>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to the Cube's Coverage of Forward five UI Path Customer event. This is the fourth forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, had some great events. It's all about the customer stories. Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Flow Yees here. She's the director of engineering and development at dsu and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of Automation Solutions at dsu. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much. Thanks >>You to >>Be here. Tell us about dsu. You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. >>Yeah, absolutely. Dentsu, it's one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees and we're operating in a hundred plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Household names like Microsoft Factor and Gamble. If you seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry, Larry Davids ads for the crypto brand. That's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here and we really respect the creatives of our company. >>That was the best commercial, the Super Bowl by far. For sure. I, I said at the top of saying that Dave and I were talking UI pass, a cool company. You guys kinda look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell, tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah, >>Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, so what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And when we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world >>And, And Kate, what's your role? Yeah, >>And the Automation Solutions vertical that I head up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for flows, developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business businesses objectives and making sure that we route them to the right place. So is it, does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers or do we need to bring in the professional resources on flow's >>Team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak geek and wall, right? Is that fair? Okay. So take me back to the, let's, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top down? Is, is is top down required to be successful? Cuz it does feel like you can have bottom up bottoms up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? >>Yeah, we started back in 2017, very traditional top down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath. You know, going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could, that could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. You know, DSU is a young company with a lot of young, young creatives. They wanna make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey I, I need a bot to do this. I need a bot to do that i's gonna save me, you know, 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team a hundred hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in entire department, but didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020 we really introduced the citizen development program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up as well as the top down. >>So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. So >>They've grown up with the technology, they know that they can order an Uber from their phone, right? Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees. >>Yeah. Now, now the way you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, Oh you want things automated, here are the tools. Go ahead. Automated. We'll we, for those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Did I hear that right? You're, you're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. >>Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? Yeah, absolutely. >>Yeah, so I think we started out with assistant development program, obviously the huge success, right? Last year we're also here at the Cubes. We're very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot had changed and we've grown a lot since last year. One, I have the joy being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we are really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. Okay. What I mean by that is that these developer originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. >>And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region and sometimes these use cases could be very, very much, you know, small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we are now able to do is tap into a global automation pipeline. So we connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's used automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation cuz we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines. So the business is happy cuz we are delivering these high scalable solutions. We also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized and then at the same time growing our automation program. So then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities projects are being delivered at a local level and we are able to innovate at a local level. >>I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's blowing my mind >>Here. It's a whole cycle. >>So let me start with how do you, you know, one of the, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA, cuz just you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that to realize the potential of each individual, right? But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it, right? And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought, >>Right? Exactly. A lot of time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we are doing now, able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups, we really bring the diversity together. That's diversity D diverse diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem is to, and that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short-termism. So there's something, what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right? Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. >>But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back, think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar auto tools that they use. So we are really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling a project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good and then that's what we talked about at dsu, Teaming without limits. And that's a, so >>By taking, we wanna make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. Exactly. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into automation cloud, having everything that single pipeline in the cloud. Anybody at DSU can often join the automation community and get access to automation hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launchpad to go and take training. Yeah. And get started on their own automation journey as a citizen developer and you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. >>So by taking us a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now you start in 2017 really before you UI path made it's big enterprise play, it acquired process gold, you know, cloud elements now most recently referenced some others. How much of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah, >>I mean platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team. Whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at dsu, we wanna make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. You know, they're super smart technical people, they wanna do the cool shit with the new stuff. They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upscale them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work. And they don't, they, they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. >>How, how much sort of use case runway when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean where are you, if you had on a spectrum of, you know, maturity, how much more opportunity is there for DSU to automate? >>There's so much I think the, you feel >>Like it's limitless? >>No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there one thing, it's, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people so we make sure our professional developers part of our team spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing, it's also investment in our company's growth. And that's a long term goal. And overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do. And not only the use cases we are doing what we are doing as an operating model for automation. That is also something that we really value because then this is a kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing >>On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and I'm sitting here thinking they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job once they get everything automated, what are they gonna do? Right? But, but so, so it sounds like it's a never ending process, but because you guys are, are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that, is that part of your process? Yeah, >>Absolutely. Because we are such a global brand and with the automation, automation operating model, what we are able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people, but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, right, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automation before. And when they go to their security team and asking for an Okta bypass service account and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath is, why would I give you a service account for good reason, right? They're doing their job right. But what we able to do with automation model, it's to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set up standing infrastructure that we are ready to go whenever an automation's ready to deploy and we're able to get the set up standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality would delivered and making sure anything that we deployed, automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very control and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are >>The governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? >>Yeah, >>If >>You wanna talk more about, >>So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, here are the requirements like get started and go, we've prove the value of automation at Densu. We wanna make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline. And it's, it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities. It's a, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in EM for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same, you know, e r P system for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases, but that's where we wanna work with them to identify, you know, maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there, let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start, you know, working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. >>Does, does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean there are obviously budget constraints are very concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets. But where are the budgets coming from inside of dsu? Is it the business, is it the tech >>Group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group is the cause of doing business because we are here connecting people with bridging people together and really elevating. And the reason why we structure it that way, it's people, we do automation at dsu not to reduce head count, not to, you know, not, not just those matrix number that we measure, but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business. So then that way they can focus on their wellbeing and that way they can focus on the work-life balance, right? So that's what we say. We are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because DSU do prioritize people, you know, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business. So then we can get these time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. >>Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so >>Much for having us today. >>You're very welcome. All keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're live from UI path forward at five from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center. Will be right back, right for the short break.