phone number cleansing, and then just overall making sure that we have a single golden record. If you think about somebody like me, I started with the company in 1998 as a consultant. So being out there as a consultant for 23 years and then coming in-house, all of my data from my maiden name still exists in our systems. So really, it's about not just cleansing good to bad, but making sure that you're creating that golden record of a person so somebody on LinkedIn might just put their first initial or on any third party system and knowing that those are all still the same person and making sure that we're connecting the right people is really important to us. >> You bring up such good points I don't even think about. Most people don't think about. But one of the most satisfying things about a job is the commute. I live in the Bay Area here. (laughing) If I'm in East Bay and I've got to go to Palo Alto, that's a nightmare. But that depends on the opportunity, right? So that's a blend. And the other one is the role of new data. So you mentioned LinkedIn. So LinkedIn seems to be a contextual resume, and in short term social network, which they're doing a decent job with. But that's more data. Reputation's super important in the world you're in. >> That's right, right. >> How are you guys looking at that? Because I can see how you guys got the blend of machines and humans, that's nice. Business philosophy's awesome. How do you guys get more reputation data points, too? Look for those blind spots. >> Sure. Well one of the things we do is by taking the person's information. One of the things that I think sets us apart from our competition is that we actually have the actuals. So if somebody, how they performed, how long they performed on a position for a lot of our consultants, that's information that we've had in our systems for 20, 30 years. So having the actual data to compare against what people are saying now makes a big difference. It's something our competition can't go out and buy. >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's just so interesting a world you're in. You're like in the cross hairs of a lot of moving waves. Look at the HR world is changing significantly from the world I live in in tech, for instance, has been a big thing and making sure people are being promoted. And the old way of doing HR is like, processes are kind of broken but the tools are available. So there's a whole dynamic going on in the future of work that's overlaying on top of your job. How are you dealing with that? >> It's very difficult. We use a lot of natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to really look at people and almost in some ways predict their level of thought leadership. So it's not enough any more to say, "I have those skills." It's can they do more than the skill we're hiring for and are they really going to be able to come in here and be that curious person, that problem solver, right? We can teach people tools. How do you teach somebody to be a problem solver? >> I can almost imagine Claire and some of these automated intelligences, I call it AIs. To me, it's automated intelligence. AIs don't really exist, I mean Google's probably about. Neural networks that teach neural networks, c'mon. >> Salema: Right. >> That's 1980s. But the augmentation is the key, and you think about what you're doing is you almost want the system to be working for the user. So instead of HR, you flip it around. So the HR should be notified that, "Hey, Salema needs a promotion right now. "She's peaked, she's been growing." Now new openings are coming up. Rather than trying to have the review, have the end user fill out their performances, having an ongoing performance track is probably pretty key. >> Yeah, it's something that we look at in our applicant tracking systems and how we keep track of the people that are out there working for our clients and the feedback that we get. Survey information is really important to us, both from our customers and from our consultants. So we use that to help them grow, and I mentioned earlier, one of the things that we tried really hard is coming to work for Allegis is about coming to work for a family where you're not just making a living, but you're making a life. >> Alright, final question, well, two final questions. But I'll get your thoughts on the show, that's a little bit of an easier question. The pointed question here, relative to what you're doing is, the world now with Cloud and data is about scale. And one of the things that's interesting about what you guys are doing at your work is it's pretty large scale. You mentioned 55 million people and beyond that. A lot of folks have to operate now at a higher level of scale. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice to other practitioners out there that have to start thinking differently in terms of order of magnitude scale. Just mindset, what advice would you share with folks on the scale question? >> I would say collect the data. Collect all the data you create as an organization. Collect everything, and then over time, connect it. Connect the dot. I often say collect it and we'll connect it. And I think that start small, right? I mean, when you don't want to boil the ocean, but collecting the data with the tools that we have today with the big data appliances, we use Cloudera, Informatica, by bringing all of that data into our enterprise data hub, then as those business problems exist and we can slowly start to help the organization by being those problem solvers. >> Awesome, great success story. Final question, word for you is, what's the show like? For the folks watching? What's the experience like, what's the vibe? >> Salema: At Informatica World? >> Informatica World here in San Francisco? >> It's been amazing. It's full of energy like the opening yesterday had my heart racing. It's really been a great event. It's a lot smaller than some of the ones that I think people are accustomed to coming to. And because of that, you get more of that personal touch. The classrooms aren't so big that you can't do a question and answers. >> John: It's very intimate. You get to meet the executives, they're very transparent. >> Yeah, absolutely. And really just see where it's going. And this isn't the kind of thing where you're seeing something that's going to be here years from now. You're seeing what's going to be released weeks from now. >> You're happy with Informatica? They've done a good job with the product? >> Absolutely. I love Informatica. I love our partnership with them. I mentioned for me, it's about, they have a seat at our table, and they help us solve problems and things where we didn't think they were possible, and they really help us identify what those things are and how we can resolve them. >> What do you think about their transformation? >> I love it. I absolutely love it. I love all of the buzz words around here, and I even love the new logo. I think it's great, it's full of energy. >> John: Salema Rice, thanks so much for spending the time here. >> Absolutely. >> Inside the Cube, sharing her experiences as an industry practitioner also large scale. Really using data as an asset, that is the theme here. And of course, we believe at the Cube. We're very data-driven as well, software-defined. And that's the future. Salema, thank you so much, it's the Cube. More live coverage here in San Francisco with the Cube after this short break. I'm John Furrier, stay with us.

>> Announcer: Live from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit Spring 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit Spring 2017. It's a mouthful, it's 170 people here, all high-level CXOs learning about data, and it's part of an ongoing series that IBM is doing around chief data officers and data, part of a big initiative with Cognitive and Watson, I'm sure you've heard all about it, Watson TV if nothing else, if not going to the shows, and we're really excited to have the drivers behind this activity with us today, also Peter Burris from Wikibon, chief strategy officer, but we've got Caitlin Lepech who's really driving this whole show. She is the Communications and Client Engagement Executive, IBM Global Chief Data Office. That's a mouthful, she's got a really big card. And Cortnie Abercrombie, who I'm thrilled to see you, seen her many, many times, I'm sure, at the MIT CDOIQ, so she's been playing in this space for a long time. She is a Cognitive and Analytics Offerings leader, IBM Global Business. So first off, welcome. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> Thanks, always a pleasure on theCUBE. It's so comfortable, I forget you guys aren't just buddies hanging out. >> Before we jump into it, let's talk about kind of what is this series? Because it's not World of Watson, it's not InterConnect, it's a much smaller, more intimate event, but you're having a series of them, and in the keynote is a lot of talk about what's coming next and what's coming in October, so I don't know. >> Let me let you start, because this was originally Cortnie's program. >> This was a long time ago. >> 2014. >> Yeah, 2014, the role was just starting, and I was tasked with can we identify and start to build relationships with this new line of business role that's cropping up everywhere. And at that time there were only 50 chief data officers worldwide. And so I-- >> Jeff: 50? In 2014. >> 50, and I can tell you that earnestly because I knew every single of them. >> More than that here today. >> I made it a point of my career over the last three years to get to know every single chief data officer as they took their jobs. I would literally, well, hopefully I'm not a chief data officer stalker, but I basically was calling them once I'd see them on LinkedIn, or if I saw a press announcement, I would call them up and say, "You've got a tough job. "Let me help connect you with each other "and share best practices." And before we knew, it became a whole summit. It became, there were so many always asking to be connected to each other, and how do we share best practices, and what do you guys know as IBM because you're always working with different clients on this stuff? >> And Cortnie and I first started working in 2014, we wrote IBM's first paper on chief data officers, and at the time, there was a lot of skepticism within our organization, why spend the time with data officers? There's other C-suite roles you may want to focus on instead. But we were saying just the rise of data, external data, unstructured data, lot of opportunity to rise in the role, and so, I think we're seeing it reflected in the numbers. Again, first summit three years ago, 30 participants. We have 170 data executives, clients joining us today and tomorrow. >> And six papers later, and we're goin' strong still. >> And six papers later. >> Exactly, exactly. >> Before we jump into the details, some of the really top-level stuff that, again, you talked about with John and David, MIT CDOIQ, in terms of reporting structure. Where do CDOs report? What exactly are they responsible for? You covered some of that earlier in the keynote, I wonder if you can review some of those findings. >> Yeah, that was amazing >> Sure, I can share that, and then, have Cortnie add. So, we find about a third report directly to the CEO, a third report through the CIO's office, sort of the traditional relationship with CIOs, and then, a third, and what we see growing quite a bit, are CXOs, so functional or business line function. Originally, traditionally it was really a spin-off of CIO, a lot of technical folks coming up, and we're seeing more and more the shift to business expertise, and the focus on making sure we're demonstrating the business impact these data programs are driving for our organization. >> Yeah, it kind of started more as a data governance type of role, and so, it was born out of IT to some degree because, but IT was having problems with getting the line of business leaders to come to the table, and we knew that there had to be a shift over to the business leaders to get them to come and share their domain expertise because as every chief data officer will tell you, you can't have lineage or know anything about all of this great data unless you have the experts who have been sitting there creating all of that data through their processes. And so, that's kind of how we came to have this line of business type of function. >> And Inderpal really talked about, in terms of the strategy, if you don't start from the business strategy-- >> Inderpal? >> Yeah, on the keynote. >> Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> You are really in big risk of the boiling the ocean problem. I mean, you can't just come at it from the data first. You really have to come at it from the business problem first. >> It was interesting, so Inderpal was one of our clients as a CEO three times prior to rejoining IBM a year ago, and so, Cortnie and I have known him-- >> Express Scripts, Cambia. >> Exactly, we've interviewed him, featured him in our research prior, too, so when he joined IBM in December a year ago, his first task was data strategy. And where we see a lot of our clients struggle is they make data strategy an 18-month, 24-month process, getting the strategy mapped out and implemented. And we say, "You don't have the time for it." You