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Cube's live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS reinforce 2022. I'm John fur, host of the cube with Dave. Valante my co-host for breaking analysis, famous podcast, Dave, great to see you. Um, Beck in Boston, 2010, we started >>The queue. It all started right here in this building. John, >>12 years ago, we started here, but here, you know, just 12 years, it just seems like a marathon with the queue. Over the years, we've seen many ways. You call yourself a historian, which you are. We are both now, historians security is doing over. And we said in 2013 is security to do where we asked pat GSK. Now the CEO of Intel prior to that, he was the CEO of VMware. This is the security show fors. It's called the reinforce. They have reinvent, which is their big show. Now they have these, what they call reshow, re Mars, machine learning, automation, um, robotics and space. And then they got reinforced, which is security. It's all about security in the cloud. So great show. Lot of talk about the keynotes were, um, pretty, I wouldn't say generic on one hand, but specific in the other clear AWS posture, we were both watching. What's your take? >>Well, John, actually looking back to may of 2010, when we started the cube at EMC world, and that was the beginning of this massive boom run, uh, which, you know, finally, we're starting to see some, some cracks of the armor. Of course, we're threats of recession. We're in a recession, most likely, uh, in inflationary pressures, interest rate hikes. And so, you know, finally the tech market has chilled out a little bit and you have this case before we get into the security piece of is the glass half full or half empty. So budgets coming into this year, it was expected. They would grow at a very robust eight point half percent CIOs have tuned that down, but it's still pretty strong at around 6%. And one of the areas that they really have no choice, but to focus on is security. They moved everything into the cloud or a lot of stuff into the cloud. >>They had to deal with remote work and that created a lot of security vulnerabilities. And they're still trying to figure that out and plug the holes with the lack of talent that they have. So it's interesting re the first reinforc that we did, which was also here in 2019, Steven Schmidt, who at the time was chief information security officer at Amazon web services said the state of cloud security is really strong. All this narrative, like the pat Gelsinger narrative securities, a do over, which you just mentioned, security is broken. It doesn't help the industry. The state of cloud security is very strong. If you follow the prescription. Well, see, now Steven Schmidt, as you know, is now chief security officer at Amazon. So we followed >>Jesse all Amazon, not just AWS. So >>He followed Jesse over and I asked him, well, why no, I, and they said, well, he's responsible now for physical security. Presumably the warehouses I'm like, well, wait a minute. What about the data centers? Who's responsible for that? So it's kind of funny, CJ. Moses is now the CSO at AWS and you know, these events are, are good. They're growing. And it's all about best practices, how to apply the practices. A lot of recommendations from, from AWS, a lot of tooling and really an ecosystem because let's face it. Amazon doesn't have the breadth and depth of tools to do it alone. >>And also the attendance is interesting, cuz we are just in New York city for the, uh, ado summit, 19,000 people, massive numbers, certainly in the pandemic. That's probably one of the top end shows and it was a summit. This is a different audience. It's security. It's really nerdy. You got OT, you got cloud. You've got on-prem. So now you have cloud operations. We're calling super cloud. Of course we're having our inaugural pilot event on August 9th, check it out. We're called super cloud, go to the cube.net to check it out. But this is the super cloud model evolving with security. And what you're hearing today, Dave, I wanna get your reaction to this is things like we've got billions of observational points. We're certainly there's no perimeter, right? So the perimeter's dead. The new perimeter, if you will, is every transaction at scale. So you have to have a new model. So security posture needs to be rethought. They actually said that directly on the keynote. So security, although numbers aren't as big as last week or two weeks ago in New York still relevant. So alright. There's sessions here. There's networking. Very interesting demographic, long hair. Lot of >>T-shirts >>No lot of, not a lot of nerds doing to build out things over there. So, so I gotta ask you, what's your reaction to this scale as the new advantage? Is that a tailwind or a headwind? What's your read? >>Well, it is amazing. I mean he actually, Steven Schmidt talked about quadrillions of events every month, quadrillions 15 zeros. What surprised me, John. So they, they, Amazon talks about five areas, but by the, by the way, at the event, they got five tracks in 125 sessions, data protection and privacy, GRC governance, risk and compliance, identity network security and threat detection. I was really surprised given the focus on developers, they didn't call out container security. I would've thought that would be sort of a separate area of focus, but to your point about scale, it's true. Amazon has a scale where they'll see events every day or every month that you might not see in a generation if you just kind of running your own data center. So I do think that's, that's, that's, that's a, a, a, a valid statement having said that Amazon's got a limited capability in terms of security. That's why they have to rely on the ecosystem. Now it's all about APIs connecting in and APIs are one of the biggest security vulnerability. So that's kind of, I, I I'm having trouble squaring that circle. >>Well, they did just to come up, bring back to the whole open source and software. They did say they did make a measurement was store, but at the beginning, Schmidt did say that, you know, besides scale being an advantage for Amazon with a quadri in 15 zeros, don't bolt on security. So that's a classic old school. We've heard that before, right. But he said specifically, weave in security in the dev cycles. And the C I C D pipeline that is, that basically means shift left. So sneak is here, uh, company we've covered. Um, and they, their whole thing is shift left. That implies Docker containers that implies Kubernetes. Um, but this is not a cloud native show per se. It's much more crypto crypto. You heard about, you know, the, uh, encrypt everything message on the keynote. You heard, um, about reasoning, quantum, quantum >>Skating to the puck. >>Yeah. So yeah, so, you know, although the middleman is logged for J heard that little little mention, I love the quote from Lewis Hamilton that they put up on stage CJ, Moses said, team behind the scenes make it happen. So a big emphasis on teamwork, big emphasis on don't bolt on security, have it in the beginning. We've heard that before a lot of threat modeling discussions, uh, and then really this, you know, the news around the cloud audit academy. So clearly skills gap, more threats, more use cases happening than ever before. >>Yeah. And you know, to your point about, you know, the teamwork, I think the problem that CISOs have is they just don't have the talent to that. AWS has. So they have a real difficulty applying that talent. And so but's saying, well, join us at these shows. We'll kind of show you how to do it, how we do it internally. And again, I think when you look out on this ecosystem, there's still like thousands and thousands of tools that practitioners have to apply every time. There's a tool, there's a separate set of skills to really understand that tool, even within AWS's portfolio. So this notion of a shared responsibility model, Amazon takes care of, you know, securing for instance, the physical nature of S3 you're responsible for secure, make sure you're the, the S3 bucket doesn't have public access. So that shared responsibility model is still very important. And I think practitioners still struggling with all this complexity in this matrix of tools. >>So they had the layered defense. So, so just a review opening keynote with Steve Schmidt, the new CSO, he talked about weaving insecurity in the dev cycles shift left, which is the, I don't bolt it on keep in the beginning. Uh, the lessons learned, he talked a lot about over permissive creates chaos, um, and that you gotta really look at who has access to what and why big learnings there. And he brought up the use cases. The more use cases are coming on than ever before. Um, layered defense strategy was his core theme, Dave. And that was interesting. And he also said specifically, no, don't rely on single security control, use multiple layers, stronger together. Be it it from the beginning, basically that was the whole ethos, the posture, he laid that down >>And he had a great quote on that. He said, I'm sorry to interrupt single controls. And binary states will fail guaranteed. >>Yeah, that's a guarantee that was basically like, that's his, that's not a best practice. That's a mandate. <laugh> um, and then CJ, Moses, who was his deputy in the past now takes over a CSO, um, ownership across teams, ransomware mitigation, air gaping, all that kind of in the weeds kind of security stuff. You want to check the boxes on. And I thought he did a good job. Right. And he did the news. He's the new CISO. Okay. Then you had lean is smart from Mongo DB. Come on. Yeah. Um, she was interesting. I liked her talk, obviously. Mongo is one of the ecosystem partners headlining game. How do you read into that? >>Well, I, I I'm, its really interesting. Right? You didn't see snowflake up there. Right? You see data breaks up there. You had Mongo up there and I'm curious is her and she's coming on the cube tomorrow is her primary role sort of securing Mongo internally? Is it, is it securing the Mongo that's running across clouds. She's obviously here talking about AWS. So what I make of it is, you know, that's, it's a really critical partner. That's driving a lot of business for AWS, but at the same time it's data, they talked about data security being one of the key areas that you have to worry about and that's, you know what Mongo does. So I'm really excited. I talked to her >>Tomorrow. I, I did like her mention a big idea, a cube alumni, yeah. Company. They were part of our, um, season one of our eight of us startup showcase, check out AWS startups.com. If you're watching this, we've been doing now, we're in season two, we're featuring the fastest growing hottest startups in the ecosystem. Not the big players, that's ISVs more of the startups. They were mentioned. They have a great product. So I like to mention a big ID. Um, security hub mentioned a config. They're clearly a big customer and they have user base, a lot of E C, two and storage going on. People are building on Mongo so I can see why they're in there. The question I want to ask you is, is Mongo's new stuff in line with all the upgrades in the Silicon. So you got graviton, which has got great stuff. Um, great performance. Do you see that, that being a key part of things >>Well, specifically graviton. So I I'll tell you this. I'll tell you what I know when you look at like snowflake, for instance, is optimizing for graviton. For certain workloads, they actually talked about it on their earnings call, how it's lowered the cost for customers and actually hurt their revenue. You know, they still had great revenue, but it hurt their revenue. My sources indicate to me that that, that Mongo is not getting as much outta graviton two, but they're waiting for graviton three. Now they don't want to make that widely known because they don't wanna dis AWS. But it's, it's probably because Mongo's more focused on analytics. But so to me, graviton is the future. It's lower cost. >>Yeah. Nobody turns off the database. >>Nobody turns off the database. >><laugh>, it's always cranking C two cycles. You >>Know the other thing I wanted to bring, bring up, I thought we'd hear, hear more about ransomware. We heard a little bit of from Kirk Coel and he, and he talked about all these things you could do to mitigate ransomware. He didn't talk about air gaps and that's all you hear is how air gap. David Flo talks about this all the time. You must have air gaps. If you wanna, you know, cover yourself against ransomware. And they didn't even mention that. Now, maybe we'll hear that from the ecosystem. That was kind of surprising. Then I, I saw you made a note in our shared doc about encryption, cuz I think all the talk here is encryption at rest. What about data in motion? >>Well, this, this is the last guy that came on the keynote. He brought up encryption, Kurt, uh, Goel, which I love by the way he's VP of platform. I like his mojo. He's got the long hair >>And he's >>Geeking out swagger, but I, he hit on some really cool stuff. This idea of the reasoning, right? He automated reasoning is little pet project that is like killer AI. That's next generation. Next level >>Stuff. Explain that. >>So machine learning does all kinds of things, you know, goes to sit pattern, supervise, unsupervised automate stuff, but true reasoning. Like no one connecting the dots with software. That's like true AI, right? That's really hard. Like in word association, knowing how things are connected, looking at pattern and deducing things. So you predictive analytics, we all know comes from great machine learning. But when you start getting into deduction, when you say, Hey, that EC two cluster never should be on the same VPC, is this, this one? Why is this packet trying to go there? You can see patterns beyond normal observation space. So if you have a large observation space like AWS, you can really put some killer computer science technology on this. And that's where this reasoning is. It's next level stuff you don't hear about it because nobody does it. Yes. I mean, Google does it with metadata. There's meta meta reasoning. Um, we've been, I've been watching this for over two decades now. It's it's a part of AI that no one's tapped and if they get it right, this is gonna be a killer part of the automation. So >>He talked about this, basically it being advanced math that gets you to provable security, like you gave an example. Another example I gave is, is this S3 bucket open to the public is a, at that access UN restricted or unrestricted, can anyone access my KMS keys? So, and you can prove, yeah. The answer to that question using advanced math and automated reasoning. Yeah, exactly. That's a huge leap because you used to be use math, but you didn't have the data, the observation space and the compute power to be able to do it in near real time or real time. >>It's like, it's like when someone, if in the physical world real life in real life, you say, Hey, that person doesn't belong here. Or you, you can look at something saying that doesn't fit <laugh> >>Yeah. Yeah. >>So you go, okay, you observe it and you, you take measures on it or you query that person and say, why you here? Oh, okay. You're here. It doesn't fit. Right. Think about the way on the right clothes, the right look, whatever you kind of have that data. That's deducing that and getting that information. That's what reasoning is. It's it's really a killer level. And you know, there's encrypt, everything has to be data. Lin has to be data in at movement at rest is one thing, but you gotta get data in flight. Dave, this is a huge problem. And making that work is a key >>Issue. The other thing that Kirk Coel talked about was, was quantum, uh, quantum proof algorithms, because basically he put up a quote, you're a hockey guy, Wayne Greski. He said the greatest hockey player ever. Do you agree? I do agree. Okay, great. >>Bobby or, and Wayne Greski. >>Yeah, but okay, so we'll give the nada Greski, but I always skate to the where the puck is gonna be not to where it's been. And basically his point was where skating to where quantum is going, because quantum, it brings risks to basically blow away all the existing crypto cryptographic algorithms. I, I, my understanding is N just came up with new algorithms. I wasn't clear if those were supposed to be quantum proof, but I think they are, and AWS is testing them. And AWS is coming out with, you know, some test to see if quantum can break these new algos. So that's huge. The question is interoperability. Yeah. How is it gonna interact with all the existing algorithms and all the tools that are out there today? So I think we're a long way off from solving that problem. >>Well, that was one of Kurt's big point. You talking about quantum resistant cryptography and they introduce hybrid post quantum key agreements. That means KMS cert certification, cert manager and manager all can manage the keys. This was something that's gives more flexibility on, on, on that quantum resistance argument. I gotta dig into it. I really don't know how it works, what he meant by that in terms of what does that hybrid actually mean? I think what it means is multi mode and uh, key management, but we'll see. >>So I come back to the ho the macro for a second. We've got consumer spending under pressure. Walmart just announced, not great earning. Shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. We have Amazon meta and alphabet announcing this weekend. I think Microsoft. Yep. So everybody's on edge, you know, is this gonna ripple through now? The flip side of that is BEC because the economy yeah. Is, is maybe not in, not such great shape. People are saying maybe the fed is not gonna raise after September. Yeah. So that's, so that's why we come back to this half full half empty. How does that relate to cyber security? Well, people are prioritizing cybersecurity, but it's not an unlimited budget. So they may have to steal from other places. >>It's a double whammy. Dave, it's a double whammy on the spend side and also the macroeconomic. So, okay. We're gonna have a, a recession that's predicted the issue >>On, so that's bad on the one hand, but it's good from a standpoint of not raising interest rates, >>It's one of the double whammy. It was one, it's one of the double whammy and we're talking about here, but as we sit on the cube two weeks ago at <inaudible> summit in New York, and we did at re Mars, this is the first recession where the cloud computing hyperscale is, are pumping full cylinder, all cylinders. So there's a new economic engine called cloud computing that's in place. So unlike data center purchase in the past, that was CapEx. When, when spending was hit, they pause was a complete shutdown. Then a reboot cloud computer. You can pause spending for a little bit, make, might make the cycle longer in sales, but it's gonna be quickly fast turned on. So, so turning off spending with cloud is not that hard to do. You can hit pause and like check things out and then turn it back on again. So that's just general cloud economics with security though. I don't see the spending slowing down. Maybe the sales cycles might go longer, but there's no spending slow down in my mind that I see. And if there's any pause, it's more of refactoring, whether it's the crypto stuff or new things that Amazon has. >>So, so that's interesting. So a couple things there. I do think you're seeing a slight slow down in the, the, the ex the velocity of the spend. When you look at the leaders in spending velocity in ETR data, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, Palo Alto networks, they're all showing a slight deceleration in spending momentum, but still highly elevated. Yeah. Okay. So, so that's a, I think now to your other point, really interesting. What you're saying is cloud spending is discretionary. That's one of the advantages. I can dial it down, but track me if I'm wrong. But most of the cloud spending is with reserved instances. So ultimately you're buying those reserved instances and you have to spend over a period of time. So they're ultimately AWS is gonna see that revenue. They just might not see it for this one quarter. As people pull back a little bit, right. >>It might lag a little bit. So it might, you might not see it for a quarter or two, so it's impact, but it's not as severe. So the dialing up, that's a key indicator get, I think I'm gonna watch that because that's gonna be something that we've never seen before. So what's that reserve now the wild card and all this and the dark horse new services. So there's other services besides the classic AC two, but security and others. There's new things coming out. So to me, this is absolutely why we've been saying super cloud is a thing because what's going on right now in security and cloud native is there's net new functionality that needs to be in place to handle multiple clouds, multiple abstraction layers, and to do all these super cloudlike capabilities like Mike MongoDB, like these vendors, they need to up their gain. And that we're gonna see new cloud native services that haven't exist. Yeah. I'll use some hatchy Corp here. I'll use something over here. I got some VMware, I got this, but there's gaps. Dave, there'll be gaps that are gonna emerge. And I think that's gonna be a huge wild >>Cup. And now I wanna bring something up on the super cloud event. So you think about the layers I, as, uh, PAs and, and SAS, and we see super cloud permeating, all those somebody ask you, well, because we have Intuit coming on. Yep. If somebody asks, why Intuit in super cloud, here's why. So we talked about cloud being discretionary. You can dial it down. We saw that with snowflake sort of Mongo, you know, similarly you can, if you want dial it down, although transaction databases are to do, but SAS, the SAS model is you pay for it every month. Okay? So I've, I've contended that the SAS model is not customer friendly. It's not cloudlike and it's broken for customers. And I think it's in this decade, it's gonna get fixed. And people are gonna say, look, we're gonna move SAS into a consumption model. That's more customer friendly. And that's something that we're >>Gonna explore in the super cloud event. Yeah. And one more thing too, on the spend, the other wild card is okay. If we believe super cloud, which we just explained, um, if you don't come to the August 9th event, watch the debate happen. But as the spending gets paused, the only reason why spending will be paused in security is the replatforming of moving from tools to platforms. So one of the indicators that we're seeing with super cloud is a flight to best of breeds on platforms, meaning hyperscale. So on Amazon web services, there's a best of breed set of services from AWS and the ecosystem on Azure. They have a few goodies there and customers are making a choice to use Azure for certain things. If they, if they have teams or whatever or office, and they run all their dev on AWS. So that's kind of what's happened. So that's, multi-cloud by our definition is customers two clouds. That's not multi-cloud, as in things are moving around. Now, if you start getting data planes in there, these customers want platforms. If I'm a cybersecurity CSO, I'm moving to platforms, not just tools. So, so maybe CrowdStrike might have it dial down, but a little bit, but they're turning into a platform. Splunk trying to be a platform. Okta is platform. Everybody's scale is a platform. It's a platform war right now, Dave cyber, >>A right paying identity. They're all plat platform, beach products. We've talked about that a lot in the queue. >>Yeah. Well, great stuff, Dave, let's get going. We've got two days alive coverage. Here is a cubes at, in Boston for reinforc 22. I'm Shante. We're back with our guests coming on the queue at the short break.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Veeam on 2022 at the RS. Nice to be at the aria. My co-host Dave Nicholson here. We spend a lot of time at the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand. So it's nice to have a more intimate venue. I really like it here. George Burg is joining us. He's the vice president of data protection at vast data, a company that some of you may not know about. George. >>Welcome a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. >>So VAs is smoking hot, raised a ton of dough. You've got great founders, hard charging, interesting tech. We've covered a little bit on the Wikibon research side, but give us the overview of the company. Yeah, >>If I could please. So we're here at the, you know, the Veeam show and, you know, the theme is modern data protection, and I don't think there's any company that epitomizes modern data protection more than vast data. The fact that we're able to do an all flash system at exabyte scale, but the economics of cloud object based deep, cheap, and deep archive type solutions and an extremely resilient platform is really game changing for the marketplace. So, and quite frankly, a marketplace from a data protection target space that I think is, is ripe for change and in need of change based on the things that are going on in the marketplace today. >>Yeah. So a lot of what you said is gonna be surprising to people, wait a minute, you're talking about data protection and all flash sure. I thought you'd use cheap and deep disc or, you know, even tape for that or, you know, spin it up in the cloud in a, in a deep archive or a glacier. Explain your approach in, in architecture. Yeah. At a >>High level. Yeah. So great question. We get that question every day and got it in the booth yesterday, probably about 40 or 50 times. How could it be all flash that at an economic point that is the fitting that of, you know, data protection. Yeah. >>What is this Ferrari minivan of which you speak? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. The minivan that goes 180 miles an hour, right. That, you know, it's, it's really all about the architecture, right? The component tree is, is somewhat similar to what you'll see in other devices. However, it's how we're leveraging them in the architecture and design, you know, from our founders years ago and building a solution that just not, was not available in the marketplace. So yeah, sure. We're using, you know, all flash QLC drives, but the technology, you know, the advanced next generation algorithms or erasure coding or rage striping allows us to be extremely efficient. We also have some technologies around what we call similarity, some advanced data reduction. So you need less, less capacity if you will, with a vast system. So that obviously help obviously helps us out tremendously with their economics. But the other thing is I could sell a customer exactly what they need. If you think about the legacy data protection market purpose built back of appliances, for example, you know, ALA, Adele, Aita, and HP, you know, they're selling systems that are somewhat rigid. There's always a controller in a capacity. It's tied to a model number right. Soon as you need more performance, you buy another, as soon as you need more capacity, you buy another, it's really not modular in any way. It's great >>Model. If you want to just keep, keep billing the >>Customer. Yeah. If, if that, if yeah. And, and I, I think, I think at this point, the purpose, you know, Dave, the purpose built backup appliance market is, is hungry for a change. Right. You know, there's, there's not anyone that has one. It doesn't exist. I'm not just talking about having two because of replication. I'm it's because of organic growth. Ransomware needs to have a second unit, a second copy. And just, and just scalability. Well, you >>Guys saw that fatigue with that model of, oh, you need more buy more, >>Right? Oh, without a doubt, you said we're gonna attack that. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. That's great. Without a doubt. So, so we can configure a solution exactly. To the need. Cause let's face it. Every single data center, every single vertical market, it's a work of art. You know, everyone's retention policies are different. Everyone's compliance needs are different. There might be some things that are self mandated or government mandated and they're all gonna be somewhat different. Right? The fact of the matter is the way that our, our architecture works, disaggregated shared everything. Architecture is different because when we go back to those model numbers and there's more rigid purpose built back of appliances, or, or maybe a raise designed specifically for data protection, they don't offer that flexibility. And, you know, I, I, I think our, our, our, our entry point is sized to exactly what the need is. Our ease of scalability. You need more performance. We just add another compute, another compute box, what we call our C box. If you need more capacity, we just add another data box, a D box, you know, where the data resides. And, you know, I, you know, especially here at Veeam, I think customers are really clamoring for that next generation solution. They love the idea that there's a low point of entry, but they also love the idea that, that it's easy to scale on demand, you know, as, as needed and as needed basis. >>So just, I wanna be just, I want to go down another layer on that architecturally. Cause I think it's important for people to understand. Sure, exactly what you're saying. When you're talking about scaling, there's this concept of the, of the sort of devil's triangle, the tyranny of this combination of memory, CPU and storage. Sure. And if you're too rigid, like in an appliance, you end up paying for things you don't need. Correct. When all I need is a little more capacity. Correct. All I need is a little more horsepower. Well, you wanna horsepower? No, you gotta buy a bunch of capacity. Exactly. Oh, need capacity. No, no. You need to buy expensive CPUs and suck a bunch of power. All I need is capacity. So what, so go through that, just a little more detail in terms of sure. How you cobble these systems together. Sure. My, the way my brain works, it's always about Legos. So feel free to use Legos. >>Yeah. We, so, so with our disaggregated solution, right. We've separated basically hardware from software. Right. So, so, so that's a good thing, right? From an economic standpoint, but also a design and architecture standpoint, but also an underlining underpinning of that solution is we've also separated the capacity from the performance. And as you just mentioned, those are typically relatively speaking for every other solution on the planet. Those are tied together. Right? Right. So we've disaggregated that as well within our architecture. So we, we again have basically three tier, tier's not the right word, three components that build out a vast cluster. And again, we don't sell like a solution designed by a model number. And that's typically our C boxes connected via NVMe over fabric to a D box C is all the performance D is all the capacity because they're modular. You can end up like our, our baseline product would start out as a one by one, one C box one D box, right? >>Connected again, via different, different size and Vme fabrics. And that could scale to hundreds. When we do have customers with dozens of C boxes, meeting high performance requirements, keep in mind when, when vast data came to market, our founders brought it to the market for high performance computing machine learning, AI data protection was an afterthought, but those found, you know, foundational things that we're able to build in that modularity with performance at scale, it behooves itself, it's perfect fit for data protection. So we see in clients today, just yesterday, two clients standing next to each other in the same market in the same vertical. I have a 30 day retention. I have a 90 day retention. I have to keep one year worth of full backups. I have to keep seven years worth of full backups. We can accommodate both and size it to exactly what the need is. >>Now, the moment that they need one more terabyte, we license into 100 terabyte increments so they can actually buy it in a sense, almost in arrears, we don't turn it off. We don't, there's not a hard cat. They have access to that capacity within the solution that they provide and they can have access immediate access. And without going through, let's face it. A lot of the other companies that we're both thinking of that have those traditional again, purpose-built solutions or arrays. They want you to buy everything up front in advance, signing license agreements. We're the exact opposite. We want you to buy for the need as, and as needed basis. And also because the fact that we're, multi-protocol multi-use case, you see people doing many things within even a single vast cluster. >>I, I wanna come back to the architecture if I, I can and just understand it better. And I said, David, Flo's written a lot about this on our site, but I've had three key meetings in my life with Mosia and I, and I you've obviously know the first week you showed up in my offices at IDC in the late 1980s said, tell me everything, you know about the IBM mainframe IO subsystem. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be a short meeting. And then they came back a year later and showed us symmetric. I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive. The second one was, I gave a speech at 43 south of 42 south. He came up and gave me a big hug. I'm like, wow. He knows me. And the third one, he was in my offices at, in Mabo several years ago. And we were arguing about the flash versus spinning disc. And he's like, I can outperform an all flash array because we've tuned our algorithms for spinning disc. Everybody else is missing that. You're basically saying the opposite. Correct. We've turned tuned our algorithms to, for QC David Flos says Dave, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat in this technology industry. So I wanted to make sure I got that right. Basically you're skinning the cat with different >>Approach. Yeah. We've also changed really the approach of backup. I mean, the, the term backup is really legacy. I mean, that's 10, 12 years of our recovery. The, the story today is really about, about restore resiliency and recovery. So when you think about those legacy solutions, right, they were built to ingest fast, right? We wanna move the data off our primary systems, our, our primary applications and we needed to fit within a backup window. Restore was an afterthought. Restore was, I might occasionally need to restore something. Something got lost, something got re corrupted. I have to restore something today with the, you know, let's face it, the digital pandemic of, of, of cyber threats and, and ransomware it's about sometimes restoring everything. So if you look at a legacy system, they ingest, I'm sorry. They, they, they write very fast. They, they, they can bring the data in very quickly, but their restore time is typically about 20 to 25%. >>So their reading at only 20, 25% of their right speed, you know, is their rate speed. We flip the script on that. We actually read eight times faster than we write. So I could size again to the performance that you need. If you need 40 terabytes, an hour 50 terabytes an hour, we can do that. But those systems that write at 40 terabytes an hour are restoring at only eight. We're writing at a similarly size system, which actually comes out about 51 terabytes an hour 54 terabytes. We're restoring at 432 terabytes an hour. So we've broken the mold of data protection targets. We're no longer the bottleneck. We're no longer part of your recovery plan going to be the issue right now, you gotta start thinking about network connectivity. Do I have, you know, you know, with the, with our Veeam partners, do we have the right data movers, whether virtual or physical, where am I gonna put the data? >>We've really helped customer aided customers to rethinking their whole Dr. Plan, cuz let's face it. When, when ransomware occurs, you might not be able to get in the building, your phones don't work. Who do you call right? By the time you get that all figured out and you get to the point where you're start, you want to start recovering data. If I could recover 50 times faster than a purpose built backup appliance. Right? Think about it. Is it one day or is it 50 days? Am I gonna be back online? Is it one hour? Is it 50 hours? How many millions of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars were like, will that cost us? And that's why our architecture though our thought process and how the system was designed lends itself. So well for the requirements of today, data protection, not backup it's about data protection. >>Can you give us a sense as to how much of your business momentum is from data protection? >>Yeah, sure. So I joined VAs as we were talking chatting before I come on about six months ago. And it's funny, we had a lot of vast customers on their own because they wanted to leverage the platform and they saw the power of VAs. They started doing that. And then as our founders, you know, decided to lean in heavily into this marketplace with investments, not just in people, but also in technology and research and development, and also partnering with the likes of, of Veeam. We, we don't have a data mover, right. We, we require a data mover to bring us the data we've leaned in tremendously. Last quarter was really our, probably our first quarter where we had a lot of marketing and momentum around data protection. We sold five X last quarter than we did all of last year. So right now the momentum's great pipeline looks phenomenal and you know, we're gonna continue to lean in here. >>Describe the relationship with Veeam, like kind of, sort of started recently. It sounds like as customer demand. Yeah. But what's that like, what are you guys doing in terms of engineering integration go to market? >>Yeah. So, so we've gone through all the traditional, you know, verifications and certifications and, and, and I'm proud to say that we kind of blew the, the, the roof off the requirements of a Veeam environ. Remember Veeam was very innovative. 10, 12 years ago, they were putting flash in servers because they, they, they want a high performing environment, a feature such as instant recovery. We've now enabled. When I talked about all those things about re about restore. We had customers yesterday come to us that have tens of thousands of VMs. Imagine that I can spin them up instantaneously and run Veeam's instant recovery solution. While then in the background, restoring those items that is powerful and you need a very fast high performance system to enable that instant. Recovery's not new. It's been in the market for very long, but you can ask nine outta 10 customers walk in the floor. >>They're not able to leverage that today in the systems that they have, or it's over architected and very expensive and somewhat cost prohibitive. So our relationship with Veeam is really skyrocketing actually, as part of that, that success and our, our last quarter, we did seven figure deals here in the United States. We've done deals in Australia. We were chatting. I, I, I happened to be in Dubai and we did a deal there with the government there. So, you know, there's no, there's no specific vertical market. They're all different. You know, it's, it's really driven by, you know, they have a great, you know, cyber resilient message. I mean, you get seen by the last couple of days today and they just want that power that vast. Now there are other systems in the marketplace today that leverage all flash, but they don't have the economic solution that we have. >>No, your, your design anticipated the era that we're we're in right now from it, it anticipated the ability to scale in, to scale, you know, in >>A variety. Well, listen, anticipation of course, co coincidental architecture. It's a fantastic fit either way, either way. I mean, it's a fantastic fit for today. And that's the conversations that we're having with, with all the customers here, it's really all about resiliency. And they know, I mean, one of the sessions, I think it was mentioned 82 or 84% of, of all clients interviewed don't believe that they can do a restore after a cyber attack or it'll cost them millions of dollars. So that there's a tremendous amount of risk there. So time is, is, is ultimately equals dollars. So we see a, a big uptick there, but we're, we're actually continuing our validation work and testing with Veeam. They've been very receptive, very receptive globally. Veeam's channel has also been very receptive globally because you know, their customers are, you know, hungry for innovation as well. And I really strongly believe ASBO brings that >>George, we gotta go, but thank you. Congratulations. Pleasure on the momentum. Say hi to Jeff for us. >>We'll we'll do so, you know, and we'll, can I leave you with one last thought? Yeah, >>Please do give us your final thought. >>If I could, in closing, I think it's pretty important when, when customers are, are evaluating vast, if I could give them three data points, 100% of customers that Triva test vast POC, vast BVAs 100% Gartner peer insights recently did a survey. You know, they, they do it with our, you know, blind survey, dozens of vast customers and never happened before where 100% of the respondents said, yes, I would recommend VA and I will buy VAs again. It was more >>Than two respondents. >>It was more, it was dozens. They won't do it. If it's not dozens, it's dozens. It's not dozen this >>Check >>In and last but not. And, and last but not least our customers are, are speaking with their wallet. And the fact of the matter is for every customer that spends a dollar with vast within a year, they spend three more. So, I mean, if there's no better endorsement, if you have a customer base, a client base that are coming back and looking for more use cases, not just data protection, but again, high performance computing machine learning AI for a company like VA data. >>Awesome. And a lot of investment in engineering, more investment in engineering than marketing. How do I know? Because your capacity nodes, aren't the C nodes. They're the D nodes somehow. So the engineers obviously won that naming. >>They'll always win that one and we, and we, and we let them, we need them. Thank you. So that awesome product >>Sales, it's the golden rule. All right. Thank you, George. Keep it right there. VEON 20, 22, you're watching the cube, Uber, Uber right back.