don't have 18 months to come to data, to come to a data strategy and get by and get it implemented. >> Nail something right away. >> Exactly. >> Get it in the door, start showing some results right away. You cannot wait, or your line of business people will just, you know. >> What is a data strategy? >> Sure, so I can say what we've done internally, and then, I know you've worked with a lot of clients on what they're building. For us internally, it started with the value proposition of the data office, and so, we got very clear on what that was, and it was the ability to take internal, external data, structured, unstructured, and pull that together. If I can summarize it, it's drive to cognitive business, and it's infusing cognition across all of our business processes internally. And then, we identified all of these use cases that'll help accelerate, and the catalyst that will get us there faster. And so, Client 360, product catalog, et cetera. We took data strategy, got buy-in at the highest levels at our organization, senior vice president level, and then, once we had that support and mandate from the top, went to the implementation piece. It was moving very quickly to specify, for us, it's about transforming to cognitive business. That then guides what's critical data and critical use cases for us. >> Before you answer, before you get into it, so is a data strategy a means to cognitive, or is it an end in itself? >> I would say it, to be most effective, it's a succinct, one-page description of how you're going to get to that end. And so, we always say-- >> Peter: Of cognitive? >> Exactly, for us, it's cognitive. So, we always ask very simple question, how is your company going to make money? Not today, what's its monetization strategy for the future? For us, it's coming to cognitive business. I have a lot of clients that say, "We're product-centric. "We want to become customer, client-centric. "That's our key piece there." So, it's that key at the highest level for us becoming a cognitive business. >> Well, and data strategies are as big or as small as you want them to be, quite frankly. They're better when they have a larger vision, but let's just face it, some companies have a crisis going on, and they need to know, what's my data strategy to get myself through this crisis and into the next step so that I don't become the person whose cheese moved overnight. Am I giving myself away? Do you all know the cheese, you know, Who Moved My Cheese? >> Every time the new iOS comes up, my wife's like-- >> I don't know if the younger people don't know that term, I don't think. >> Ah, but who cares about them? >> Who cares about the millenials? I do, I love the millenials. But yes, cheese, you don't want your cheese to move overnight. >> But the reason I ask the question, and the reason why I think it's important is because strategy is many things to many people, but anybody who has a view on strategy ultimately concludes that the strategic process is what's important. It's the process of creating consensus amongst planners, executives, financial people about what we're going to do. And so, the concept of a data strategy has to be, I presume, as crucial to getting the organization to build a consensus about the role the data's going to play in business. >> Absolutely. >> And that is the hardest. That is the hardest job. Everybody thinks of a data officer as being a technical, highly technical person, when in fact, the best thing you can be as a chief data officer is political, very, very adept at politics and understanding what drives the business forward and how to bring results that the CEO will get behind and that the C-suite table will get behind. >> And by politics here you mean influencing others to get on board and participate in this process? >> Even just understanding, sometimes leaders of business don't articulate very well in terms of data and analytics, what is it that they actually need to accomplish to get to their end goal, and you find them kind of stammering when it comes to, "Well, I don't really know "how you as Inderpal Bhandari can help me, "but here's what I've got to do." And it's a crisis usually. "I've got to get this done, "and I've got to make these numbers by this date. "How can you help me do that?" And that's when the chief data officer kicks into gear and is very creative and actually brings a whole new mindset to the person to understand their business and really dive in and understand, "Okay, this is how "we're going to help you meet that sales number," or, "This is how we're going to help you "get the new revenue growth." >> In certain respects, there's a business strategy, and then, you have to resource the business strategy. And the data strategy then is how are we going to use data as a resource to achieve our business strategy? >> Cortnie: Yes. >> So, let me test something. The way that we at SiliconANGLE, Wikibon have defined digital business is that a business, a digital business uses data as an asset to differentially create and keep customers. >> Caitlin: Right. >> Does that work for you guys? >> Cortnie: Yeah, sure. >> It's focused on, and therefore, you can look at a business and say is it more or less digital based on how, whether it's more or less focused on data as an asset and as a resource that's going to differentiate how it's business behaves and what it does for customers. >> Cortnie: And it goes from the front office all the way to the back. >> Yes, because it's not just, but that's what, create and keep, I'm borrowing from Peter Drucker, right. Peter Drucker said the goal of business is to create and keep customers. >> Yeah, that's right. Absolutely, at the end of the day-- >> He included front end and back end. >> You got to make money and you got to have customers. >> Exactly. >> You got to have customers to make the money. >> So data becomes a de-differentiating asset in the digital business, and increasingly, digital is becoming the differentiating approach in all business. >> I would argue it's not the data, because everybody's drowning in data, it's how you use the data and how creative you can be to come up with the methods that you're going to employ. And I'll give you an example. Here's just an example that I've been using with retailers lately. I can look at all kinds of digital exhaust, that's what we call it these days. Let's say you have a personal digital shopping experience that you're creating for these new millenials, we'll go with that example, because shoppers, 'cause retailers really do need to get more millenials in the door. They're used to their Amazon.coms and their online shopping, so they're trying to get more of them in the door. When you start to combine all of that data that's underlying all of these cool things that you're doing, so personal shopping, thumbs up, thumb down, you like this dress, you like that cut, you like these heels? Yeah, yes, yes or no, yes or no. I'm getting all this rich data that I'm building with my app, 'cause you got to be opted in, no violating privacy here, but you're opting in all the way along, and we're building and building, and so, we even have, for us, we have this Metro Pulse retail asset that we use that actually has hyperlocal information. So, you could, knowing that millenials like, for example, food trucks, we all like food trucks, let's just face it, but millenials really love food trucks. You could even, if you are a retailer, you could even provide a fashion truck directly to their location outside their office equipped with things that you know they like because you've mined that digital exhaust that's coming off the personal digital shopping experience, and you've understood how they like to pair up what they've got, so you're doing a next best action type of thing where you're cross-selling, up-selling. And now, you bring it into the actual real world for them, and you take it straight to them. That's a new experience, that's a new millennial experience for retail. But it's how creative you are with all that data, 'cause you could have just sat there before and done nothing about that. You could have just looked at it and said, "Well, let's run some reports, "let's look at a dashboard." But unless you actually have someone creative enough, and usually it's a pairing of data scientist, chief data officers, digital officers all working together who come up with these great ideas, and it's all based, if you go back to what my example was, that example is how do I create a new experience that will get millenials through my doors, or at least get them buying from me in a different way. If you think about that was the goal, but how I combined it was data, a digital process, and then, I put it together in a brand new way to take action on it. That's how you get somewhere. >> Let me see if I can summarize very quickly. And again, just as an also test, 'cause this is the way we're looking at it as well, that there's human beings operate and businesses operate in an analog world, so the first test is to take analog data and turn it into digital data. IOT does that. >> Cortnie: Otherwise, there's not digital exhaust. >> Otherwise, there's no digital anything. >> Cortnie: That's right. >> And we call it IOT and P, Internet of Things and People, because of the people element is so crucial in this process. Then we have analytics, big data, that's taking those data streams and turning them into models that have suggestions and predictions about what might be the right way to go about doing things, and then there's these systems of action, or what we've been calling systems of enactment, but we're going to lose that battle, it's probably going to be called systems of action that then take and transduce the output of the model back into the real world, and that's going to be a combination of digital and physical. >> And robotic process automation. We won't even introduce that yet. >> Which is all great. >> But that's fun. >> That's going to be in October. >> But I really like the example that you gave of the fashion truck because people don't look at a truck and say, "Oh, that's digital business." >> Cortnie: Right, but it manifested in that. >> But it absolutely is digital business because the data allows you to bring a more personal experience >> Understand it, that's right. >> right there at that moment, and it's virtually impossible to even conceive of how you can make money doing that unless you're able to intercept that person with that ensemble in a way that makes both parties happy. >> And wouldn't that be cheaper than having big, huge retail stores? Someone's going to take me up on that. Retailers are going to take me up on this, I'm telling you. >> But I think the other part is-- >> Right next to the taco truck. >> There could be other trucks in that, a much cleaner truck, and this and that. But one thing, Cortnie, you talk about and you got to still have a hypothesis, I think of the early false promises of big data and Hadoop, just that you throw all this stuff in, and the answer just comes out. That just isn't the way. You've got to be creative, and you have to have a hypothesis to test, and I'm just curious from your experience, how ready are people to take in the external data sources and the unstructured data sources and start to incorporate that in with the proprietary data, 'cause that's a really important piece of the puzzle? It's very different now. >> I think they're ready to do it, it depends on who in the business you are working with. Digital offices, marketing offices, merchandising offices, medical offices, they're very interested in how can we do this, but they don't know what they need. They need guidance from a data officer or a data science head, or something like this, because it's all about the creativity of what can I bring together to actually reach that patient diagnostic, that whatever the case may be, the right fashion truck mix, or whatever. Taco Tuesday. >> So, does somebody from the chief data office, if you will, you know, get assigned to, you're assigned to marketing and you're assigned to finance, and you're assigned to sales. >> I have somebody assigned to us. >> To put this in-- >> Caitlin: Exactly, exactly. >> To put this in kind of a common or more modern parlance, there's a design element. You have to have use case design, and what are we going, how are we going to get better at designing use cases so we can go off and explore the role that data is going to play, how we're going to combine it with other things, and to your point, and it's a great point, how that turns into a new business activity. >> And if I can connect two points there, the single biggest question I get from clients is how do you prioritize your use cases. >> Oh, gosh, yeah. >> How can you help me select where I'm going to have the biggest impact? And it goes, I think my thing's falling again. (laughing) >> Jeff: It's nice and quiet in here. >> Okay, good. It goes back to what you were saying about data strategy. We say what's your data strategy? What's your overarching mission of the organization? For us, it's becoming cognitive business, so for us, it's selecting projects where we can infuse cognition the quickest way, so Client 360, for example. We'll often say what's your strategy, and that guides your prioritization. That's the question we get the