>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> We're back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DEVNET Zone at Cisco Live 2018, beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Mike Bundy who is the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Pure Storage, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> As a first time guest, give us a little bit about your background, you're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. >> Absolutely, so, relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there led the Global Enterprise Data Center sales force, so a lot of background, experience around cloud, virtualization, automation in the data center space, so very excited to be at Pure. >> When you talk about Pure, here at the Cisco show, I know it's FlashStack, but give us a little bit of the kind of the breadth and the depth of the relationship there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT, just the future of where all these technologies are going, so where is the intersections? >> Yeah, so FlashStack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. What differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. And we're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with explosion of IoT, intelligence, whether it's deep learning, neural networks, or business intelligence, with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on Hadoop infrastructure. >> Want to unpack some of those, because you said a lot there. Our research from Wikibon coming into 2018, data's at the center of it all. I mean, talk to Cisco, data, majorly important. Not just moving it things, but how do I get value out of the data. Start with IoT, you mentioned in there, how does a company, I think a pure storage company, how does Pure have an impact in relationship on the IoT discussion. >> Right, so, IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. In two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created, so for us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths of the company. Our software set is called Pure1 and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage solutions that have been in the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. Very, very powerful, and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. >> FlashStack, talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? The trend of converged infrastructure now has gone on for over eight years. There's the buzz of hyperconverge, there's cloud is kind of front and center, why is converged infrastructure in general, and FlashStack specifically so important today? >> If you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments there. If you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has, from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform, it's very simple to manage, it's very scalable, you can get 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a FlashStack than you can the competitors'. So it's really an innovative, modernized, converged infrastructure stack. As you said, CI's been around for eight years, this FlashStack's been in the marketplace about two years and has had tremendous growth in that timeframe as a result. We continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model, how you maintain it, from a cost perspective is different, so it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CIs in the marketplace. >> One of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started he said to companies, it's database, database, database, there's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first-use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere Pure's focus has been. Talk about what are some of the results, what did customers see when they moved to CI for business-critical applications like database. >> If you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. So the way that the FlashStack and the Pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas, it's very fast and easy and we've seen developers cut down 25-30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? So it's drastically different than what they've been used to in the past. >> Mike, you lived for years on the Cisco side of the equation and now you're partners. What's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make Pure feel special yet understand kind of the cooperative nature of our industry. >> I think what we're trying to make sure we do here is focus on the customer outcome, right? So we are really working day-in and day-out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer. And that is what separates the partnership from others. When you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem. It's very competitive, as you call out, but there's still a great partnership here and Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. >> It's been a few years since I've attended a Cisco Live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DEVNET Zone, lots of people here coding. I walked through the World of Solutions, it's not just networking, you know, networking's a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? How does that impact Pure and just personally, what do you look at this ecosystem? >> Going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge you're solving, what is the opportunity they're seizing and how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their software teams to really take advantage of that. So really that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud-friendly, more automated, and then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, healthcare industry, et cetera. That's really where I've seen a transition from, it's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure, it's about the higher-level outcome for the customer business. >> When it comes to Pure's business in general, and FlashStacks specifically, any differences here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? >> Not really. I think from a Flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all Flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that here. What we saw, probably about two years ago in the United States, so there's actually a ton of excitement here now, in terms of the opportunity for the FlashStack and what Flash can do for that. >> It's interesting you mention for Flash, and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't kind of dove in. >> Correct. >> Any commentary as to what's holding people back or you know, some "aha" moments that you've had customers that, those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyperconverged, that they should get on board? >> I think if you look at Flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input/output performance requirements initially, virtualization, virtual desktops were very big, and then your higher-performance applications now. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about Flash and performance, it actually is about a storage platform now. And the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. I think you'll continue to see this expansion, I think Gartner and IDC talk about the next three to five years, you'll see a much greater greater density of applications moving onto Flash versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon and we'll be integrating into FlashStack other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data. Things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective. And I think you'll see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. >> Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? >> Absolutely. We'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new-use cases that are very relevant in this space. To capture the demands of the customer, so things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence, we'll scale that out. And you'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable, foundational elements of a storage platform. So those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. >> All right, well Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack, and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (bright poppy music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Fransisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay welcome back everyone here live in San Fransisco at Moscone West, is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference #SDC2017. I'm John Furrier co-founder of SiliconANGLE media, co-host of theCUBE. My next guest is artist, director, and producer Rob Prior, at Robprior.com. Great to have you, thanks for spending time. >> It's good to be here. >> Alright. Great to have you. You're super impressive. I was amazed by the work behind me on the wide shot. Can we go to the wide shot? You can see the work you've done. You were just here behind us on the main Disruptor studio with Stan Lee who was Marvel Comics, legend in the industry. >> Legend. >> I mean absolutely legend. And he's here promoting, you know, the edge of the network with Samsung. Games and all that good stuff, part of the developer conference. >> Yeah. >> But you were up there painting with both hands in real time. And did this art. >> Yeah, it was less than an hour, I think this one was. I don't know I don't even keep track anymore. I'm just like... >> So you do both hands. So how did that come about? How did you get to the two hands? >> When I was about, alright, I was going to be an artist no matter what. My entire family line were artists, but none by profession. So, I was kind of not even given a choice. So I got to be about 10 years old and I thought the same thing that every 10 year old thinks, "what if I loose my right hand?". No 10 year old thinks that. So I switched at 10. I switched to, you know I was born a righty, I switched to be a lefty. I switched everything. I switched, you know, baseball, how I threw a balls, playing guitar. I switched everything over. So for two years, no mater how much any one begged me, to like, my grades were going down, cause no one could read my writing, cause I'm like... >> Cryptic. >> Yeah it was weird, and so at that point I made my left hand as good as my right hand. And I was published very young. I was published at 13, internationally at 15. And 13, when I got published, I had math homework due, and I had a painting, a cover due. And I'm like oh my god how am I going to do, I mean. >> Screw the homework, I'm going to do the painting. >> Yeah, so I picked up two brushes and I'm was oh yeah I can do this. Then I actually figured out that I could do my math homework and paint simultaneously. I shut my eyes apparently, when, I don't know when I do it, but when I paint, my eyes are shut a lot of the time. >> Wow, that's awesome. So great skills, so it gets it done faster, but it's also creative. Talk about your work, your artistry, cartoons. You started doing, what did you get into first? And how did your career evolve? Take us through the evolution of your career, because now in the tech scene, you're doing some awesome art, but we live in a digital world. >> Yeah. >> How's that? You're doing cartoons, covers. >> When I first started out, I was doing interiors. Like just pen and ink interiors. And then I started moving into color painted covers, and, you know, sort of gradually went from, you know from black and white work to full color work, to being, doing a lot of different magazine covers, book covers. You name it. I worked heavily with TSR, which is Dungeons and Dragons at the time. >> Yeah. >> And I just sort of moved forward and kept... >> And you got then you got to Hollywood started with movies. What movies did you work on? >> Oh my god, I've worked on a lot of low budget movies. I worked on TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Angel. God, so many. I mean, like literally that whole era of TV shows. You know, movie wise I've done stuff with Fast and the Furious. Wow, it's amazing, when you get asked, when you have a giant body of work. When you ask that question all I see are ducks going across. >> Well you just came off stage, so you're really in painting mode now, and you just did this painting. >> Yeah. And how long did it take you do this one? >> I'm sorry? >> This art, how long did it take you to do this one? >> This was a little under an hour. I painted one earlier as well on the main stage during the keynote speech. And that one took me 45 minutes or something like that. >> So they're giving their talk, and you're painting away. >> Yep. >> And you've done this at concerts? >> Yeah >> Tell us what other venues have you done? >> Things like this. I've done it with concerts. People like Tech N9ne, Linkin Park, you know, Steve Aoki, Flo Rida, just to name a few. So I do it while they're performing. So I'll do a full, like, four foot by eight foot painting in about an hour and a half. But when I'm doing gallery work it takes me about a day, maximum two days a painting. >> Yeah. Well you're considerable talent. You mentioned before we came on camera, you're going to do the Linkin Park memorial at the Hollywood Bowl. >> I am, I'm going to be painting there on the 27th, at the Hollywood Bowl. You know, there's going to be a lot of people there, just, you know I think they said the tickets sold out in, like, 39 seconds, or, it was crazy. >> Yeah. >> But I'm fortunate to be able to do that. >> Yeah. >> And pay my respects as well, so. >> Well great work you're doing. I'm really inspired by that because one of the things we're passionate about at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE here is social science, arts, and technology coming together. That's clearly a trend that's happening. I start see the younger generation too coming into this world, and certainly, you have four kids, I have four kids too. We talked about that earlier, but, they're getting immersed in this digital culture and might miss out on some of the analog art. >> Absolutely. >> And what's your thoughts on that, because, this is like, you do both right. >> Yes. >> So you get your hands dirty, I see your hands are dirty. >> Yep they're filthy. >> Good job, you really roll up your sleeves, little pun intended. So, this is the key to success. Share your thoughts and vision for the younger generation and other artists out there, because art will be the front and center piece of technology inspiration, user interface, gaming, augmented reality. >> No, absolutely, you know what, here's the thing. And this is something that you and I were talking about just a little bit ago. I think the, we as humans have a choice. You know, especially kids nowadays they can go and they can be fully immersed, but then they miss all the other things, you know. I've seen kids at tables texting each other instead of talking. But I think if you take the analog era, the thing, like the live painting. Cause I use, I'll take a picture of this I'll pour it into the computer, ill clean it up, and I'll do that. I think mixing the two worlds is vital, you know, in advancing forwards as humans. I mean that's just my opinion, I try to teach my kids that as well. >> Yeah. >> You can't forget about the real world. >> Yeah. >> Because the real world's going to be here no matter what. >> Yeah. >> So, you know- >> And then game developers are out there right now working on a lot of ideas, inspiration, you've drawn monsters before. >> Absolutely >> Some of the characters here from Marvel with Stan Lee. There is, do you need the creative spark? >> Oh absolutely. And look there are, creative spark, anything can be a tool. You know, so, the computer, doing computer art is an amazing opportunity to explore a new kind of tool, right? To invent and create new creatures or new things. It's all on how you use it. And then you get the people, I said this on stage the other day, you get people who are taking photos and then pressing 27 filters and calling it art. I think you have to go backwards and, once again, be able to do the analog. Write your story, create your idea and take any tool that's available and make it happen. Whether it's to picking up a paintbrush, whether it's getting on a computer on a Wacom tablet. >> So you think that's practice from a young artist standpoint is get down and dirty, get analog. >> Absolutely. >> And that's your inspiration sandbox, if you will. >> Absolutely, you know, and I think, here's an example. It's hard to have a gallery show of all digital stuff. Beause then it's just prints of things that you've done. There's no brush strokes, there's nothing there. And a lot of art collectors want to see the stroke. They want to know it's one-of-a-kind, that's it. >> Yeah the prototype. >> Yeah >> Or whatever the inspiration was. It's inspiring. >> Absolutely. So I tell all artistes, and even to the best computer artists, I'm like, go analog, get your hands dirty, paint. And let that speak as well. >> I've been lucky at my age to see a bunch of waves of innovation in technology. It's super exciting. I'd love to get your thoughts, from your perspective, and the artistry community, and you've been in L.A., over the past 10 years, maybe even 20, but say 10 an easier number. 10 years ago the Iphone wasn't even out, right? >> Oh god. >> So actually, 10 years ago it was the Iphone, but let's say 11 years ago. There was no Iphone, there was, YouTube just hit the scene. So this whole digital culture has just shifted. >> Oh absolutely. >> Apple was a no name company in 2000, right? Micheal Dell once said, " They should give the stock back to stockholders". (laughter) So Steven Jobs proved them all wrong. What is the scene like in your world around the last 10 years? What's been the disruptive change? Where's the enablement? What's been bad? What's been good? What's your thoughts? >> You know, in the art world itself, it's something I just mentioned, what's disrupted the art world, is people coming in and literally just being, what I call, a button pusher artist. You know, they figure out a filter or a tan, or whatever, they make art on their phone, and they're like. And that disrupts a lot of things. Because then it shows, or can teach, kids or artists, or anybody. People our age, whatever, it doesn't matter. That it's okay to do that and skip all of the steps, and I think that's the biggest point is the technology has allowed people to think they can skip steps, but you can't. You can never skip the step- >> What's the consequences of those steps skipping. What's the consequence there? >> So, if that's what you are, and you've figured out filters, and you get hired to do a job, because maybe you're the greatest filter button pusher in the world. But then all of the sudden your computer goes out. What do you do? >> Call Apple Care. >> Yeah, there you go. >> Cheese bar appointment. >> I know, I konw You're screwed basically. >> You are. I mean, I knew way back in the 20 years ago, if you were versed in drawing cars, and you got a job doing storyboards for a commercial, and all of the sudden they said, "Hey we're changing everything. Now we're taking out all the cars and now it's real people". If you're not good at drawing real people, you lost your job. Same basic concept. >> Yeah. >> You have to take it all in, you know, in a giant ball. And for the people who are like, "I don't want to touch a computer". Man, that's- >> So it works both ways. >> Absolutely works both ways. >> So what you're saying, if I get this right, is the computer's a great enable and accelerant of a finished product. >> Rob: Absolutely. >> So you use it, you'll take this print you did behind us, you'll touch it up, and you'll turn it into posters, you'll sell it, you'll syndicate it. >> Yep. >> Etcetera, etcetera, but you did the work here in an hour. With both hands. You did it just on the fly, total creative, creativity. >> Yeah, I mean, today's world, I think, if we let things go too much then the computer takes over and we loose a part of ourselves. >> And what about your social friends. Like musicians, you know? >> Oh my god. >> So what's the musician vibe, same thing? I mean tools are out there now, my son's doing some stuff on Ableton live, he loves that software suite, but he's still laying some guitar licks down. >> Absolutely, and you know, the great thing about in the music scene, I heard this a lot when Pro Tools first came out. Everybody was like, "That's the death of the producer". No, that was the beginning of a different kind of producer. And if you can do things at home and you're good, then it's great. >> What's the culture like in L.A. right now in terms of the creative producer, creator? Cause you've got like a maker culture on the geek side. Robotics, maker culture put stuff together, build some new things. Now you got a creator culture which builds off the maker culture, then you got the builder culture all kind of coming together. What's the success formula in your mind, besides the managing the tools. What's the mindset of the new producer, the new director, the new artist? What do you see as success points? >> These are some of the best questions I've ever been asked. Like, literally in every interview I'm answering the same ones. No, this is great. I think, I think it's a little bit of the wild west out in L.A., you know, and all over. Because, you're forming amalgamations. The director of a movie is no longer, possibly, just a director. He's also working on some of the cinematography. Maybe he's an editor, you know, it's a jack of all trades thing. And I think a lot of the people that had one trade going in, and were really good at it, are finding that they're getting passed up sometimes by the person who can do four or five different things including being able to be versed at technology >> Yeah we're seeing a lot of the things happen in the computer industry, just to share on my side of the table. Data scientist is the hottest job on the planet. Doing data. Some of the best data scientists are anthropologists. >> Really? >> Like weird majors in college. But they have a unique view of the data. They're not parochial in their thinking. They're looking at it differently. Or they have a math background, and obviously math is pretty important in data science, but also, it's not just prototypical, you got to be this spec. It's a little bit of a different artsy kind of a feel, cause you got to be, look at things differently. You got to be able to rotate around 360. >> And that's exactly it. That you've got to have, you got to be thinking outside of the box at all times nowadays. >> Well Rob what's next for you? What' going on? You got a lot of things going on. >> Rob: Oh wow. >> You got a lot of business ventures, you make a lot of money on your prints, you're famous. You're exploring new territory. What are some of the boundaries you're pushing right now creatively, that's really getting you excited? >> Well, I'm going to be directing a movie coming up. Which I find great because it allows me to take every bit of all the things I know and put it into a package, that's fun. I've got several gallery shows coming up. I've got a gallery show that I'll be doing with Stan, which will be New York and L.A. And, just getting on stage with more and more bands. You know, I think- >> You're a cult of personality, what's it like working with Stan? He's a cult of personality. >> Oh my god, Stan is, Stan's great. >> People yelling stuff at him, "hey what do you think about that". I mean there's a lot of culture in the Marvel Comics world. >> Oh man he, you know, and look he's like what, 95. And he's got more energy than I do. Literally last night, we're all out to dinner and I left before everybody else did. Stan outlast me. A 95 year old guy, and I'm like, "I'm too tired, I got to go to bed". And Stan's still going, you know. >> The energizer bunny. >> He's an animal. >> Well great for coming on. Thanks for the inspiration. Great art, got amazing art right here >> Thank you so much for having me man. >> Great job, congratulations. >> Thank you >> Good to see the arts. Analog and the digital worlds connecting. This is the key to success in the technology business. Bringing an artisan mindset to great technology for vital benefits. That's what theCUBE believes, we believe it. And so does Mr. Prior here. Check out the art, robertprior.com. Check it out. Robprior.com. It's theCUBE live from San Francisco. More after this short break. >> Thanks for having me.

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is theCUBE and we're live from Knowledge17, I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Michael Dippolito, did I say that right? >> D'Ippolito, close enough. >> D'Ippolito, sorry about that. A fellow Italian, I should get that right. D'Ippolito is assistant Vice President of Run Services Delivery, infrastructure and operations for Nationwide Insurance. Nationwide is on your side. >> You got it. It's in our heads right? >> I remember that. >> What a great marketing campaign. Michael, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So how's Knowledge going for ya? >> Very good, very good. I'm really excited about some of the new things coming out with the newest release that was just announced this morning. And as a matter of fact I'm ready to go back and say let's jump to that version right? Because it sounds really exciting. >> So where are you right now? Which version are you on? Are you on the Helsinki? >> We are on the Helsinki release now. We usually like to jump a couple and stay as current as we can, usually you know one release behind maybe but if we find there's good functionality in jumping one we'll do it. >> I want to come back and talk about that, because we like to pick your brains about what's the best practice there, but before we do maybe set up your role at Nationwide. >> Yeah, RunService is a pretty large organization for Nationwide, through acquisitions and through our legacy environments, we have lots of application systems, you know, keeping all those running is a monumental task. So, our group is kind of sitting mainly in the middle of the applications, the infrastructure, the process, and trying to help everything stay running smoothly. >> Okay and you started with IT service management change management, like most customers, is that right? And then, you've been evolving that. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah we just implemented, about a year ago actually, we installed a year ago. >> Okay. >> We went with the Fuji release that we implemented then we've already jumped to Helsinki, and we pretty much went all processes all at once and kind of a big bang. We actually did ask that management at first does a little bit of a pilot, but then we actually went through all the other ITSM functionality, big bang after that. >> Jeff: So you're all in. >> Michael: Yeah. >> So what was life like, you know, give us a before and after, and maybe take us through the business case and how that all came about. >> I'll give you a perfect example, I just kind of did an after action review for our senior management, on our previous platform, which was an on prem heavily customized platform, to take a release would require a year and a half with a lot of planning and about a million dollars. >> Jeff: To do an upgrade. >> To do an upgrade. (Jeff Laughing) This last release to Helsinki went about six weeks, and about $100,000. So, that's a huge business case right there. Being able to be in the cloud, not having to worry about the infrastructure ourselves, and really we drove a model of zero customization so we wanted to stay out of box as much as possible, just for that reason so we could take releases fast and stay current. >> Wow, I'm sure that benefits. >> In the, you know, was situtation, the cost was predominantly people cost, programming cost, license cost, maintenance, consultants? >> It was mostly hours of effort. >> Yeah. >> The amount of customization we had and then to retrofit and test all those changes back into the release from the vendor was a monumental task and we never want to get into that situation again. >> And so with the ServiceNow upgrade, it's not out of pocket cost as much, you're quantifying time, is that correct? >> Correct. >> Yeah okay. >> It's mostly our internal cost. >> You said the time it took was a year and a half and then, like a typical upgrade in ServiceNow is, >> Michael: Less than two months. >> Okay. >> For us to bring it in test it, exercise