most, what use case do I select? Where am I going to have the most impact for the business, and that's where you have to work with close partnership with the business. >> But is it the most impact, which just sounds scary, and you could get in analysis paralysis, or where can I show some impact the easiest or the fastest? >> You're going to delineate both, right? >> Exactly. >> Inderpal's got his shortlist, and he's got his long list. Here's the long term that we need to be focused on to make sure that we are becoming holistically a cognitive company so that we can be flexible and agile in this marketplace and respond to all kinds of different situations, whether they're HR and we need more skills and talent, 'cause let's face it, we're a technology company who's rapidly evolving to fit with the marketplace, or whether it's just good old-fashioned we need more consultants. Whatever the case may be. >> Always, always. >> Yes! >> I worked my business in. >> More consultants! >> Alright, we could go, we could go and go and go, but we're running out of time, we had a full slate. >> Caitlin: We just started. >> I know. >> I agree, we're just starting this convers, I started a whole other conversation to him. We haven't even hit the robotics yet. >> We need to keep going, guys. >> Get control. >> Cortnie: Less coffee for us. >> What do people think about when they think about this series? What should they look forward to, what's the next one for the people that didn't make it here today, where should they go on the calendar and book in their calendars? >> So, I'll speak to the summits first. It's great, we do Spring in San Francisco. We'll come back, reconvene in Boston in fall, so that'll be September, October frame. I'm seeing two other trends, which I'm quite excited about, we're also looking at more industry-specific CDO summits. So, for those of our friends that are in government sectors, we'll be in June 6th and 7th at a government CDO summit in D.C., so we're starting to see more of the industry-specific, as well as global, so we just ran our first in Rio, Brazil for that area. We're working on a South Africa summit. >> Cortnie: I know, right. >> We actually have a CDO here with us that traveled from South Africa from a bank to see our summit here and hoping to take some of that back. >> We have several from Peru and Mexico and Chile, so yeah. >> We'll continue to do our two flagship North America-based summits, but I'm seeing a lot of growth out in our geographies, which is fantastic. >> And it was interesting, too, in your keynote talking about people's request for more networking time. You know, it is really a sharing of best practices amongst peers, and that cannot be overstated. >> Well, it's community. A community is building. >> It really is. >> It's a family, it really is. >> We joke, this is a reunion. >> We all come in and hug, I don't know if you noticed, but we're all hugging each other. >> Everybody likes to hug their own team. It's a CUBE thing, too. >> It's like therapy. It's like data therapy, that's what it is. >> Alright, well, Caitlin, Cortnie, again, thanks for having us, congratulations on a great event, and I'm sure it's going to be a super productive day. >> Thank you so much. Pleasure. >> Thanks. >> Jeff Frick with Peter Burris, you're watchin' theCUBE from the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit Spring 2017 San Francisco, thanks for watching. (electronic keyboard music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, Nevada it's theCube. Covering, Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Fortinet. Now, here are your hosts, Lisa Martin, and Peter Buress. (tech music) >> Lisa: Hi, welcome back to theCube. We are Silicon Angle's Flagship Program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal to the noise, bringing it directly to you. Today, we are in beautiful Las Vegas with Fortinet. It's their Accelerate 2017 Event. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, joined by my cohost, Peter Buress. And we're very excited to be joined by a Technology Alliance Partner, Nozomi Networks, Edgard Capdevielle. You are the CEO? >> Yes, that's right. >> And, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So, a couple of great things that Nozomi announced, just a couple of months ago, one was, they just secured fantastic $7.5 million in Series A Funding. And the second thing they announced was you, as the new CEO, so congratulations on your new post. >> Thank you very much, thank you. >> So, Nozomi is focused on the Industrial Control Systems Industry. What was it about this particular opportunity, that attracted you to want to lead Nozomi? >> Yeah, great question. Two things mainly. One, is the team. The two founders are truly rock stars, they have a great background in Cyber Security, and how do we apply Artificial Intelligence to Industrial Cyber Security. And two was, I had been working with the founders for a little bit, and I saw, with my own eyes, how the customers adopted the technology, how easy it was to deploy in an industrial setting, which tends to have a lot of friction. Not a lot of equipment gets into those networks. And the ease of proof of concepts, I saw it with my own eyes. And the frictionless interactions, made me join. >> So Nozomi was started in 2013, you're already monitoring over 50,000 industrial installations. >> That's right. >> Some of the themes that we've talked about, at the event today, so far, with Fortinet's senior leaders, is the evolution of security, where they're positioning, really at this third generation of that. As we're seeing that, and we're seeing that in order for businesses to digitalize successfully, they have to have trust in that data. What is Nozomi seeing, in terms of your industrial customers? What are some of the biggest concerns that they have, regarding security? And how are you working with Fortinet, to help mitigate or limit damage from cyber attacks? >> A lot of our customers in our space, are going through what's called IT/OT Conversions. OT networks, have traditionally been serial, point to point, run over two step para copper and they've recently adopted ethernet. When you adopt ethernet, you have a gravitational force, which is to connect. So these OT networks used to be air gaps, segregated, and now they're being converged with IT technology, under sometimes, IT operation. And therefore, they start suffering the traditional IT attacks. Those traditional IT attacks, are particularly harmful when it comes to industrial, critical infrastructure. And they require special technology that understands those protocols, to be able to detect anomalies, and white list or black list, certain activities. >> Give some example, of an IOT network. So, what is, you say critical infrastructure, gives us some examples, what are we talking about? >> IOT's a very broad term. We focus very specifically on industrial IOT. >> Or, industrial IOT. >> Industrial IOT, could be a network that controls a refining, so the refining process in a refinery. It could be electrical distribution, any form of electrical generation, oil and gas, upstream or downstream. Manufacturing, everything that moves in manufacturing, is controlled by an industrial control networks. Pharma, in the same subsegment, if you will. Some transportation, we're based in San Francisco, so our barge system is controlled with industrial control systems. >> So, we're talking about, as you say critical infrastructure, we're talking about things that, where getting control of some element of that critical infrastructure, >> Correct. >> Especially in the process manufacturing businesses, can have enormously harmful effects? >> Correct. >> On not only business, but an entire community? >> The disruption that it can cause is tremendous. From lights out in a city, to harm to people, in a transportation case, oil and gas case. Environmental damage, leakage. The damage can be tremendous. And that's basically, one of the huge differences between IT and OT. In IT, if your network blinks, your email may be two seconds late, my print job may need to be resent. In OT, you may not be able to turn off that valve, or stop this process from happening, or receive an alarm in time. >> Right, so like, I live in Palo Alto. Not too from me is, some of the big refineries up in Richmond, California. And not too long ago, they had an OT outage, and it led to nearly a billion dollars worth of damage, to that plant, and to the local environment. >> Correct. >> So this is real serious stuff. >> So with a product like Nozomi, you can detect anomalies. Anomalies come in three flavors. One could be equipment damage, malfunction. The other one could be human error, which is very very common. And the other one could be cyber. Any one of those could be an anomaly, and if it tries to throw the process into a critical state, we would detect that, and that's where ... >> Talking about cyber, from a cyber attack perspective, what is it about industrial control systems that makes them such a target? >> Yeah. It is that they had been used to be isolated networks, just like I said. When IT and OT converges, are taking networks that used to be serial security was not really a concern, in industrial control networks, you don't really have identity, you don't have authentication. You're just starting to have encryption. Basically, if you drop a command in the network, that command will get executed. So, it's about the vulnerability of those. >> Vulnerability, maybe it's an easy target? And then from a proliferation perspective, we mentioned the evolution of security. But, the evolution of cyber attacks, the threat surface is increasing. What is the potential, give us some examples, some real world examples, of the proliferation that a cyber attack, >> That is a great question. >> And an industrial control system, can have on a retailer or a bank, energy company? >> The industry was put in the map in 2010, with Stuxnet. Stuxnet was the first attack, everybody talked about Stuxnet for a while. And it was very hard to create a market out of that, because it was done really by a nation's state, and it was done like once. Since then, 2010, 2013 and now 'til today, attacks have increased in frequency dramatically, and in use cases. Not only are nation states attacking each other, like in the case now of the Ukraine, but now you have traditional security use cases, your malicious insider, you're compromised insiders, doing industrial cyber attacks. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security reported 295, industrial cyber attacks, in our nation's critical infrastructure. And those are not mandated, they don't have a reporting mandate, so those are voluntary reports. >> Wow. >> So that number, could be two or three times as big. If you think about it, from 2010, we've gone from once a year, to 2015 once per day. So, it's happening. It's happening all the time. And it's increasing not only in frequency, but in sophistication. >> So, it's 295 reported. But there's a bunch of unreported, >> Correct. >> That we know about, and then there's a bunch that we don't know about? >> Correct. >> So, you're talking about potentially thousands of efforts? And you're trying with Fortinet and others, to bring technology, as well as, a set of best practices and thought leadership, for how to mitigate those problems? >> That's right. With Fortinet, we have a very comprehensive solution. We basically combine Fortinet's sophistication or robustness from a cyber security platform, with Nozomi's industrial knowledge. Really, we provide anomaly detection, we detect, like I said, any sort of anomaly, when it comes to error, cyber, or malfunction. And we feed it to Fortinet. Fortinet can be our enforcement arm if you will, to stop, quarantine, block, cyber attacks. >> So, Nozomi's building models, based on your expertise of how industrial IOT works, >> That's right. >> And you're deploying those models with clients, but integrating the back into the Fortinet sandbox, and other types of places. So, when problems are identified, it immediately gets published, communicated to Fortinet, and then all Fortinet customers get visibility into some of those problems? >> We connect with Fortinet in two ways. One, is we have 40 SIM, so we alert everybody. We become part of the information, security information environment. But we also used Nozomi Fortigates, to block, to become active in the network. Our product is 100% passive. We have to be passive to be friendly deployed in industrial networks. But, for the level of attack or the level or risk is very high, you can actually configure Fortinet to receive a command from Fortinet, and from Nozomi, and actually block or quarantine a particular contaminated node, or something like that. Does that make sense? >> Oh, totally. Makes 100%, because as you said, so you let Fortinet do the active work, of actually saying yes or no, something can or cannot happen, based on the output of your models? >> That's right. Yep. >> So, when you think about IOT, or industrial IOT, there's an enormous amount of investment being made of turning all these analog feeds, into digital signals, that then can be modeled. Tell us a little bit about how your customers are altering their perspective on, what analog information needs to be captured, so that your models can get smarter and smarter, and better and better at predicting and anticipating and stopping problems. >> When it comes to industrial models, you need to pretty much capture all the data. So, we size the deployment of our product based on the number of nodes or PLC's that exist in an industrial network. We have designed our product to scale, so the more information or the more number of nodes, the better our models are going to be, and our products will scale to build those models. But, capturing all the data is required. Not only capturing, but parsing all the data, and extracting the insides and the correlations between all the data, is a requirement for us to have the accuracy in anomaly detection that we have. >> What is the customer looking at in terms of going along that, that seems like an arduous task, a journey. What does, and you don't have to give us a customer name, but what does that journey look like, working together with Nozomi, and Fortinet, to facilitate that transformation, from analog to digital, if all the information is critical? >> That transformation is happening already. A lot of these industrial networks are already working on top of ethernet, a standard DCPIP. The way the journey works for us, is we provide, as soon as we show up, an immediate amount of visibility. These networks don't have the same tool sets from a visibility and asset management perspective that IT networks have. So, the first value add is visibility. We capture an incredible amount of information. And the first and best way to deploy it initially, is with, let me look at my network, understand how many PLC's do I have, how the segmentation should be properly done. And then, during all this time, our model building is happening, we're learning about the physical process and about the network. After we've done with the learning our system, determines that now it's ready to enforce, or detect anomalies, and we become at that point, active in anomaly detection. At that point, the customer may connect us with Fortinet, and we may be able to enforce quarantine activities, or blocking activities, if the problem requires it. >> Is there any one particular, use case that sticks out in your mind, as a considerable attack, that Nozomi has helped to stop? >> We obviously can't name any one in particular, but when it comes to defending yourself against cyber criminals, we have defended companies against malicious insiders. Sometimes, an employee didn't like how something may have happened, with them or with somebody else, and that person leaves the company, but nobody removed their industrial credentials. And they decide to do something harmful, and it's very hard. Industrial malicious insider activity, is extremely hard to pinpoint, extremely hard to troubleshoot. Industrial issues in general, are very hard to troubleshoot. So, one of the things that Nozomi adds a lot of value is, is allowing troubleshooting from the keyboard, without eliminating trucks and excel sheets, you quickly can pinpoint a problem, and stop the bad things before they happen. >> One more quick question for you. With the announcements that Fortinet has made today, regarding, you mentioned some of the products, what are you looking forward to most in 2017, in terms of being able to take it to the next level with your customers? To help them, help themselves? >> Listen, the solution works amazingly well. We have to tell more people about it. I think the critical infrastructure has not had the attention in prior years, and I think this year's going to be a year where, ICS security is going to be, and Fortinet of course, is very aware of this, is going to be a lot more relevant for a lot more people. The number of attacks, and the you know, the attacks surface that will never be, it's all playing so that, this year's going to be a big year. >> Yeah, I think we were talking, before we started, that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has just identified the U.S. Election System, as a critical infrastructure. >> That's right. >> So maybe it's going to take more visible things, that have global implications, to really help move this forward. >> I think the one point I would make when it comes to government, government has been great, if you make an analogy, this is an analogy that I have on the top of my head, if you look at cars in the automotive industry, seat belts and airbags have saved a lot of lives. We don't have that in industrial cyber security. And we need the government to tell us, what are the seat belts? And what are the minimum set of requirements that are electrical, infrastructures should be able to sustain? And that way, it makes the job easier for a lot of us, because nobody can tell you today, how much security to invest, and what's the mix of security solutions that you should have. And therefore, in the places where you don't have a lot of investment, you don't have none. And you become very vulnerable. Today, if you want to ship a car, and you want your car to be driven on the road, it has to have airbags, and it has to have seat belts, and that makes it a minimum bar for proper operation, if you will. >> But the proper, the way it typically works, is government is going to turn to folks like yourself, to help advise and deliver visibility, into what should be the appropriate statements about regulation, and what needs to be in place. So, it's going to be interesting because you and companies like you, will in fact be able to generate much of the data, that will lead to hopefully, less ambiguous types of regulations. >> Yes, that's right. That's right. I agree 100%. >> Wow, it's an exciting prospect. Edgard Capdevielle, thank you so much. CEO of Nozomi Networks, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program today. >> Thank you. >> On behalf of my cohost Peter Buress, Peter, thank you. We thank you for watching theCube, but stick around, we've got some more up, so stay tuned. (tech music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New York, it's The Cube, covering Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. Nenshad Bardoliwalla is here, he's the co-founder and chief product officer at Paxata, a company that, three years ago, I want to say three years ago, came out of stealth on The Cube. >> October 27, 2013. >> Right, and we were at the Warwick Hotel across the street from the Hilton. Yeah, Prakash came on The Cube and came out of stealth. Welcome back. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to see you guys. Taking the world by storm. >> Great to be here, and of course, Prakash sends his apologies. He couldn't be here so he sent his stunt double. (Dave and George laugh) >> Great, so give us the update. What's the latest? >> So there are a lot of great things going on in our space. The thing that we announced here at the show is what we're calling Paxata Connect, OK? We are moving just in the same way that we created the self-service data preparation category, and now there are 50 companies that claim they do self-service data prep. We are moving the industry to the next phase of what we are calling our business information platform. Paxata Connect is one of the first major milestones in getting to that vision of the business information platform. What Paxata Connect allows our customers to do is, number one, to have visual, completely declarative, point-and-click browsing access to a variety of different data sources in the enterprise. For example, we support, we are the only company that we know of that supports connecting to multiple, simultaneous, different Hadoop distributions in one system. So a Paxata customer can connect to MapR, they can connect to Hortonworks, they can connect to Cloudera, and they can federate across all of them, which is a very powerful aspect of the system. >> And part of this involves, when you say declarative, it means you don't have to write a program to retrieve the data. >> Exactly right. Exactly right. >> Is this going into HTFS, into Hive, or? >> Yes it is. In fact, so Hadoop is one part of, this multi-source Hadoop capability is one part of Paxata Connect. The second is, as we've moved into this information platform world, our customers are telling us they want read-write access to more than just Hadoop. Hadoop is obviously a very important part, but we're actually supporting no-sequel data sources like Cloudant, Mongo DB, we're supporting read and write, we're supporting, for the first time, relational databases, we already supported read, but now we actually support write to relational databases. So Paxata is really becoming kind of this fabric, a business-centric information fabric, that allows people to move data from anywhere to any destination, and transform it, profile it, explore it along the way. >> Excellent. Let's get into some of the use cases. >> Yeah, tell us where the banks are. The sense at the conference is that everyone sort of got their data lakes to some extent up and running. Now where are they pushing to go next? >> Sure, that's an excellent question. So we have really focused on the enterprise segment, as you know. So the customers that are working with Paxata from an industry perspective, banking is, of course, a very important one, we were really proud to share the stage yesterday with both Citi and Standard Chartered Bank, two of our flagship banking customers. But Paxata is also heavily used in the United States government, in the intelligence community, I won't say any more about that. It's used heavily in retail and consumer products, it's used heavily in the high-tech space, it's used heavily by data service providers, that is, companies whose entire business is based on data. But to answer your question specifically, what's happening in the data lake world is that a lot of folks, the early adopters, have jumped onto the data lake bandwagon. So they're pouring terabytes and petabytes of data into the data lake. And then the next question the business asks is, OK, now what? Where's the data, right? One of the simplest use cases, but actually one that's very pervasive for our customers, is they say, "Look, we don't even know, "our business people, they don't even know "what's in Hadoop right now." And by the way, I will also say that the data lake is not just Hadoop, but Amazon S3 is also serving as a data lake. The capabilities inside Microsoft's cloud are also serving as a data lake. Even the notion of a data lake is becoming this sort of polymorphic distributed thing. So what they do is, they want to be able to get what we like to say is first eyes on data. We let people with Paxata, especially with the release of Connect, to just point and click their way and to actually explore the data in all of the native systems before they even bring it in to something like Paxata. So they can actually sneak preview thousands of database tables or thousands of compressed data sets inside of Amazon S3, or thousands of data sets inside of Hadoop, and now the business people for the first time can point and click and actually see what is in the data lake in the first place. So step number one is, we have taken the approach so far in the industry of, there have been a lot of IT-driven use cases that have motivated people to go to the data lake approach. But now, we obviously want to show, all of our companies want to show business value, so tools and platforms like Paxata that sit on top of the data lake, that can federate across multiple data lakes and provide business-centric access to that information is the first significant use case pattern we're seeing. >> Just a clarification, could there be two roles where one is for slightly more technical business user exposes views summarizing, so that the ultimate end user doesn't have to see the thousands of tables? >> Absolutely, that's a great question. So when you look at self-service, if somebody wants to roll out a self-service strategy, there are multiple roles in an organization that actually need to intersect with self-service. There is a pattern in organizations where people say, "We want our people to get access to all the data." Of course it's governed, they have to have the right passwords and SSO and all that, but they're the companies who say, yes, the users really need to be able to see all of the data across these different tables. But there's a different role, who also uses Paxata extensively, who are the curators, right? These are the people who say, look, I'm going to provision the raw data, provide the views, provide even some normalization or transformation, and then land that data back into another layer, as people call the data relay, they go from layer zero to layer one to layer two, they're different directory structures, but the point is, there's a natural processing frame that they're going through with their data, and then from the curated data that's created by the data stewards, then the analysts can go pick it up. >> One of the other big challenges that our research is showing, that chief data officers express, is that they get this data in the data lake. So they've got the data sources, you're providing access to it, the other piece is they want to trust that data. There's obviously a governance piece, but then there's a data quality piece, maybe you could talk about that? >> Absolutely. So use case number one is about access. The second reason that people are not so -- So, why are people doing data prep in the first place? They are trying to make information-driven decisions that actually help move their business forward. So if you look at researchers from firms like Forrester, they'll say there are two reasons that slow down the latency of going from raw data to decision. Number one is access to data. That's the use case we just talked about. Number two is the trustworthiness of data. Our approach is very different on that. Once people actually can find the data that they're looking for, the big paradigm shift in the self-service world is that, instead of trying to process data based on transforming the metadata attributes, like I'm going to draw on a work flow diagram, bring in this table, aggregate with this operator, then split it this way, filter it, which is the classic ETL paradigm. The, I don't want to say profound, but maybe the very obvious thing we did was to say, "What if people could actually look at the data in the first place --" >> And sort of program it by example? >> We can tell, that's right. Because our eyes can tell us, our brains help us to say, we can immediately look at a data set, right? You look at an age column, let's say. There are values in the age column of 150 years. Maybe 20 years from now there may be someone who, on Earth, lives to 150 years. But pretty much -- >> Highly unlikely. >> The customers at the banks you work with are not 150 years old, right? So just being able to look at the data, to get to the point that you're asking, quality is about data being fit for a specific purpose. In order for data to be fit for a specific purpose, the person who needs the data needs to make the decision about what is quality data. Both of you may have access to the same transactional data, raw data, that the IT team has landed in the Hadoop cluster. But now you pull it up for one use case, you pull it up for another use case, and because your needs are different, what constitutes quality to you and where you want to make the investment is going to be very different. So by putting the power of that capability into the hands of the person who actually knows what they want, that is how we are actually able to change the paradigm and really compress the latency from "Here's my raw data" to "Here's the decision I want to make on that data." >> Let me ask, it sounds like, having put all of the self-service capabilities together, you've democratized access to this data. Now, what happens in terms of governance, or more importantly, just trust, when the pipeline, you know, has to go beyond where you're working on it, to some of the analytics or some of the basic ingest? To say, "I know this data came from here "and it's going there." >> That's right, how do we verify the fidelity of these data sources? It's a fantastic question. So, in my career, having worked in BI for a couple of decades, I know I look much younger but it actually has been a couple of decades. Remember, the camera adds about 15 pounds, for those of you watching at home. (Dave and George laugh) >> George: But you've lost already. >> Thank you very much. >> So you've lost net 30. (Nenshad laughs) >> Or maybe I'm back to where I'm supposed to be. What I've seen as the two models of governance in the enterprise when it comes to analytics and information management, right? There's model one, which is, we're going to build an enterprise data warehouse, we're going to know all the possible questions people are going to ask in advance, we're going to preprogram the ETL routines, we're going to put something like a MicroStrategy or BusinessObjects, an enterprise-reporting factory tool. Then you spend 10 million dollars on that project, the users come in and for the first time they use the system, and they say, "Oh, I kind of want to change this, this way. "I want to add this calculation." It takes them about five minutes to determine that they can't do it for whatever reason, and what is the first feature they look for in the product in order to move forward? Download to Excel, right? So you invested 15 million dollars to build a download to Excel capability which they already had before. So if you lock things down too much, the point is, the end users will go around you. They've been doing it for 30 years and they'll keep doing it. Then we have model two. Model two is, Excel spreadsheet. Excel Hell, or spreadmarts. There are lots of words for these things. You have a version of the data, you have a version of the data, I have a version of the data. We all started from the same transactional data, yet you're the head of sales, so suddenly your forecast looks really rosy. You're the head of finance, you really don't like what the forecast looks like. And I'm the product guy, so why am I even looking at the forecast in the first place, but somehow I got access to the data, right? These are the two polarities of the enterprise that we've worked with for the last 30 years. We wanted to find sort of a middle path, which is to say, let's give people the freedom and flexibility to be able to do the transformations they need to. If they want to add a column, let them add a column. If they want to change a calculation, let them add a a calculation. But, every single step in the process must be recorded. It must be versioned, it must be auditable. It must be governed in that way. So why the large banks and the intelligence community and the large enterprise customers are attracted to Paxata is because they have the ability to have perfect retraceability for every decision that they make. I can actually sit next to you and say, "This is why the data looks like this. "This is how this value, which started at one million, "became 1.5 million." That covers the Paxata part. But then the answer to the question you asked is, how do you even extend that to a broader ecosystem? I think that's really about some of the metadata interchange initiatives that a lot of the vendors in the Hadoop space, but also in the traditional enterprise space, have had for the last many years. If you look at something like Apache Atlas or Cloudera Navigator, they are systems designed to collect, aggregate, and connect these different metadata steps so you can see in an end-to-end flow, this is the raw data that got ingested into Hadoop. These are the transformations that the end user did in Paxata in order to make it ready for analytics. This is how it's getting consumed in something like Zoom Data, and you actually have the entire life cycle of data now actually manifested as a software asset. >> So those not, in other words, those are not just managing within the perimeter of Hadoop. They are managers of managers. >> That's right, that's right. Because the data is coming from anywhere, and it's going to anywhere. And then you can add another dimension of complexity which is, it's not just one Hadoop cluster. It's 10 Hadoop clusters. And those 10 Hadoop clusters, three of them are in Amazon. Four of them are in Microsoft. Three of them are in Google Cloud platform. How do you know what people are doing with data then? >> How is this all presented to the user? What does the user see? >> Great question. The trick to all of this, of self service, first you have to know very clearly, who is the person you are trying to serve? What are their technical skills and capabilities, and how can you get them productive as fast as possible? When we created this category, our key notion was that we were going to go after analysts. Now, that is a very generic term, right? Because we are all, in some sense, analysts in our day-to-day lives. But in Paxata, a business analyst, in an enterprise organizational context, is somebody that has the ability to use Microsoft Excel, they have to have that skill or they won't be successful with today's Paxata. They have to know what a VLOOKUP is, because a VLOOKUP is a way to actually pull data from a second data source into one. We would all know that as a join or a lookup. And the third thing is, they have to know what a pivot table is and know how a pivot table works. Because the key insight we had is that, of the hundreds of millions of analysts, people who use Excel on a day-to-day basis, a lot of their work is data prep. But Excel, being an amazing generic tool, is actually quite bad for doing data prep. So the person we target, when I go to a customer and they say, "Are we a good candidate to use Paxata?" and we're talking to the actual person who's going to use the software, I say, "Do you know what a VLOOKUP is, yes or no? "Do you know what a pivot table is, yes or no?" If they have that skill, when they come into Paxata, we designed Paxata to be very attractive to those people. So it's completely point-and-click. It's completely visual. It's completely interactive. There's no scripting inside that whole process, because do you think the average Microsoft Excel analyst wants to script, or they want to use a proprietary wrangling language? I'm sorry, but analysts don't want to wrangle. Data scientists, the 1% of the 1%, maybe they like to wrangle, but you don't have that with the broader analyst community, and that is a much larger market opportunity that we have targeted. >> Well, very large, I mean, a lot of people are familiar with those concepts in Excel, and if they're not, they're relatively easy to learn. >> Nenshad: That's right. Excellent. All right, Nenshad, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Congratulations for all the success. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube, we're live from New York City at Big Data NYC. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the cute covering knowledge sixteen Brought to you by service. Now here your host, Dave, Alon and Jeffrey. >> Welcome back to knowledge. Sixteen. Everybody, This is the Cube, Cuba Silicon Angles Flagship program. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise We're here. This is Day two for us. Will be going wall to wall for three days. That knowledge sixteen hashtag No. Sixteen. Chris Beatty is Here's the CEO. Relatively new CEO. It's service now. Chris, Thanks for coming on the Cube. It's going to be here. So you are hosting the CEO Decisions event Yesterday >> I was an event. We had a lot of CEOs, a lot of energy in the room, you know, one of the main main themes. Wass. You know, technology change happens all the time, but really one of the leadership challenge is right and what courage is required of leaders to really break through the status quo and get to that next level. We talked a lot about the importance of getting the right culture right within it, and that's a and what it really means to have a service mindset right throughout the enterprise. And as our vocabulary becomes the same inside it and across all the departments, right, as a leader, how do you enact that change so really a lot about the human element, as opposed to, you know, the technology part of it? >> Yes. So a lot of discussions over the past several service now knowledge comes in one year, Frank said. He sort of threw down the gauntlet and CEOs. They have to be business leaders. No longer Is that just a technology roll? Others have come on. The Cuban said. Well, you know, CEOs role. They gotta choose. They're gonna choose a technical path or a business path or data path. Even Chief Date officer. What do you thoughts on the >> I mean, >> there's a >> lot of press about the role. The CEO, right? And if you go back years and anything from Seo's dead, it is a relevant right. It's going the way of the dodo bird. Teo CEOs Morse strategic than ever, disrupting and creating new business models. I think the answer is somewhere in between, and it's probably changes, you know, depending on the day of the week. Right. So CEOs have a base job which is running, you know, the technology infrastructure of any company running the applications. But I do agree with Frank in terms of CEOs up, leveling their responsibilities and taking on the responsibility for more. I could tell you what I take responsibility for, right And yes, it's I t. But the overall velocity of our business. How fast can we run with everything Hiring employees, closing our books. Every single process in the company is powered by an IT platform, right? And so high tea is really in a unique position, and it has a bird's eye view of the organization to really help. Dr Velocity and Velocity is everything. How can you outflank your competition? The other thing I see think CEOs need to take responsibility for is maximizing the productivity of every single employee in the company. Right now, if you take that on, you start to look at things a little bit differently. It's not about projects, it's really about outcomes. And you know what measurable things are we delivering? And last and certainly not least, I think, the responsibility for customer experiences again. Customer experiences are powered by platform CEOs have the ability that influence every single one of those experiences and make it great and more and more as we look towards the future with things like automated bots and augmented reality customer. Your actions are going to become human to platform, and that's going to increase its relevance in that >> so and thinking about CIA imperatives of, you know, the bromide of eighty percent of the dollars we spend is on keeping the lights on twenty percent of innovation of That's a real number, No, but nobody seems to argue with it. Yeah, you >> hear that number a lot, but I think the good organizations actually do measure that number so they actually they will know what their number is and that service. Now we've done a lot of work, so our ratio is actually sixty percent run the business forty percent on innovation, and we're driving that down. So it's uneven. Fifty fifty split. I think that where you don't want to go is spending too little time on what I call the utility computing because that's the fabric that gets work done right. It's everything from networking and email and all those basic services you still need to have. Those aren't going anywhere collaboration services. >> I'd like to split it up into a little finer grain. I wonder if you could comment run the business grow the business transformed the business. Now maybe you're maybe you're always transforming your business, I don't know. But in >> terms of have to be >> in terms of but specific spending on initiatives to transform the business is that a reasonable, reasonable way to look at your portfolio was >> absolutely right. And I think if you're not doing things that transform your business, you're you're not acting with enough urgency. So my view on it is identify the big rocks right that we need to knock down, make sure we make room for those, even if it's at the cost of the grow or run part of the budget. Because if you're not getting those things done again, back to that getting left behind things were moving too quick. You got to keep pace. So make room for the transformation somehow, and that means squeezing every bit of automation that you can. How did the run part of the business, which is something I've used service now for in my past. I used to be a customer. I bought the platform twice over before I joined the company, and we did it a lot, and I'm doing it now, now that I'm at service now, >> that's one of Frank's requirements to become a CEO. I think. How >> do you >> measure that? That split. You said you're sixty today. Like to be a fifty, a lot of CEOs going. I have no idea how to measure that. I look at my projects are, but guess how do you do it? >> And it's tough we actually use. Not surprisingly, are Ownit Financial Management module to do that. And so technology's technology would we take all of our G L data and we map it to a taxonomy of business services in certain business services we know are not transformative, but they're a run part of the business, and we do that mapping once than every month. We can look at actuals against it. We can look at our unit costs, but the other begin put his projects right, which is again also in our platform, so able to look at those two things together and data driven segmentation of our spend too many times I see ninety organizations. They do it as one time exercise as part of annual planning. Then they don't look at it again until the next year. Annual planning. But there's a lot of runway in between and decisions we're making every day, which you should be making based upon data. But instead you're doing on perhaps nine months ago information. >> So you essentially categorize the business process, the business services as run or Growler training farm and on an ongoing basis. >> Absolutely. And you do the math and the most dynamic part of it, his projects. So every one of our projects, when we look at our portfolio, we look at our project portfolio by business areas, the sales marketing HR finance so on. But then we also do categorize our portfolio by Is this just sort of keep the lights on activity? But it's a project we still need to dio, or is it growing the business in somewhere? Is it truly helping us transform the way we operate >> on reasonable people? Khun, sit down and agree on sort of what those look like and >> short, and we also adjust accordingly. Also, do a top down allocation of what percentage do we want to go into each bucket, and that's not the same for each area because different parts of our business are different maturity cars, different pressures on them. I wouldn't want to be very transfer meitiv with RGL, right? That's not an area I want to innovate on. But with our sales and marketing organization, absolutely. We want to be in high innovation. Hi, experimentation, whatever we can do to help dry. >> So that's a top down bottom up exercise with the executive team says Okay, >> sideways inputs from everywhere. You know, one of the things I think CEOs it is a coming to fund CEOs to dio is manage spend. But more importantly, where people spending their time right, that's inarguably a fixed costs. We have a set of people where they spending their time and are they spending their time on the right things? And if you get that right, the rest could get a lot easier. >> So Secretary Gates last night speaking Teo, you know, maybe roughly one hundred CEOs and your your CEO decisions Conference gave the thumbs down on consensus management, and I sense just a little bit of discomfort in the room because CEOs is a hard job. But you serve a lot of different masters if you will, and as well you've got heads of application development you got, you know, architects, you got the business to serve, and so there's a lot of consensus building. And so he got questions on How do you do it? What was your reaction to that? Your colleagues, You know, which >> one was your science? They asked him a question. And because he said Consensus building doesn't work into an outside person looking in, it would seem like by nature. Everything in the government is consensus oriented. He had a lot of examples actually, where he did things against his own team's conviction, but he felt like that change was necessary. So it's two things I think Dr Gates has dealt with monumental organizations, right? Texas A and M is the smallest organization of those the CIA and the D. O D. Department of Defense has three million people, so the scale is unlike what most enterprise CEOs are leaders have seen. So when when he talked about not being consensus oriented, he viewed it as a requirement, and I actually agree with him. If you're trying to disrupt the status quo, you can't be consensus oriented. I don't think you'LL move fast enough, and most of time you won't get very far. So I think it's incumbent upon leaders to be the ones that break the status quo and say, We've got to change. And But what? What Dr Gates did describe is that if people are informed about why, from their leader enough, even if they disagree, they can get on board. And he brought up numerous examples of where he had conversations with Congress and people within the d. O d about change. He wanted to drive, and even though they were very opposed to it, they got on board because they intellectually could understand why. And over time, he won over hearts and minds >> about your priorities. So you come in relatively new tow service now. So first of all first impressions, any any surprises, pleasant or unpleasant? And what your priorities. >> So coming in no surprises. I had had a lot of admiration for the company as a customer, and now that I'm here, I love the culture. The culture is very execution oriented, get stepped on, very customer focused. You know, when we when we talk about our go to market, we really talk a lot about what's going to be most important for our customers. What pressures are customers under what problems can be solved for him? It's really not a discussion around squeezing. You know, the maximum margin out of each customer, which I think is fantastic way drive pretty hard. But but we're also very team oriented culture, so that's been great. My priorities at service. Now, when I think about my six strategic themes that I'm focused on growth eyes hugely important that service now. Right now, it's a lot of time I spend, fails and marketing effectiveness and innovation. And what can we do to drive, help, drive growth from a night perspective? Working with our partner organization, helping our partners? I do business with us easier things like partner portals and things like that. Ah, velocity. I mentioned earlier driving velocity through every department at the Enterprise at service now and really maniacally going after business process automation. And the great thing is, we have a platform that makes it easy, right and Ivax full access to that platform. So self service catalogs and knowledge base, but really going department by department saying, How do we do that? Analytics. Obviously we want to continue to measure and improve our business. But we're starting to do a lot more with Predictive Analytics, right? And how can we use data to really predict next best actions in a variety of arenas? Uh, security is the gift that keeps on giving for every CEO never ending. It's >> just one of those things that'll Teo you got, you >> got, you got to accept it and then really focus on team, right? I think talent and team and culture hugely important. You could have the best plans, you know, on paper. But if you don't have the right talent and culture within your team to get it done, I don't think you're getting very far operational. Rigor is a big one for me and a Metrix based approach to managing our business and driving outcomes. So when I look at projects that I execute for the organization on time and on budget, that's fine. That's table stakes. Really. What I'm after is on benefit, right? Are we delivering the benefits that we said we were going to get? And last, but certainly not least a part of my job is now on now. What? What we mean by now? On now is me being our best in first customer. And that's a very strategic level, working with product management to help them, you know, with roadmap features and things like that that I think all of our CEO's would need also upgrading early. So hopefully we can iron out the bugs before all of our customers and then consuming our own your products and implement it internally, learning the lessons within our four walls that we can inform our fields they could help our customers. >> How about on benefit? What percentage of projects are on benefit? That's another one of these things. Seventy percent of the projects fail. It was a number one on the market research, even >> that even that's a problem that fail is identified as not being on time or on. But right now, I view that is interesting but not compelling. Are you delivering the outcome? And so we're early. I've only been at service now six months, but I know in the past, through rigor and even making it a metric that's important have gotten to an eighty five percent hit rate on benefit. Certainly you could do better, but some of the benefits we have realised, with our platform eighty three percent increase in productivity. Leveraging R R R R application, but examples outside of Ice D, where we've eliminated forty five hundred hours of work from our financial close by putting email and manual checklist on your platform. Eighty five percent reduction in time that we spent hours spent on on boarding new employees. I mean, the list goes on and on, but it's a requirement in my organisation. When you're doing a project, you gotta have an outcome and set an aspirational outcome. Because if you talk about ten percent improvement and anything, that's sort of easy to get it. If you tell yourself I need to get a seventy percent improvement, it forces you to really rethink things and think differently. And I think that's our job. Is leaders to set those set the bar really high and then sharp teams have the resources to go after it. >> So even if you're late and over budget, if you get that, I didn't say that I later over, but I was asked, so that's got three. So that's a that's a prerequisite to be on time and on budget, >> and we're not perfect, but our target is to be ninety five percent on time, ninety five percent on budget, knowing you're gonna have five percent, you know, wiggle room and ninety five percent on benefit. >> What is on. So when you talk to the board, switch topics about security, what should be on the CEO's checklist for communicating to the board about security? So So >> I think it's really about risk, right? And what risks do we think we have? What's the likelihood of those risks? And what's the plan to mitigate those risk? I don't think security should be talked about in a This is Donner. That's done because you're never really done right. It's risk management, and the bad guys continue to innovate faster than the good guys. So what's your current security posture? What's the state of your risks and how are you mitigating them and in what time frame you know the stuff about? You know, we have a deal. P. We have ideas. We have I ps. I mean, the list of acronyms is interesting at a more tactical level, but at a board level, I think it's really risk management. >> So I promise I wanted before Ortiz talk about mitigating risk. But is there a place for a narrative that says you'd only mitigate so much? You're going to get penetrated. It's how you respond absolutely is critical. And I can I, as the CEO can lead that response or whomever is the >> appropriate person? I think you you have to do everything you possibly can Teo secure your perimeter. But it's known that you are going to get breach. Just a fact. So then it really becomes How quickly can you identify the fact that you have anomalous activity happening on your network of data? How quickly can you mitigate it? And in the past, when I was at various sign JD issue, a lot of that was manual right You have. You know, you have a piece of bad malware on the Enterprise. You may even know what assets. Um, it's on where you think you know. Usually I think you know, and then you really find out later where it's gone. But tying those assets to risk meaning what? Business services, it is it my CFO's laptop? Or is it? You know, the the you know, the person in AP. So you treated a little bit differently. And is it the infrastructure that supports our badge reader? Or is it our ear piece system? Right, So that's the missing piece. And I do thank our security organization and our our business unit, Shawn, because they've actually built a solution. Help solve that where you can go from security incident. Piece of Alberto Asset to Business service to employ within minutes, which that used to be half a day, at least half a day is a long time in a security incident. >> Yeah, so there's that magic number of whatever it is two hundred five days to detect a penetration? Yes, very. Do you feel like your organization can compress that? Is that a viable metric to be focused on? >> It's certainly a viable metric to focus on in terms of knowledge, off again anomalous activity. I don't think we're near two hundred five days, but absolutely we are focused on it because we need to secure not only our data but the data that our customers in trust without trust, >> meaning you feel as though you could detect much in a much shorter time frame, and they have some interesting. You haven't depending >> on the wrist right? Without getting into a lot of the details. >> Yeah, So we'll see you. But implicit in that is that you have a sense of the value of your data, your assets your I p what you're saying you've got a pretty good visibility on. >> Is that right? Yeah, we d'Oh. We spent a lot of time making sure our security posture is solid again customers and trust us with their data. We take that responsibility very seriously. >> Not speaking for service now, but just general knowledge of your colleagues Do you feel as though the lack of ability to value data assets negatively affect people's ability? T appropriately spend resources >> on security? It's tough because one of the first things you need to do in security say, what do I need to secure first? And then you say, OK, well, that's my core. I pee. Where's my core I pee stored? I would argue that a lot of companies don't even know because it's scattered on different file shares and different servers, and then you don't know whether people are putting it on box or drop box or one of the many storied sites out there so keep key. First step, I think for a lot of organizations is really just getting a handle on where their I P is. >> Right? All right, Count Chris, Thank you very much. Appreciate you coming on last. Give the last word. Uh, knowledge sixteen for you. What's the kind of bumper sticker? Is the truck's pulling away from its been awesome. I mean, >> just talking with customers and fellow CEOs. You know, we're all in this journey together towards this service enabled enterprise, but it is about leadership and just courage to bust through this current status quo that were in within the enterprise to get to that next level of efficiency. >> Thanks a lot of fun. Well, congratulations on the new role on DH hosting at a hostel conference just caught the tail end of it. But it looked like great energy >> because a lot of >> had some really good discussions with some of your colleagues. So really great coming on. Thank you. Alright. Keep right there, buddy. That's the Cuba bit back from knowledge. Sixteen, Las Vegas. Right after this >> every once in a while.

>> live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering E M C. World 2015. Brought to you by E. M. C Brocade and D. C. >> You're watching E m C World Live here on the Q. Looking Angles Flagship program. We go out to the event they start the season noise. I'm John Kerry of my coast Dude. Minutemen. Our next guest is a cube. Alumni have been on a cute many times before and back again. 2011 John Thompson is the CEO of Virtual Instruments and also the chairman of a company called Microsoft. Um, welcome back to the cubes. Nice to be about Great to see you in the A M World week didn't interview on Virtual Instruments with CEO, and we were really riffing on this whole idea of data instrumentation. And we it was really free Internet of things. So give us the update. What's going on with virtue Instruments here? I see Microsoft has a conference going on ignite. Even though you're chairman. The board. You're also the CEO of Virgin Instruments and you're gonna do some business here. What's going on? What business are you doing? Well, this is an important conference for virtual instruments. DMC is one of our strongest go to market partners, and candidly, many of their customers are virtual instruments customers. And so it's an opportunity for me to be here to spend time with our partners and our customers in one venue. Our business is doing quite well. We just had a very, very strong March quarter, which is always a little bit of a down quarter for most tech companies. But we were up 27 28% year over year for the calendar. Q. One so we feel pretty good about that. This is the most important quarter of the year, though, which is always the case in Texas. So we're hoping that we can knock the ball out of the park again this quarter. We launched our virtual wisdom for platform in the spring of last year, and it is gaining tremendous traction, certainly in the U. S. And around the globe. It is all about health utilization in performance of the infrastructure, and we've defined a model where you can look at an application inside that infrastructure, monitor its performance and its availability, and that idea is so critical in a world where everything will someday live in the cloud and will you will want to assure a level of performance and, quite frankly, a level of responsiveness to customers as they come on says it's a reset to share the folks out. This is not a new concept for you guys. We talked about this years ago. It's not like you woke up one boys. Hey, things is trendy. This data center in fermentation takes us quickly back. Where did it come from? Was an itch to scratch. What original product as you have and how does that morph into today's crazy, data driven world, where dash boring riel time is actually competitive advantage and now table stakes? Well, if you were to go back to the genesis of virtual instruments, we started as a small technology investment inside a larger company called Venice are that was trying to solve the inevitable performance problem in the fibre channel world. And as the market crashed in 7 4008 the team at Venice or had to decide, how are we gonna clean up our portfolio? And the result waas. They sold off the assets? Were we, in fact, created virtual instruments. So a small group of investors, led by Jim Davidson from Silver Lake and Michael Marks from Riverwood, helped to fund the original investment and virtual instruments. We've been at it now for about seven years. We have clearly evolved the product quite a bit since then, and we've captured a number of very, very strong venture capital investment so long away as we made the choice. That said, we need the shift from being a fiber channel company to be in an infrastructure performance management company because the inevitable movement to the cloud will drive an opportunity for us. Yeah, and you're a senior executive private equity. I mean, this is pretty much a big bet. There's a lot of money involved with private equity. So it wasn't like you're, like, throw in the Silicon Valley startup together. It was really like, Okay, there's big money behind it. Well, you guys, did you see it turning out this way? What? What was learning that have been magnified from that trajectory? Well, I think in the early days we thought the path was a little different than what we've actually followed. We thought the path waas that the fibre channel World was so big and it needed better visibility. This would in fact give the world better visibility in the fibre channel space. What we have observed, however, is that the entire infrastructure has become Maur and more opaque, and therefore you need to not just drive visibility in the storage layer, but across the entire converge staff. And so the platform that we have evolved is all about supporting this converged platform not just fibre Channel, but filed a storage not just VM where, but all virtualized server environments. And we believe that's, ah, multibillion dollar market. And that's why we were able to attract both private equity initially and venture capital later as we built out of product. It's interesting. You see some of these ideas come a come around full circle. I'm curious. Just in industry trend. Your your opinion on Veritas, you know, being spun out. It's it's It's both sad for me personally, but I think it speaks to how difficult the cultural integration might have been between the two companies. While I really had a vision back in the old four or five days of security and backup coming together, I think It was a really, really difficult thing to make happen in the context of what has evolved at Samantha, so the fact that they've chosen to spend it out, it's perhaps a little disappointing for me personally, but not a surprise. So what is your vision of security today? My understanding, You advise, even sit on the board of ah Lumia company. We've way we've talked to the company really, what's happening in security. So if you think about how security has evolved once upon a time, it was about protecting the device candidly and a cloud based world. It's going to be more about protecting the workloads as they move around. And that's one of the elements of what a lumia does, in fact, provide. Furthermore, I have believed for a very, very long time that as time goes on, security will have to get closer and closer to that which is deemed to be most critical. In other words, you can't protect all of the data. You can't protect all of the instances that air on the Web, but you can identify those that are most critical and therefore need a level of protection beyond what the standard would be. And so my belief is that companies like a Loom EO and others that will evolve will get closer to the workload, and we'll get closer to the data that's most critical. And so data classification and things of that nature will become much, much more important than they have. You're an investor in aluminum. You on the board are okay, so you're on the board of director and investor. We covered their launch. Great company. The cracking is low slides, as as Alan Cohen would say, they phenomenal funding round gone from stealth two years and now the big $100,000,000 really funding round massive guerrilla marketing. Still going on at the air say, was kind of clever. The perimeter lists cloud is a factor. And what tech enabled? Do you see the key thing? Alan Cohen described it as 1000 foot shoulds soldiers protecting assets because there's no more perimeter that no front door any more. What is the technology driver for that? Well, the whole idea behind the loom Eo, is to have a what I would call a portable policy enforcement engine that can move as the workload moves around the cloud. So policy management, security policy management has been a very, very difficult task for most large enterprises. So if I can define security policies for every server of where workloads can go to and from on that server and make sure that nothing violates that policy, hence I enforce it routinely. Oh, I can change. The dynamic of House security gets delivered in a cloud based world because no workload is gonna run in any single place on a cloud world. That workload is gonna move to where there is capacity to handle. I gotta ask you because we have a lot of people out there that follow tech business test tech athletes that you are. But also, you're a senior executive who has a lot of experience, and we could be presenting to Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School. I want to get your kind of business mind out to the audience. And that is, is that as an executive who's seen the big, big companies, the big battleships, the big aircraft carriers, from the IBM days to the M in a world of the nineties and the transformation of the Internet now in a complete shift, an inflection point with things like a Loom, Eo and Cloud and and Virtual instruments and the new Microsoft and the Silicon Angles and the crowd shots out there, What do you advise managers out there to operate from a management perspective. I mean, there's a classic business school numbers quarter on the challenges of going public, managing enormous dynamic technology change. So every theater is kind of exploding the technology theater, the business theater, the social theater as an executive. How would you advise someone as a CEO are rising growing startup how they should stitch themselves together? If you can draw in from previous experiences? Or is there a pattern recognition you can share? Well, it's It's never simply about the numbers, while the numbers air always important and the numbers will always be the underpinning of evaluation or whatever. In reality, it's about having a team that is able to rally around a leader with vision that says, Here's how we're gonna change the world. Here's how we're going to make an impact as this industry goes through, the natural inflection points that it always does. And if you look at what has occurred in this industry about every 8 to 10 years, something significant changes. And so a company that may have missed an opportunity six or eight years ago has another shot at it six or eight years later because of the inflection points that we go through. So it's important for the leader of a company toe. Believe that I can change the world based upon the industry that I'm a part of and have a compelling point of view about what changing the world means for that company and that team. And if you could get the team together around that idea, what about cloud and big data and mobile thes dynamics that you would? If someone just wants a roadmap for navigation or what decked me to go after, What would you say? What do you say? You know, get it all in the cloud or go poke at a duel are indeed new, agile management. Things were happening like, Well, I think it starts with what are the court confidence is that you have as a team or company, so you can't say g I'm gonna go and do cloud and oh, by the way, I have no confidence in the management infrastructure for large enterprises or I'm gonna go do mobile and I really have no experience in the mobile space whatsoever. So core competencies matter and leveraging the core strengths of the company matters now. Oftentimes, what companies will do its supplement their core strengths through M, and we'll go out and acquire something and bolted on the hard part of M and A, which is what we were referencing early around. Veritas is Can you integrate it? Can you really make it work after you bought it? Buying it is the easy part. Generating it and making it work is the really, really tough part. And arguably we didn't do is good a job as I would have liked with Samantha. And so basically you're saying is if you as an executive, you want to look at the winds of change for hand, get the sails up, if you will, to confuse the metaphor and get into that slipstream so you can actually drive and you can't. Being an amateur, you gotta actually have some competency. You have a leverage point. Look, one of the great things about this industry is it doesn't take some brilliant business leader to create a new idea. I mean, no one ever would have viewed Zucker Bird as a business leader or some of the young, really, really powerful CEO built phenomenal, phenomenal companies in this industry. But they had an idea, and they were able to create a team around that idea and go change the world. And that's what's so powerful about this industry that I've had the pleasure to be a part of for 40 some years. Yes. Speaking about CEOs that changed the industry, John Chambers announced that he's stepping aside from the CEO role this morning. So you know when you look back, you know John was one of the four horsemen of the Internet era and 20 years there. Chuck Robbins is coming in. He's been there since C. I think 97. What do you think of that move? And you know what's happening with Cisco in leadership for the big companies? Well, John's a really, really good friend, and I admire him for all of what he's done and Cisco and I wish him well as he makes this transition. Interestingly enough, the transition is to executive chairman, with the new CEO stepping in so What that says is that John plans that have a little more involvement, perhaps in what goes on in the company. Then I do it. Microsoft. My title is not executive chairman of Microsoft. Thank goodness I wouldn't want it to. But it also speaks to the fact that John spend the CEO. It just goes since 1995 like that. So he has an enormous amount of knowledge and insight about the company industry, its customers, partners, culture, all of those culture. And so all of those things will be valuable and important to the new CEO. And I think him stepping into that role is trying to leverage that. Cenedella came in and made his voice heard really instantly. And Microsoft has been a great company to watch, you know, since Auntie's came on board, you know, just Cisco need to make some bold moves or are they pretty stable where they are is kind of the dominant? That's a better question for John and CEO. I think what is clear is that all all companies, at some point after find a way to redefine and Sasha's role at Microsoft. He has redefined Microsoft as a cloud first mobile first, and that's all about recognizing. Were acts are gonna run on what devices and what kind of service is. And that redefinition, I think, is important for any industry leader, regardless of how long you just brought us to the tagline of this show, M C World is redefined. So any comments, How's the emcee doing it? Redefining themselves, I think the emcees a terrific company. Joe's a longtime friend of mine. I mean, I know Joe forever on. It's been amazing to see how it's gone from being a storage company to this federation of companies that have capabilities that are so broad and so diverse. I hope they don't get pushed to do something that isn't in the best interest of customers, but maybe enamored by some investors. The angel of the activist pressure. Yeah, that's always and that that's unfortunate, but I think they have a nice balance now. They have a huge installed base and this competitive pressure so they gotta push that. But I have to. I have to ask, is that? You know, I was getting some tweets earlier about Microsoft, and I know you, you know, you're only chairman of the board executive chairman. But you were involved in a very historic where you were on the executive search committee for the CEO replacement for Steve Balmer, of which they chose sake. Nutella Cube alumni We interviewed at the XL Partners Innovation Summit in Stanford that that's about culture. That's about transitions, about inflection points. And Sister used to mention Cisco. Not similar situation. But Microsoft is the legend company. I think the computer industry like an apple. Microsoft was their big part of the computer revolution. Big seismic changing. You were right there. Just share some color on what that whole experience like for you personally. And if you can share any insights to the audience, I know it's a sense might be sensitive topic. But what's that like? And, you know, the outcomes. Looking good. As he says, he's doing great. What? What can you share? Well, I think it would be fair to say that it was a more consuming process than I ever thought it would be. I went from being a new board member of Microsoft in the spring of 2012 to be in the lead independent director in the fall of 2012 to leading the search starting in the summer of 2013. I mean, I never could have imagine my involvement there changing that dramatically, Nor would I have imagined that searching for a CEO of a company would consume 80% of my time when I was also running a company. So for a period of about six months, it's like athlete right there. I had two full time jobs where I was on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for the eye and on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for Microsoft as well. It was, I would also have to say and incredibly incredibly exhilarating experience. I talked to some phenomenal leaders from around the world way had hard, long look anywhere we wanted at any CEO or candidate that we wanted, and we settled on someone who was a Tech athlete. We believe that the company was at a really, really important inflection point where over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, we're gonna have to make some really, really important technology decisions that would set the course from Microsoft for many, many years to come. And so, while there was much speculation in the press about this person or that person, and what a great business leader, that person waas What we, as a board concluded, was that what our company needed at that moment in time was a true technology visionary who could drive the strategy of the company because it had assets. I mean, they had a whole search thing that they quote missed on paper. But they had, like you said, they could come back at it again with being the subtle art of assets. Here, Cloud was built out. Everything was kind of like in place for that tech athlete on. And I think soccer has done an amazing job. I'm quite proud of them. I'm happy toe say I have some small part in that, but I'm or happy for the way he has executed in the job. I mean, he steps into the job with a level of humility but confidence that is so important for the CEO of a company of that size, and to maintain that cultural DNA because you have one of most competitive companies on the planet. A question to the point where they had to be almost broken up by the DOJ from the Bill Gates kind of DNA and bomber to continued, be competitive, live in this new era. Really tough challenge. Well, he's he's a bright guy. He, as I said, has great humility and has the respect of the team. And it's been interesting to see the internal shift behavior and attitude with a guy who I jokingly say he has two ears and one mouth and he uses them proportionately. And that's a very important lesson for someone trying to transform a company. You must listen more than you talk, and I think he does a great job. We try to do that. The Cuban we talk all day long way do interviews, but I gotta ask you back to virtual instruments. Okay, gets a good business going on with the emcee Goto partner about the anywhere in the federation of a partner with you as well, say, Is it all Federation? It's mostly through E M. C. And while the em wears of small V I customer, we don't do much with them on the go to market side on the go to market side. We rely more heavily, if you will. On AMC, that partnership has evolved. I mean, from the early days it was viewed as G. We're not sure who you are and what you do and whether or not you're competitive with us today, we have very, very common go to market processes around the globe. I'd love to see them stronger. I just left to cheese office in San GI Joe. We could doom. Or but when it's when it's all said and gone, this is one of the strongest go to market partners we have that's also shared the folks out there what they might not know about insurance, that you could share their hearing this now for the first time and working on the radar future of your business, your division product, extensive bility. Future of Internet of everything. Future Internet of things, whatever you want to put on a big data and the data center now, and the migration of cloud is all here. So at our core, we believe that every large enterprise will inevitably have some, if not all, of their work in the class. So the question is, how do you help them manage that inevitable migration to the cloud by de risking the migration and ensuring appropriate infrastructure performance management. Once you arrive there, we focus on the largest enterprises in the world. So unlike many tech startups, that will start with a midsize or small company and work their way up well, the largest banks in the universe, the largest insurance companies in the universe, the largest of every sector in the universe is a customer of the eye or will be someday. And that notion of solving very, very complex problems is something that our team has great pride in our ability to do that I want to get philosophical with you. You can for second kind of sit back and, you know, have a glass of wine and kind of talk to the younger generation out there with all your history on experience. How great of an opportunity for the young entrepreneurs and CEOs out there right now. Given the the confluence of the shift and inflection points, can you compare this to an error? We on the Cubes say It's like the PC revolution bundled in with the clients, terrorists and the Internet. All kind of at once do you agree? And would you say it? Guys, you have an amazing opportunity. Well, I think example of just how crazy it is. I I was driving to the airport this morning, and what I thought would be our long drive took two hours. Because there's so many people on the road in the Valley going to work. There's just so much going on in Silicon Valley right now. It is amazing. And for anyone who has a really, really great idea, the thing that's equally amazing is there's lots of capital out there to support those ideas. And so I would encourage any young entrepreneur who has a thought socialize your thought, Get it out so people can learn about it and then go get money to support and back that though. There's lots of money out there for good ideas. Lots of money. \ewelry officially taking the time coming out. Your busy schedule. CEO Virtual Instruments, chairman of Microsoft Here inside the Cube tech athletes is a big deal. You are one of the great great. Always have a conversation with you, sharing your thanks so much. Just the Cuban. Be right back with more insights and the signal from the noise at this short break