it, making sure all our customizations, or configurations actually I should say, are working well. And a lot of it is more just the change management around it, you know, putting out the word, the communications, doing a little bit of training, or whatever it takes to get ready for a smooth launch. >> And some of the upfront planning of that as well. Now, when we talk to customers, there seems to be, we heard today that 90% of customers are adopting service catalog, CMDB, I don't know. It's mixed, right? We hear some yes, some no. Maybe tell us your experiences. >> We have a huge focus on CMDB right now. We think that CMDB is basically the foundation to all your other processes to run more smoothly right? So good trustworthy data enables faster incident resolution, better problem solving, more rigorous change management so you asses your risk of change better. So really when we sold our CMDB project, we didn't sell it based on the CMDB, we sold it based on all those other things, >> All the benefits. >> That get a ramp off of it. You know, from doing that effort. So, we're putting a lot of effort on CMDB maturity. >> So you were talking before about some of the things you saw today in Jakarta that were of interest before we go there, you had mentioned you started with Fuji, and now you're on Helsinki. What was the, you didn't double leapfrog did you? Or did you? What's your upgrade strategy? You said you might be an N minus one, but you like to stay pretty current. What's your strategy in regards to upgrades? >> Right now, we're looking at trying to be N minus one >> Uh huh. >> and taking two per year. So looking at two releases a year. We're trying to plan our schedules around maybe spring and fall. So we organize our work and our patterns around that. But something like that. We haven't really solidified that yet. A lot of it depends on what we see coming up, and what we can take advantage of. Like for example, we're getting ready to implement Work Day. And we want to make sure we have great integration between Work Day and ServiceNow. Some of the things that Jakarta is going to offer us is going to integrate nicely into Work Day. So, we may jump to that version because of that. >> So we heard this morning that the big things, well CJ set up the big things in Jakarta were going to be performance, obviously everybody better performance, maybe some UX stuff in there too, vendor risk management, and then the software asset management, which got the big cheers and the whoohoo! >> Yeah. (Jeff chuckling) >> Yeah, so, what in Jakarta is appealing to you? >> This software as a management I'd say, is very interesting because we're looking at that very closely right now in terms of our strategy around that. The other one I really like is the performance analytics and the predictive analytics that are coming out. I'd really love to be able to benchmark ourselves against other companies in terms of how we're doing. I feel we beat ourselves up a lot internally around things like availability or performance. But then, when I look and talk to others, we're not so bad. (Jeff chuckling) We're actually doing pretty good. So it'd be nice to get that benchmarking. >> Right, right. >> And some of that trend analysis that's offered. And then, finally, how do we get into a more predictive analytics mode where we can prevent incidents from happening before they do? So that's key. >> It was interesting, listening to Farrell Hough this morning talk about sort of the evolution of automation. How do you look at automation? Some shops are afraid of automation, but it seems like the ServiceNow customers we talk to really can't go fast enough. What is your thought, and how are you evolving automation? >> Well, one of our key drivers right now is how do we increase the speed of delivery to the marketplace? But, we also have to stay safe and reliable, right? And the key to speed is through automation. You can't really get that speed if you're not highly automated. And, to be highly automated, you need really high trustworthy data. So that enables fast decision making, and accuracy. >> Jeff: And that ties back to your CMDB commitment. >> Exactly, so, that all entailed enables speed, which we really want because in today's world speed is everything in terms of how you're constantly adapting your systems of engagement out there with your customers. Constantly learning from their patterns and adjusting on the fly. And that requires new mindsets. >> So you start with IT service management, you've got HR as well, is that right? >> We don't have the HR model. Right now we're only IT service management. >> Okay, straight IT services. >> We're looking at other modules, as we speak. >> Okay, so you want to make sure you get the value out of the initial ITSM, and then, how do you see that, you know, evolving? What is the conversation like internally? Do the business lines say, wow, all of a sudden we're getting improved service, and how are you doing that? Or is it more of a push where you go out to the business and say hey, here are some ideas. How does that all work? >> I'll tell you what we're really starting to see is a really change in what's driving innovation. And it's more coming from IT versus, the former models where IT was kind of like the order taker, and the business came up with everything they needed. Now, with the pace of change with technology, new business models are coming from IT to the business. And we're actually almost seeing ourselves more of an IT company than we are an insurance company. And, you starting to see those patterns especially with things like, now we're talking about metered insurance for auto, right? So basically, pay by the mile insurance, versus paying the same rate for six months. With the data we're getting out of vehicles today we can adjust your rates on the fly as you drive. Why should you pay the same rate if your car sits in the garage all weekend, versus you take it out and drive it 200 miles, right? So with the kind of data, big data and analytics that are coming from the vehicles we can do that now. >> So how is that conversation taking place? Is it being initiated by somebody in the IT staff that says hey, did you know that we have this data and we can do this? Let's take it to the business unit. Or does the business unit saying, I just saw Flo, the competitor, sticking the little thing in the dashboard? (Michael chuckling) Can we do that too? You know, there's a lot of talk about IT taking a seat at the business table >> Right. >> But how have you seen it actually been executed inside of Nationwide? >> Actually what we're seeing is, the lines are very blurry now between IT and the business. Almost to where, we're just a team working together versus the silos you used to have, and throwing the ideas over the fence. So we actually have a team that their goal is strategy and innovation. They report up through our CIO, and then business line teams have similar organizations, and they all work in a matrix fashion together. So anybody can bring any type of idea to the table, regardless of who you report up through. And we take those into consideration and we look for partners, we've got partners coming to us all the time that want to join us in innovation. And so it doesn't have to be our own solution. It could just be us on the back end of somebody else's front end, right? So, there's a lot of interesting ideas coming at us. >> What's happening in the business Mike? I mean you've got, obviously you're supporting the big systems or claims, you've got your agents systems, but mobile has exploded onto the scene. >> Yes. >> How has that affected you? What are some of the drivers in the insurance business these days? >> Well, definitely we're in this digital world now so, mobile first is critical. Everything has to be mobile enabled. We have to think of our strategy in a digital way constantly so we have a whole digital strategy that we work on. The traditional models of agency sold insurance won't ever really go away, per se, but they are shrinking. You see the demands and needs of the millennials coming up, very differently and changing. You have to compete on price to get in the door. That's important, so again we're trying to find all those interaction or intercept points with our customers as they need us. People don't really like to think of insurance, it's not on top of mind in their day to day life. But, when certain events happen like oh, I'm going to get married, or I'm going to take a trip, or you know, those kinds of things. >> Jeff: Right, kid turns sixteen. >> Yeah, we have different ways to interact with our customers, and offer some solutions that meet their need at the time. >> Well it seems like you're right, to be competitive, you've got to have the right price for those that say okay, I've got to get insurance, I need to start somewhere, great, but are you able to, as an industry, sell value? I mean, increasingly you're seeing some companies I would say Nationwide is one, where you're selling value. >> Yeah. >> Is that a trend in the business? >> Absolutely, I'll give you an example. One of the things that, normally the insurance model used to be I buy insurance and I'm protected when something bad happens. then when something bad happens, you compensate me. You pay my claim. But what about, if we can help you prevent the bad thing from even happening? So with products like our Smart Home package that you can buy now with internet of things, we can put sensors on those hot water tanks or on those pipes, or connected to your alarm system so that maybe we could alert you when we see your pipe is about to break. >> Right so, we cover, as you know our audience, we cover big data a lot. And the data business, and the insurance business have come mashing together, right? You had mentioned before, Mike, in many regards you're becoming an IT company and digitization is all about data. And the data allows you guys to build new products, to offer new services, to be more competitive and at the end of the day it's all about speed. >> Correct, speed and then that helps drive that value equation, right? So it's not so much being the lowest price, although you have to have a good price to be in the game, but then after that how can you provide that value? >> I'm curious Mike, from an insurance point of view, where before the business was based on, you know you didn't have so much data, right? So you had some big swaths, Age, sex, smoker, not smoker, but now as you're able to get data to the individual level, how that changes the way you look at it? Because it's very different than just kind of aggregating to the bulk, and then the poor unfortunate soul who has a car wreck, you pay the claim. But now, like you said, you know if I'm driving on the weekends, or if I'm parking my car. How is that really shaping the way that you guys look at the marketplace and the opportunities? >> Well you know, in the old days, you used to be able to take basically a subset of data from the past, and make your decisions based on that. >> A subset of data from the past, I love that. >> Now we're taking all the data in real time. >> In real time. >> So that puts more demands on the need for the technologies to provide that. It's critical, like especially if we're going to change your rates daily on how we insure your car, we have to have all the data, all the time. >> I remember Abhi Mehta, one of our early big data CUBE interviews, he made the statement in 2010 he said, "Sampling is dead." And, now, some people will debate that but the point he was making is just the same one you just made Michael is that you've got that data coming in, streaming it in real time. Some consumers, you know, have an issue with sticking that little meter in their car, but ultimately, that's the trend. It's going to happen. >> And you know we're seeing, and you're probably seeing it in other businesses as well, if you can provide that value, customers will give you the access and the data, because they see a value in return. So, it's that value equation. If it's good enough, they'll give you the value, and they'll give you the data. >> Dave: Yeah, you see it every day in mobile apps, right? >> Correct. >> You know, you're in New York City trying to get somewhere and it's like, turn on location services and I can help you. >> When you download any app, there's a big screen that comes up and you say I accept at the bottom, and then it has access to your pictures, access to your location and you're free to hit that accept because you see the value in that application. >> It's a quid pro quo, you know it's interesting we had the author on yesterday, Pink, Daniel Pink? >> Jeff: Pink, Mr. Pink, yes. >> And he was pointing out, he said look there used to be that the brand used to have all the information, and now there's parody in information, but in many regards, this whole digitization is an attempt by the brand to provide, to use more data and to give the consumers more value, and to create differentiation in the marketplace, and that's kind of what you're describing in your business. Last question, what's on ServiceNow's to-do list? What do you want to see a year, year and a half in? >> Well, after we implemented, we partnered with ServiceNow in a project they call Inspire, and basically it's to, what are we going to do next? You know, that very question, how do we leverage now what we've implemented, and take advantage of what the platform has to offer? We see lots of opportunities, as a matter of fact our list is so long we just don't have the bandwidth to do it all (Jeff chuckling) and we have to prioritize, but we see a lot of integration points, we see a lot of APIs coming in, we are in a kind of a really big phase in automation right now, we're trying to automate as much as possible, so for our on prem technology, we really want to go into automated provisioning of our assets, which means being able to connect those into the CMDB as they're provisioned, all automatically, and we want to really shorten those cycle times for when we have to provision infrastructure and support our applications. So ServiceNow is setting us up to do just that. >> Inspire is a great program, it's one of the best freebies in the business, and it leads, it's a win win. The customer gets the best experts, they come in and obviously, the hope is they're going to buy more stuff from ServiceNow, and if the value's there you will. Why not? It's going to drive to the bottom line. >> Using cloud to provision on prem resources, I like that. (all laughing) >> Mike thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, it was really a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Jeff: Thanks for sharing the insight. >> Alright keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, there's a CUBEr live from Knowledge, be right back. (techno music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Twitter headquarters for Data Privacy Day. An interesting collection of people coming together here at Twitter to talk about privacy, the implications of privacy... And I can't help but think back to the classic Scott McNeely quote right, "Privacy is dead, get over it", and that was in 1999. Oh how the world has changed, most significantly obviously mobile phones with the release of the iPhone in 2007. So we're excited to really kind of have the spearhead of this event, Michael Kaiser. He's the executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance in from Washington D.C.. Michael, great to see you. >> Thanks for having us in. >> For the folks that aren't here, what is kind of the agenda today? What's kind of the purpose, the mission? Why are we having this day? >> Well Data Privacy Day actually comes to us from Europe, from the EU which created privacy as a human right back in 1981. We've been doing it here in the United States since around 2008. NCSA took over the effort in 2011. The goal here really is just help educate people, people and businesses as well, about the importance of respecting privacy, the importance of safeguarding information, people's personal data. And then really hopefully with an end goal of building a lot more trust in the ecosystem around the handling of personal data which is so vital to the way the internet works right now. >> Right, and it seems like obviously companies figured out the value of this data long before individuals did and there's a trade for service. You use Google Maps, you use a lot of these services but does the value exchange necessarily, is it equal? Is it at the right level? And that seems to be kind of the theme of some of these privacy conversations. You're giving up a lot more value than you're getting back in exchange for some of these services. >> Yeah, and we actually have a very simple way that we talk about that. We like to say that personal information is like money and that you should value it and protect it. And so, trying to encourage people and educate people to understand that their personal information does have value and there is an exchange that's going on. They should make sure that those transactions are ones that they're comfortable in terms of giving their information and what they get back. >> Right, which sounds great Michael but then you know you get the EULA, you know you sign up for these things and they don't really give you the option. You can kind of read it but who reads it? Who goes through? You check the box and you move on. And or you get this announcement, we changed our policy, we changed our policy, we changed our policy. So, I don't know if realistic is the right word but how do people kind of navigate that? Because, let's face it my friends told me about Uber, I want to get an UBER. I download UBER. I'm stuck in a rainy corner in D.C. and I hit go and here comes the car. I don't really dig into the meat. Is there an option? I mean there's not really, I opt for privacy one, two, three and I'm opting out of five, six, seven. >> Yeah, I think we're seeing a little bit more granular controls for people on some of these things now but I think that's what we'd advocate for more. When we talk to consumers they tell us mostly that they want to have better clarity about what's being collected about them, better clarity about how that information's being used, or if it's, how it's being shared. Equally importantly, if there are controls where are they, how easy are they to use, and making them more prominent so people can engage in sort of making the services tailored to their own sort of privacy profile. I think we'd like to see more of that for sure, more companies being a little more forthcoming. Yeah you have the big privacy policy that's a long complicated legal document but there may be other way to create interfaces with your customers that make some of the key pieces more apparent. >> And do you see a trend where, because you mentioned in some of the notes that we prepared that privacy is good for business and potentially is a competitive differentiator. Are you starting to see where people are surfacing privacy more brightly so that they can potentially gain the customer, gain respect of the customer, the business of the customer over potentially a rival that's got that buried down? Is that really a competitive lever that you see? >> Well I think you see some extremes. So you see some companies that say we don't collect any information about you at all so that's part of, out there, and I think they're marketing to people who have extreme concerns about this. But I also think we're seeing again some places where there are more higher profile ability to control some of this data right. Even in you know places like the mobile setting where sometimes you'll just get a little warning saying oh this is about to use your location, is that okay, or your location is turned off you need to turn it back on in order to use this particular app. And I think those kinds of interfaces with the user of the technology are really important going forward. We don't want people overwhelmed like every time you turn on your phone you're going to have to answer 17 things in order to get to do x, y, and z but making people more aware of how the apps are using the information they collect about you I think is actually good for business. I think actually sometimes consumers get confused because they'll see a whole list of permissions that need to be provided and they don't understand how those permissions apply to what the app or service is really going to do. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, that's an interesting one. I was at a, we were at Grace Hopper in October and one of the keynote speakers was talking about how mobile data has really changed this thing right because once you're on your mobile phone it uses all the capabilities that are native in the phone in terms of geolocation, accelerometer, etc. All these things that a lot of people probably didn't know were different on the mobile Facebook app than were on the desktop Facebook app. Let's face it, most this stuff is mobile these days, certainly with the younger kids. As you said, and that's an interesting tack, why do you need access to my context? Why do you need access to my pictures? Why do you need access to my location? And then the piece that I'm curious to get your opinion, will some of the value come back to the consumer in terms of I'm not just selling your stuff, I'm not monetizing it via ads, I'm going to give some of that back to you? >> Yeah, I think there's a couple things there. One quick point on the other issue there, without naming names I was looking at an app and it said it had to have access to my phone, and I'm like why would this app need access to my phone? And then I realized later well it needs access to my phone because if the phone rings it needs to turn itself off so I can answer the phone. But that wasn't apparent right? And so I think it can be confusing to people like maybe it's innocuous in some ways. Some ways it might not be but in that case it was like okay yeah because if the phone rings I'd rather answer my phone than be looking at the app. >> Right, can I read it or can I just see it. You know the degree of the access too is very confusing. >> Yeah and I think in terms of the other issues that you're raising here about how the value exchange on data, I think the internet of things is really going to play a big role in this because it's really... You know in the current world it's about you know data, delivering ads, those kinds of things, making the experience more customized. But in IoT where you're talking about wearables or fitness or those kinds of things, or thermostats in your home, your data really drives that. So in order for those devices to really work well they have to have data about you. And that's where I think customers will really have to give great thought to. You know is that a good value proposition, right? I mean, do I want to share my data about when I come and leave every day just so my thermostat you know can turn on and off. And I think those are you know can be conscience decisions about when you're implementing that kind of technology. >> Right, so there's another interesting tack I'd love to get your opinion on. You know we see Flo from the Progressive commercials advertising to stick the USB in your cigarette lighter and we'll give you cheaper rates because now we know if you stop at stop signs or not. What's funny to me is that phone already knows whether you stop at stop signs or not and it already knows that you take 18 trips to 7-Eleven on a Saturday afternoon and you're sitting on your couch the balance of the time. As that information that's there somehow gets exposed and potentially runs into say healthcare mandated requirement from the company that you must wear Fitbits so now we know you're spending too much time at the 7-Eleven and on your couch and how that impacts your health insurance and stuff. And that's going to crash right into HIPAA. It just seems like there's this huge kind of collision coming from you know I can provide better service to people at the good end of the scale, and say aggregated risk models, but then what happens to the poor people at the other end? >> Well, I think that's why you have to have opt in, right? I think you can't make these things mandatory necessarily. And I think people have to be extremely aware of when their data is being collected and how it's being used. And so, you know the example of like the car insurance, I mean they can only, really should only be able to access that data about where you're going if you sign up to do that right? And if they want to say to you, hey Michael we might give you a better rate if we can track your, you know driving habits for a couple of weeks then that should be my choice right to give that data. Maybe my rates might be impacted if I don't but I can make that choice myself and should be allowed to make that choice myself. >> So it's funny, the opt in and opt out, so right now from your point of view what do you see in terms of the percentage of kind of opt in opt out on these privacy issues? Where is it and where should it be? >> Well I would like to see some more granular controls for the consumer in general right. I would like to see... And I said a little bit earlier a lot more transparency and ease of access to what's being collected about you and what's being used. You know outside of the formal legal process, obviously you know companies have to follow the law. They have to comply. They have to be, you know write these long EULAs or privacy policies in order to really reflect what they're doing. But they should be talking to their customers and understanding what's the most important thing that you want to know about my service before you sign up for it. And help people understand that and navigate their way through it. And I think in a lot of cases consumers will click yeah let's do it but they should do that really knowingly. If opting in is you're opting in it should be done with true consent right. >> Okay, so before I let you go just share some best practices, tips and tricks, you know kind of at least the top level what people should be thinking about, what they should be doing. >> Yeah, so we really, you know in this kind of space we look at a couple things. One, personal informations like money value and protect it. That really means being thoughtful about what information you share, when you share it, who you share it with. Own your online presence, this is really important. Consumers have an active role in how they interact with the internet. Use the settings that are there right. Use the safety and security or privacy and security settings that are in the services that you have. And then, actually a lot of this is behavioral. What you share is really important yourself so share with care right. I mean be thoughtful about the kinds of information that you put out there about yourself. Be thoughtful about the kind of information that you put about your friends and family. Realize that every single one of us in this digital world is entrusted with personal information about people much more than we used to be in the past. We have that responsibility to safeguard what other people give to us and that should be the common goal around the internet. >> I think we have to have you at the bullying and harassment convention down the road. Great insight Michael and really appreciate it. Have a great day today. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of terrific content that comes out. And for people to get more information go to the National Cyber Security Alliance. Thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. He's Michael Kaiser. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching.