>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Hey guys, welcome back to the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We are live in Las Vegas at MGM Grand Hotel, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, covering our first time covering Palo Alto Ignite. 22 in person. Dave, we've had some great conversations so far. We've got two days of wall to wall coverage. We're gonna be talking with Palo Alto execs, leaders, customers, partners, and we're gonna be talking about the partner ecosystem >>Next. Wow. Super important. You know, it's funny you talk about for a minute, you didn't know where we were. I, I came to Vegas in May. I feel like I never left two weeks ago reinvent, which was I, I thought the most awesome reinvent ever. And it was really all about the ecosystem and the marketplace. So super excited to have that >>Conversation. Yeah, we've got Wet Whit Krump joining us, director of America's business development worldwide channels and customer programs at AWS marketplace. Wet, welcome to the Cube. Great to have >>You. Thanks for having me. Give >>Us a, you got a big title there. Give us a little bit of flavor of your scope of work at aws. >>Yeah, sure. So I, I've been with the marketplace team now almost eight years and originally founded our channel programs. And my scope has expanded to not just cover channels, but all things related to customers. So if you think about marketplace having sort of two sides, one being very focused on the isv, I tend to manage all things related to our in customer and our, our channel partners. >>What are some of the feedback that you're getting from customers and channel partners as the marketplace has has evolved so much? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's been interesting to watch over the course of the years, getting to see it start its infancy and grow up. One of the things that we hear often from customers and from our channel partners, and maybe not so directly, is it's not about finding the things they necessarily want to buy, although that's important, but it's the actual act of how they're able to purchase things and making that a much more streamlined process, especially in large enterprises where there's a lot of complexity. We wanna make that a lot simple, simpler for our customers. >>I mean, vendor management is such a hassle, right? But, so when I come into the marketplace, it's all there. I gotta console, it's integrated, I choose what I want. The billing is simplified. How has that capability evolved since the time that you've been at aws and where do you, where do you want to take it? >>Yeah, so when we, we first started Marketplace, it was really a pay as you go model customer come, they buy whatever, you know, whatever the, the whatever the solution was. And then it was, you know, charged by the hour and then the year. And one of the things that we discovered through customer and partner feedback was especially when they're dealing with large enterprise purchases, you know, they want to be able to instantiate those custom price and terms, you know, into that contract while enjoying the benefits of, of marketplace. And that's been, I think the biggest evolution started in 2017 with private offers, 2018 with consulting partner private offers. And then we've added things on over time to streamline procurement for, for >>Customers. So one of the hottest topics right now, everybody wants to talk about the macro and the headwinds and everything else, but when you talk to customers like, look, I gotta do more with less, less, that's the big theme. Yeah. And, and I wanna optimize my spend. Cloud allows me to do that because I can dial down, I can push storage to, to lower tiers. There's a lot of different things that I can do. Yeah. What are the techniques that people are using in the ecosystem Yeah. To bring in the partner cost optimization. Yeah. >>And so one of the key things that, that partners are, are, are doing for customers, they act as that trusted advisor. And, you know, when using marketplace either directly or through a partner, you know, customers are able to really save money through a licensing flexibility. They're also able to streamline their procurement. And then if there's an at-risk spin situation, they're able to, to manage that at-risk spend by combining marketplace and AWS spin into into one, you know, basically draws down their commitments to, to the company. >>And we talk about ask at-risk spend, you might talk about user or lose IT type of spend, right? Yeah. And so you, you increase the optionality in terms of where you can get value from your cloud spend. That's >>All right. Customers are thinking about their, their IT spend more strategically now more than ever. And so they're not just thinking about how do I buy infrastructure here and then software here, data services, they wanna combine this into one place. It's a lot less to keep up with a lot, a lot less overhead for them. But also just the simplification that you alluded to earlier around, you know, all the billing and vendor management is, and now in one, one streamlined, one streamlined process. Talk >>About that as a facilitator of organizations being able to reduce their risk profile. >>Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that, that came out earlier this year with Forrester was a to were total economic impact studies for both an ISV and for the end customer. But there was also a thought leadership study done where they surveyed over 700 customers worldwide to sort of get their thoughts on procurement and risk profile management. And, and one of the things that was really, you know, really surprising was is was that, you know, I guess it was like over 78% of of respondents DEF stated that they didn't feel like their, their companies had a really well-defined governance model and that over half of software and data purchases actually went outside of procurement. And so the companies aren't really able to, don't, they don't really have eyes on all of this spin and it's substantial >>And that's a, a huge risk for the organization. >>Yeah. Huge risk for the organization. And, and you know, half of the respondents stated outright that like they viewed marketplaces a way for them to reduce their risk profile because they, they were able to have a better governance model around that. >>So what's the business case can take us through that. How, how should a customer think about that? So, okay, I get that the procurement department likes it and the CFO probably likes it, but how, what, what's the dynamic around the business? So if I'm a, let's say I'm, I'm a bus, I'm a business person, I'm a, and running the process, I got my little, I get my procurement reach around. Yeah. What does the data suggest that what's in it from me, right? From a company wide standpoint, you know, what are the, maybe the Forester guys address this. So yeah, that overall business case I think is important. >>Yeah, I think, I think one of the big headlines for the end customer is because of license flexibility is that is is about a 10% cost savings in, in license cost. They're able to right size their purchases to buy the things they actually need. They're not gonna have these big overarching ELAs. There's gonna be a lot of other things in there that, that they don't, they don't really aren't gonna really directly use. You're talking about shelfware, you know, that sort of the classic term buy something, it never gets used, you know, also from just a, a getting things done perspective, big piece of feedback from customers is the contracting process takes a long time. It takes several months, especially for a large purchase. And a lot of those discussions are very repetitive. You know, you're talking about the same things over and over again. And we actually built a feature called standardized contract where we talked to a number of customers and ISVs distilled a contract down into a, a largely a set of terms that both sides already agreed to. And it cuts that, that contract time down by 90%. So if you're a legal team in a company, there's only so many of you and you have a lot of things to get done. If you can shave 90% off your time, that that's, that's now you can now work on a lot of other things for the, the corporation. Right. >>A lot of business impact there. You think faster time to value, faster time to market workforce optimization. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it, you know, from an ISV standpoint, the measurement is they're, they're able to close deals about 40% faster, which is great for the isv. I mean obviously they love that. But if you're a customer, you're actually getting the innovative technologies you need 40% faster. So you can actually do the work you want to take it to your customers and drive the business. >>You guys recently launched, what is it, vendor Insights? Yeah. Talk a little bit about that, the value. What are some of the things that you're seeing with that? >>Yeah, so that goes into the, the onboarding value add of marketplaces. The number of things that go into, to cutting that time according to Forrester by 75%. But Vendor Insights was based on a key piece, offa impact from customers. So, you know, marketplace is used for, one of the reasons is discoverability by customers, Hey, what is the broader landscape? Look for example of security or storage partners, you know, trying to, trying to understand what is even available. And then the double click is, alright, well how does that company, or how does that vendor fit into my risk profile? You know, understanding what their compliance metrics are, things of that nature. And so historically they would have to, a customer would've to go to an ISV and say, all right, I want you to fill out this form, you know that my questionnaire. And so they would trade this back and forth as they have questions. Now with vendor insights, a customer can actually subscribe to this and they're able to actually see the risk profile of that vendor from the inside out, you know, from the inside of their SaaS application, what does it look like on a real time basis? And they can go back and look at that whenever they want. And you know, the, the, the feedback since the launch has been fantastic. And that, and I think that helps us double down on the already the, the onboarding benefits that we are providing customers. >>This, this, I wanna come back to this idea of cost optimization and, and try to tie it into predictability. You know, a lot of people, you know, complain, oh, I got surprised at the end of the month. So if I understand it wit by, by leveraging the marketplace and the breadth that you have in the marketplace, I can say, okay, look, I'm gonna spend X amount on tech. Yeah. And, and this approach allows me to say, all right, because right now procurement or historically procurement's been a bunch of stove pipes, I can't take from here and easily put it over there. Right. You're saying that this not only addresses the sort of cost optimization, does it also address the predictability challenge? >>Yeah, and I, I think another way to describe that is, is around cost controls. And you know, just from a reporting perspective, you know, we, we have what are called cost utilization reports or curve files. And we provide those to customers anytime they want and they can load those into Tableau, use whatever analysis tools that they want to be able to use. And so, and then you can actually tag usage in those reports. And what we're really talking about is helping customers adopt thin op practices. So, you know, develop directly for the cloud customers are able to understand, okay, who's using what, when and where. So everyone's informed that creates a really collaborative environment. It also holds people accountable for their spin. So that, you know, again, talking about shelfware, we bought things we're not gonna use or we're overusing people are using software that they probably don't really need to. And so that's, that adds to that predictable is everyone has great visibility into what's happening. And there's >>Another, I mean, of course saving money is, is, is in vogue right now because you know, the headwinds and the economics, et cetera. But there's also another side of the equation, which is, I mean, I see this a lot. You know, the CFO says financial people, why is our cloud bill so high? Well it's because we're actually driving all this revenue. And so, you know, you've seen it so many so often in companies, you know, the, the spreadsheet analysis says, oh, cut that. Well, what happens to revenue if you cut that? Right? Yeah. So with that visibility, the answer may be, well actually if we double down on that, yeah, we're actually gonna make more money cuz we actually have a margin on this and it's, it's got operating leverage. So if we double that, you know, we could, so that kind of cross organization communication to make better decisions, I think is another key factor. Yeah. >>Huge impact there. Talk ultimately about how the buyer's journey seems to have been really transformed >>The >>Correct. Right? So if you're, if you're a buyer, you know, initially to your point is, you know, I'm just looking for a point solution, right? And then you move on to the next one and the next one. And now, you know, working with our teams and using the platform, you know, and frankly customers are thinking more strategically about their IT spend holistically. The conversations that we're having with us is, it's not about how do I find the solution today, but here's my forward looking software spend, or I'm going through a migration, I wanna rationalize the software portfolio I have today as I'm gonna lift and shift it to aws. You know, what is going to make the trip? What are we gonna discard entirely because it's not really optimized for the cloud. Or there's that shelf wheel component, which is, hey, you know, maybe 15 to 25% of my portfolio, it's just not even getting utilized. And that, and that's a sunk cost to your point, which is, you know, that's, that's money I could be using on something that really impacts the bottom line in various areas of the business. Right. >>What would you say is the number one request you get or feedback you get from the end customers? And how is that different from what you hear from the channel partners? How aligned or Yeah. Are those >>Vectors? I would say from a customer perspective, one of the key things I hear about is around visibility of spin, right? And I was just talking about these reports and you know, using cost optimization tools, being able to use features like identity and access management, managing entitlements, private marketplaces. Basically them being able to have a stronger governance model in the cloud. For one thing, it's, it's, you know, keeping everybody on track like some of the points I was talking about earlier, but also cost, cost optimization around, you know, limiting vendor sprawl. Are we actually really using all the things that we need? And then from a channel partner perspective, you know, some of the things I talked about earlier about that 40% faster sales cycle, you know, that that TEI or the total economic impact study that was done by Forrester was, was built for the isv. >>But if you're a channel partner sitting between the customer and the isv, you kind of get to, you get a little bit of the best of both worlds, right? You're acting as that, you're acting as that that advisor. And so if you're a channel partner, the procurement streamlining is a huge benefit because the, you know, like you said, saving money is in vogue right now. You're trying to do more with less. So if you're thinking about 20, 27% faster win rates, 40% faster time to close, and you're the customer who's trying to impact the bottom line by, by innovating more, more quickly, those two pieces of feedback are really coming together and meeting in, in the middle >>Throughout 2021, or sorry, 2022, our survey partner, etr Enterprise Technology Research has asked their panel a question is what's your strategy for, you know, doing more with less? By far the number one response has been consolidating redundant vendors. Yes. And then optimizing cloud was, you know, second, but, but way, way lower than that. The number from last survey went from 34%. It's now up to 44% in the January survey, which is in the field, which they gave me a glimpse to last night. So you're seeing dramatic uptick Yeah. In that point. Yeah. And then you guys are helping, >>We, we definitely are. I mean, it, there's the reporting piece so they have a better visibility of what they're doing. And then you think about a, a feature like private marketplace and manage entitlements. So private marketplace enables a customer to create their own private marketplace as the name states where they can limit access to it for certain types of software to the actual in customer who needs to use that software. And so, you know, not everybody needs a license to software X, right? And so that helps with the sprawl comment to your point, that's, that's on the increase, right? Am I actually spending money on things that we need to use? >>But also on the consolidation front, you, we, we talked with nikesh an hour or so ago, he was mentioning on stage, if you, if you just think of this number of security tools or cybersecurity tools that an organization has on its network, 30 to 50. And we were talking about, well, how does Palo Alto Networks what's realistic in terms of consolidation? But it sounds like what you're doing in the marketplace is giving organizations the visibility, correct, for sure. Into what they're running, usage spend, et cetera, to help facilitate ultimately at some point facilitate a strategic consolidation. >>It's, that's exactly right. And if you, you think about cost optimization, our procurement features, you know, the, the practice that we're trying to help customers around, around finops, it's all about helping customers build a, a modern procurement practice and supply chain. And so that helps with, with that point exactly. The keynotes >>Point. Exactly. So last question for you. What, what's next? What can we expect? >>Oh, so what's next for me is, you know, I, I really want to, you know, my channel business for example, you know, I want to think about enabling new types of partners. So if we've worked really heavily with resellers, we worked very heavily with Palo Alto on the reseller community, how are we bringing in more services partners of various types? You know, the gsi, the distributors, cloud service providers, managed security service providers was in a keynote yesterday listening to Palo Alto talk about their five routes to market. And, you know, they had these bubbles. And so I was like, gosh, that's exactly how I'm thinking about the business is how am I expanding my own footprint to customers that have deeper, I mean, excuse me, to partners that have deeper levels of cloud knowledge, can be more of that advisor, help customers really understand how to maximize their business on aws. And, and you know, my job is to really help facilitate that, that innovative technology through those partners. >>So sounds like powerful force, that ecosystem. Exactly. Great alignment. AWS and Palo Alto, thank you so much for joining us with, we >>Appreciate, thanks for having >>With what's going on at aws, the partner network, the mp, and all that good stuff. That's really the value in it for customers, ISVs and channel partners. I like. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. >>Our guests and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Lee Leer in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Good morning fellow nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent. We are live from the show floor here in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with my fabulous co-host John Furrier. Day two keynotes are rolling. >>Yeah. What do you thinking this? This is the day where everything comes, so the core gets popped off the bottle, all the announcements start flowing out tomorrow. You hear machine learning from swee lot more in depth around AI probably. And then developers with Verner Vos, the CTO who wrote the seminal paper in in early two thousands around web service that becames. So again, just another great year of next level cloud. Big discussion of data in the keynote bulk of the time was talking about data and business intelligence, business transformation easier. Is that what people want? They want the easy button and we're gonna talk a lot about that in this segment. I'm really looking forward to this interview. >>Easy button. We all want the >>Easy, we want the easy button. >>I love that you brought up champagne. It really feels like a champagne moment for the AWS community as a whole. Being here on the floor feels a bit like the before times. I don't want to jinx it. Our next guest, Scott Castle, from Si Sense. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you feeling? How's the show for you going so far? Oh, >>This is exciting. It's really great to see the changes that are coming in aws. It's great to see the, the excitement and the activity around how we can do so much more with data, with compute, with visualization, with reporting. It's fun. >>It is very fun. I just got a note. I think you have the coolest last name of anyone we've had on the show so far, castle. Oh, thank you. I'm here for it. I'm sure no one's ever said that before, but I'm so just in case our audience isn't familiar, tell us about >>Soy Sense is an embedded analytics platform. So we're used to take the queries and the analysis that you can power off of Aurora and Redshift and everything else and bring it to the end user in the applications they already know how to use. So it's all about embedding insights into tools. >>Embedded has been a, a real theme. Nobody wants to, it's I, I keep using the analogy of multiple tabs. Nobody wants to have to leave where they are. They want it all to come in there. Yep. Now this space is older than I think everyone at this table bis been around since 1958. Yep. How do you see Siente playing a role in the evolution there of we're in a different generation of analytics? >>Yeah, I mean, BI started, as you said, 58 with Peter Lu's paper that he wrote for IBM kind of get became popular in the late eighties and early nineties. And that was Gen one bi, that was Cognos and Business Objects and Lotus 1 23 think like green and black screen days. And the way things worked back then is if you ran a business and you wanted to get insights about that business, you went to it with a big check in your hand and said, Hey, can I have a report? And they'd come back and here's a report. And it wasn't quite right. You'd go back and cycle, cycle, cycle and eventually you'd get something. And it wasn't great. It wasn't all that accurate, but it's what we had. And then that whole thing changed in about two, 2004 when self-service BI became a thing. And the whole idea was instead of going to it with a big check in your hand, how about you make your own charts? >>And that was totally transformative. Everybody started doing this and it was great. And it was all built on semantic modeling and having very fast databases and data warehouses. Here's the problem, the tools to get to those insights needed to serve both business users like you and me and also power users who could do a lot more complex analysis and transformation. And as the tools got more complicated, the barrier to entry for everyday users got higher and higher and higher to the point where now you look, look at Gartner and Forester and IDC this year. They're all reporting in the same statistic. Between 10 and 20% of knowledge workers have learned business intelligence and everybody else is just waiting in line for a data analyst or a BI analyst to get a report for them. And that's why the focus on embedded is suddenly showing up so strong because little startups have been putting analytics into their products. People are seeing, oh my, this doesn't have to be hard. It can be easy, it can be intuitive, it can be native. Well why don't I have that for my whole business? So suddenly there's a lot of focus on how do we embed analytics seamlessly? How do we embed the investments people make in machine learning in data science? How do we bring those back to the users who can actually operationalize that? Yeah. And that's what Tysons does. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Savannah, you know, data processing used to be what the IT department used to be called back in the day data processing. Now data processing is what everyone wants to do. There's a ton of data we got, we saw the keynote this morning at Adam Lesky. There was almost a standing of vision, big applause for his announcement around ML powered forecasting with Quick Site Cube. My point is people want automation. They want to have this embedded semantic layer in where they are not having all the process of ETL or all the muck that goes on with aligning the data. All this like a lot of stuff that goes on. How do you make it easier? >>Well, to be honest, I, I would argue that they don't want that. I think they, they think they want that, cuz that feels easier. But what users actually want is they want the insight, right? When they are about to make a decision. If you have a, you have an ML powered forecast, Andy Sense has had that built in for years, now you have an ML powered forecast. You don't need it two weeks before or a week after in a report somewhere. You need it when you're about to decide do I hire more salespeople or do I put a hundred grand into a marketing program? It's putting that insight at the point of decision that's important. And you don't wanna be waiting to dig through a lot of infrastructure to find it. You just want it when you need it. What's >>The alternative from a time standpoint? So real time insight, which is what you're saying. Yep. What's the alternative? If they don't have that, what's >>The alternative? Is what we are currently seeing in the market. You hire a bunch of BI analysts and data analysts to do the work for you and you hire enough that your business users can ask questions and get answers in a timely fashion. And by the way, if you're paying attention, there's not enough data analysts in the whole world to do that. Good luck. I am >>Time to get it. I really empathize with when I, I used to work for a 3D printing startup and I can, I have just, I mean, I would call it PTSD flashbacks of standing behind our BI guy with my list of queries and things that I wanted to learn more about our e-commerce platform in our, in our marketplace and community. And it would take weeks and I mean this was only in 2012. We're not talking 1958 here. We're talking, we're talking, well, a decade in, in startup years is, is a hundred years in the rest of the world life. But I think it's really interesting. So talk to us a little bit about infused and composable analytics. Sure. And how does this relate to embedded? Yeah. >>So embedded analytics for a long time was I want to take a dashboard I built in a BI environment. I wanna lift it and shift it into some other application so it's close to the user and that is the right direction to go. But going back to that statistic about how, hey, 10 to 20% of users know how to do something with that dashboard. Well how do you reach the rest of users? Yeah. When you think about breaking that up and making it more personalized so that instead of getting a dashboard embedded in a tool, you get individual insights, you get data visualizations, you get controls, maybe it's not even actually a visualization at all. Maybe it's just a query result that influences the ordering of a list. So like if you're a csm, you have a list of accounts in your book of business, you wanna rank those by who's priorities the most likely to churn. >>Yeah. You get that. How do you get that most likely to churn? You get it from your BI system. So how, but then the question is, how do I insert that back into the application that CSM is using? So that's what we talk about when we talk about Infusion. And SI started the infusion term about two years ago and now it's being used everywhere. We see it in marketing from Click and Tableau and from Looker just recently did a whole launch on infusion. The idea is you break this up into very small digestible pieces. You put those pieces into user experiences where they're relevant and when you need them. And to do that, you need a set of APIs, SDKs, to program it. But you also need a lot of very solid building blocks so that you're not building this from scratch, you're, you're assembling it from big pieces. >>And so what we do aty sense is we've got machine learning built in. We have an LQ built in. We have a whole bunch of AI powered features, including a knowledge graph that helps users find what else they need to know. And we, we provide those to our customers as building blocks so that they can put those into their own products, make them look and feel native and get that experience. In fact, one of the things that was most interesting this last couple of couple of quarters is that we built a technology demo. We integrated SI sensee with Office 365 with Google apps for business with Slack and MS teams. We literally just threw an Nlq box into Excel and now users can go in and say, Hey, which of my sales people in the northwest region are on track to meet their quota? And they just get the table back in Excel. They can build charts of it and PowerPoint. And then when they go to their q do their QBR next week or week after that, they just hit refresh to get live data. It makes it so much more digestible. And that's the whole point of infusion. It's bigger than just, yeah. The iframe based embedding or the JavaScript embedding we used to talk about four or five years >>Ago. APIs are very key. You brought that up. That's gonna be more of the integration piece. How does embedable and composable work as more people start getting on board? It's kind of like a Yeah. A flywheel. Yes. What, how do you guys see that progression? Cause everyone's copying you. We see that, but this is a, this means it's standard. People want this. Yeah. What's next? What's the, what's that next flywheel benefit that you guys coming out with >>Composability, fundamentally, if you read the Gartner analysis, right, they, when they talk about composable, they're talking about building pre-built analytics pieces in different business units for, for different purposes. And being able to plug those together. Think of like containers and services that can, that can talk to each other. You have a composition platform that can pull it into a presentation layer. Well, the presentation layer is where I focus. And so the, so for us, composable means I'm gonna have formulas and queries and widgets and charts and everything else that my, that my end users are gonna wanna say almost minority report style. If I'm not dating myself with that, I can put this card here, I can put that chart here. I can set these filters here and I get my own personalized view. But based on all the investments my organization's made in data and governance and quality so that all that infrastructure is supporting me without me worrying much about it. >>Well that's productivity on the user side. Talk about the software angle development. Yeah. Is your low code, no code? Is there coding involved? APIs are certainly the connective tissue. What's the impact to Yeah, the >>Developer. Oh. So if you were working on a traditional legacy BI platform, it's virtually impossible because this is an architectural thing that you have to be able to do. Every single tool that can make a chart has an API to embed that chart somewhere. But that's not the point. You need the life cycle automation to create models, to modify models, to create new dashboards and charts and queries on the fly. And be able to manage the whole life cycle of that. So that in your composable application, when you say, well I want chart and I want it to go here and I want it to do this and I want it to be filtered this way you can interact with the underlying platform. And most importantly, when you want to use big pieces like, Hey, I wanna forecast revenue for the next six months. You don't want it popping down into Python and writing that yourself. >>You wanna be able to say, okay, here's my forecasting algorithm. Here are the inputs, here's the dimensions, and then go and just put it somewhere for me. And so that's what you get withy sense. And there aren't any other analytics platforms that were built to do that. We were built that way because of our architecture. We're an API first product. But more importantly, most of the legacy BI tools are legacy. They're coming from that desktop single user, self-service, BI environment. And it's a small use case for them to go embedding. And so composable is kind of out of reach without a complete rebuild. Right? But with SI senses, because our bread and butter has always been embedding, it's all architected to be API first. It's integrated for software developers with gi, but it also has all those low code and no code capabilities for business users to do the minority report style thing. And it's assemble endless components into a workable digital workspace application. >>Talk about the strategy with aws. You're here at the ecosystem, you're in the ecosystem, you're leading product and they have a strategy. We know their strategy, they have some stuff, but then the ecosystem goes faster and ends up making a better product in most of the cases. If you compare, I know they'll take me to school on that, but I, that's pretty much what we report on. Mongo's doing a great job. They have databases. So you kind of see this balance. How are you guys playing in the ecosystem? What's the, what's the feedback? What's it like? What's going on? >>AWS is actually really our best partner. And the reason why is because AWS has been clear for many, many years. They build componentry, they build services, they build infrastructure, they build Redshift, they build all these different things, but they need, they need vendors to pull it all together into something usable. And fundamentally, that's what Cient does. I mean, we didn't invent sequel, right? We didn't invent jackal or dle. These are not, these are underlying analytics technologies, but we're taking the bricks out of the briefcase. We're assembling it into something that users can actually deploy for their use cases. And so for us, AWS is perfect because they focus on the hard bits. The the underlying technologies we assemble those make them usable for customers. And we get the distribution. And of course AWS loves that. Cause it drives more compute and it drives more, more consumption. >>How much do they pay you to say that >>Keynote, >>That was a wonderful pitch. That's >>Absolutely, we always say, hey, they got a lot of, they got a lot of great goodness in the cloud, but they're not always the best at the solutions and that they're trying to bring out, and you guys are making these solutions for customers. Yeah. That resonates with what they got with Amazon. For >>Example, we, last year we did a, a technology demo with Comprehend where we put comprehend inside of a semantic model and we would compile it and then send it back to Redshift. And it takes comprehend, which is a very cool service, but you kind of gotta be a coder to use it. >>I've been hear a lot of hype about the semantic layer. What is, what is going on with that >>Semantec layer is what connects the actual data, the tables in your database with how they're connected and what they mean so that a user like you or me who's saying I wanna bar chart with revenue over time can just work with revenue and time. And the semantic layer translates between what we did and what the database knows >>About. So it speaks English and then they converts it to data language. It's >>Exactly >>Right. >>Yeah. It's facilitating the exchange of information. And, and I love this. So I like that you actually talked about it in the beginning, the knowledge map and helping people figure out what they might not know. Yeah. I, I am not a bi analyst by trade and I, I don't always know what's possible to know. Yeah. And I think it's really great that you're doing that education piece. I'm sure, especially working with AWS companies, depending on their scale, that's gotta be a big part of it. How much is the community play a role in your product development? >>It's huge because I'll tell you, one of the challenges in embedding is someone who sees an amazing experience in outreach or in seismic. And to say, I want that. And I want it to be exactly the way my product is built, but I don't wanna learn a lot. And so you, what you want do is you want to have a community of people who have already built things who can help lead the way. And our community, we launched a new version of the SES community in early 2022 and we've seen a 450% growth in the c in that community. And we've gone from an average of one response, >>450%. I just wanna put a little exclamation point on that. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. We, >>We've tripled our organic activity. So now if you post this Tysons community, it used to be, you'd get one response maybe from us, maybe from from a customer. Now it's up to three. And it's continuing to trend up. So we're, it's >>Amazing how much people are willing to help each other. If you just get in the platform, >>Do it. It's great. I mean, business is so >>Competitive. I think it's time for the, it's time. I think it's time. Instagram challenge. The reels on John. So we have a new thing. We're gonna run by you. Okay. We just call it the bumper sticker for reinvent. Instead of calling it the Instagram reels. If we're gonna do an Instagram reel for 30 seconds, what would be your take on what's going on this year at Reinvent? What you guys are doing? What's the most important story that you would share with folks on Instagram? >>You know, I think it's really what, what's been interesting to me is the, the story with Redshift composable, sorry. No, composable, Redshift Serverless. Yeah. One of the things I've been >>Seeing, we know you're thinking about composable a lot. Yes. Right? It's, it's just, it's in there, it's in your mouth. Yeah. >>So the fact that Redshift Serverless is now kind becoming the defacto standard, it changes something for, for my customers. Cuz one of the challenges with Redshift that I've seen in, in production is if as people use it more, you gotta get more boxes. You have to manage that. The fact that serverless is now available, it's, it's the default means it now people are just seeing Redshift as a very fast, very responsive repository. And that plays right into the story I'm telling cuz I'm telling them it's not that hard to put some analysis on top of things. So for me it's, it's a, maybe it's a narrow Instagram reel, but it's an >>Important one. Yeah. And that makes it better for you because you get to embed that. Yeah. And you get access to better data. Faster data. Yeah. Higher quality, relevant, updated. >>Yep. Awesome. As it goes into that 80% of knowledge workers, they have a consumer great expectation of experience. They're expecting that five ms response time. They're not waiting 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 seconds. They're not trained on theola expectations. And so it's, it matters a lot. >>Final question for you. Five years out from now, if things progress the way they're going with more innovation around data, this front end being very usable, semantic layer kicks in, you got the Lambda and you got serverless kind of coming in, helping out along the way. What's the experience gonna look like for a user? What's it in your mind's eye? What's that user look like? What's their experience? >>I, I think it shifts almost every role in a business towards being a quantitative one. Talking about, Hey, this is what I saw. This is my hypothesis and this is what came out of it. So here's what we should do next. I, I'm really excited to see that sort of scientific method move into more functions in the business. Cuz for decades it's been the domain of a few people like me doing strategy, but now I'm seeing it in CSMs, in support people and sales engineers and line engineers. That's gonna be a big shift. Awesome. >>Thank >>You Scott. Thank you so much. This has been a fantastic session. We wish you the best at si sense. John, always pleasure to share the, the stage with you. Thank you to everybody who's attuning in, tell us your thoughts. We're always eager to hear what, what features have got you most excited. And as you know, we will be live here from Las Vegas at reinvent from the show floor 10 to six all week except for Friday. We'll give you Friday off with John Furrier. My name's Savannah Peterson. We're the cube, the the, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

foreign greetings from San Francisco thecube is live this is our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here we're going to be talking with some ladies from Rackspace next please welcome Adriana Bustamante VP of strategic alliances and Hannah Deuce director of strategic alliances from Rackspace it's great to have you on the program thank you so much for having us good afternoon good morning is it lunchtime already almost almost yes and it's great to be back in person we were just talking about the keynote yesterday that we were in and it was standing room only people are ready to be back they're ready to be hearing from VMware it's ecosystem its Partners it's Community yes talk to us Adriana about what Rackspace is doing with Dell and VMware particularly in the healthcare space sure no so for us Partnerships are a big foundation to how we operate as a company and um and I have the privilege of doing it for over over 16 years so we've been looking after the dell and VMware part partnership ourselves personally for the last three years but they've been long-standing partners for for us and and how do we go and drive more meaningful joint Solutions together so Rackspace you know been around since since 98 we've seen such an evolution of coming becoming more of this multi-cloud transformation agile Global partner and we have a lot of customers that fall in lots of different verticals from retail to public sector into Healthcare but we started noticing and what we're trying trying to drive as a company is how do we drive more specialized Solutions and because of the pandemic and because of post-pandemic and everyone really trying to to figure out what the new normal is addressing different clients we saw that need increasing and we wanted to Rally together with our most strategic alliances to do more Hannah talk about obviously the the pandemic created such problems for every industry but but Healthcare being front and center it still is talk about some of the challenges that Healthcare organizations are coming to Rackspace going help yeah common theme that we've heard from some of our large providers Healthcare Providers has been helped me do more with less which we're all trying to do as we navigate The New Normal but in that space we found the opportunity to really leverage some of our expertise long-term expertise and that the talent and the resource pool that we had to really help in a some of the challenges that are being faced at a resource shortage Talent shortage and so Rackspace is able to Leverage What what we've done for many many years and really tailor it to the outcomes that Health Care Providers are needing nowadays that more with less Mantra runs across the gamut but a lot of it's been helped me modernize helped me get to that next phase I can't I can't I don't have the resources to DIY it myself anymore I need to figure out a more robust business continuity program and so helping with business continuity Dr you know third copies of just all all this data that's growing so it's not just covered pandemic driven but it's that's definitely driving the the need and the requirement to modernize so much quicker it's interesting that you mentioned rackspace's history and expertise in doing things and moving that forward and leveraging that pivoting focusing on specific environments to create something net new we've seen a lot of that here if you go back 10 years I don't know if that's the perfect date to go back to but if you go back 10 years ago you think about VMware where would we have expected VMware to be in this era of cloud we may have thought of things very very differently differently Rackspace a Pioneer in creating off-premises hey we will do this for you didn't even really call it Cloud at the time right but it was Cloud yeah and so the ability for entities like Rackspace like VMware we had a NetApp talking to us about stuff they're doing in the cloud 10 years ago if you I would say no they'd be they'll be gone they'll be gone so it's really really cool to see Rackspace making this transition and uh you know being aware of everything that's going on and focusing on the best value proposition moving forward I mean am I am I you know do I sound like somebody who would who would fit into the Rackspace culture right now or do I not get it yes you sound like a rocker we'll make you an honorary record that's what we call a Rackspace employees yes you know what we've noticed too and is budgets are moving those decision makers are moving so again 10 years ago just like you said you would be talking to sometimes a completely different Persona than we do than we do today and we've seen a shift more towards that business value we have a really unique ability to bring business and Technical conversations together I did a lot of work in the past of working with a lot of CMO and and digital transformation companies and so helping bring it and business seeing the same and how healthcare because budgets are living in different places and even across the board with Rackspace people are trying to drive more business outcomes business driven Solutions so the technical becomes the back end and really the ingredients to make all of that all of that happen and that's what we're helping to solve and it's a lot it's very fast paced everyone wants to be agile now and so they're leaning on us more and more to drive more services so if you've seen Rackspace evolve we're driving more of that advisement and those transformation service type discussions where where our original history was DNA was very much always embedded in driving a great experience now they're just wanting more from us more services help us how help us figure out the how Adriana comment on the outcomes that you're helping Healthcare organizations achieve as as we as we it's such a relatable tangible topic Healthcare is Right everybody's everybody's got somebody who's sick or you've been sick or whatnot what are some of those outcomes that we can ex that customers can expect to achieve with Rackspace and VMware oh great great question so very much I can't mentioned earlier it's how do I modernize how do I optimize how do I take the biggest advantage of the budgets and the landscape that I have I want to get to the Cloud we need to help our patients and get access to that data is this ready to go into the cloud is this not ready to go into the cloud you know how do we how do we help make sure we're taking care of our patients we're keeping things secure and accessible you know what else do you think is coming up yeah and one specific one uh sequencing genetic sequencing and so we've had this come up from a few different types of providers whether it's medical devices that they may provide to their end clients and an outcome that they're looking for is how do we get how do we leverage um here's rip here's what we do but now we have so many more people we need to give this access to we need them to be able to have access to the sequencing that all of this is doing all of these different entities are doing and the outcome that they're trying to get to to is more collaboration so so that way we can speed up in the face of a pandemic we can speed up those resolutions we could speed up to you know whether it's a vaccine needed or something that's going to address the next thing that might be coming you know um so that's a specific one I've heard that from a handful of different different um clients that that we work with and so trying to give them a Consolidated not trying to we are able to deliver them a Consolidated place that their application and tooling can run in and then all of these other entities can safely and securely access this data to do what they're going to do in their own spaces and then hopefully it helps the betterment of of of us globally like as humans in the healthcare space we all benefit from this so leveraging the technology to really drive a valuable outcome helps us all so so and by the way I like trying to because it conveys the proper level of humility that we all need to bring to this because it's complicated and anybody who looks you in the eye it pretends like they know exactly how to do it you need to run from those people no it is and and look that's where our partners become so significant we we know we're Best in Class for specific things but we rely on our Partnerships with Dell and VMware to bring their expertise to bring their tried and true technology to help us all together collectively deliver something good technology for good technology for good it is inherently good and it's nice when it's used for goodness it's nice when it's yeah yeah talk about security for a second you know we've seen the threat landscape change dramatically obviously nobody wants to be the next breach ransomware becoming a household term it's now a matter of when we get a head not F where has security gone in terms of conversations with customers going help us ensure that what we're doing is delivering data access to the right folks that need it at the right time in real time in a secure fashion no uh that's another good question in hot and burning so you know I think if we think about past conversations it was that nice Insurance offering that seemed like it came at a high cost if you really need it I've never been breached before um I'll get it when I when I need it but exactly to your point it's the win and not the if so what we're finding and also working with a nice ecosystem of Partners as well from anywhere from Akamai to cloudflare to BT it's how do we help ensure that there is the security as Hannah mentioned that we're delivering the right data access to the right people and permissions you know we're able to help meet multitude of compliance and regulations obviously health care and other regulated space as well we look to make sure that from our side of the house from the infrastructure that we have the right building blocks to help them Reach those compliance needs obviously it's a mutual partnership in maintaining that compliance and that we're able to provide guidance and best practices on to make sure that the data is living in a secure place that the people that need access to it get it when they when they need it and monitor those permissions and back to your complexity comment so more and more complex as we are a global global provider so when you start to talk to our teams in the UK and our our you know clients there specializing um kind of that Sovereign Cloud mentality of hey we need to have um we need to have a cloud that is built for the specific needs that reside within Healthcare by region so it's not just even I mean you know we're we're homegrown out of San Antonio Texas so like we know the U.S and have spent time here but we've been Global for many years so we just get down into the into the nitty-gritty to customize what's needed within each region well Hannah is that part of the Rackspace value proposition at large moving forward because frankly look if I if I want if I want something generic I can I can swipe credit card and and fire up some Services sure um moving forward this is something that is going to more characterize the Rackspace experience and I and I understand that the hesitancy to say hey it's complicated it's like I don't want to hear that I want to hear that it's easy it's like well okay we'll make it easy for you yes but it's still complicated is that okay that's the honest that's that's the honest yeah that's why you need help right that's why we need to talk about that because people people have a legitimate question why Rackspace yep and we don't I don't want to put you on the spot but no yeah but why why Rackspace you've talked a little bit about it already but kind of encapsulate it oh gosh so good good question why Rackspace it's because you can stand up [Laughter] well you can you do it there's many different options out there um and if I had a PowerPoint slide I'd show you this like lovely web of options of directions that you could go and what is Rackspace value it's that we come in and simplify it because we've had experience with this this same use case whatever somebody is bringing forward to us is typically something we've dealt with at numerous times and so we're repeating and speeding up the ability to simplify the complex and to deliver something more simplified well it may be complex within us and we're like working to get it done the outcome that we're delivering is is faster it's less expensive than dedicating all the resources yourself to do it and go invest in all of that that we've already built up and then we're able to deliver it in a more simplified manner it's like the duck analogy the feet below the water yes exactly and a lot of expertise as well yes a lot talk a little bit about the solution that that Dell VMware Rackspace are delivering to customers sure so when we think about um Healthcare clouds or Cloud specific to the healthcare industry you know there's some major players within that space that you think epic we'll just use them as an example this can play out with others but we are building out a custom or we have a custom clouds able to host epic and then provide services up through the Epic help application through partnership so that is broadening the the market for us in the sense that we can tailor what the what that end and with that healthcare provider needs uh do they do they have the expertise to manage the application okay you do that and then we will build out a custom fit Cloud for that application oh and you need all the adjacent things that come with it too so then we have reference architecture you know built out already to to tailor to whatever all those other 40 80 90 hundreds of applications that need to come with that and then and then you start to think about Imaging platforms so we have Imaging platforms available for those specific needs whether it's MRIs and things like that and then the long-term retention that's needed with that so all of these pieces that build out a healthcare ecosystem and those needs we've built those we've built those out and provide those two to our clients yesterday VMware was talking about Cloud chaos yes and and it's true you talk about the complexity and Dave talks about it too like acknowledging yes this is a very complex thing to do yeah there's just so many moving parts so many Dynamics so many people involved or lack thereof people they they then talked about kind of this this the goal of getting customers from cloud chaos to Cloud smart how does that message resonate with Rackspace and how are you helping customers get from simplifying the chaos to eventually get to that cloud smart goal so a lot of it I I believe is with the power of our alliances and I was talking about this earlier we really believe in creating those powerful ecosystems and Jay McBain former for Forester analyst talks about you know the people are going to come ahead really are serve as that orchestration layer of bringing everybody together so if you look at all of that cloud chaos and all of the different logos and the webs and which decisions to make you know the ones that can help simplify that bring it all together like we're going to need a little bit of this like baking a cake in some ways we're going to need a little bit of sugar we'll need this technology this technology and whoever is able to put it together in a clean and seamless way and as Hannah said you know we have specific use cases in different verticals Healthcare specifically and talking from the Imaging and the Epic helping them get hospitals and different you know smaller clinics get to the edge so we have all of the building blocks to get them what they need and we can't do that without Partners but we help simplify those outcomes for those customers yep so there's where they're Cloud smart so then they're like I want I want to be agile I want to work on my cost I want to be able to leverage a multi-cloud fashion because some things may may inherently need to be on Azure some things we inherently need to be on VMware how do we make them feel like they still have that modernized platform and Technology but still give the secure and access that they need right yeah we like to think of it as are you multi-cloud by accident or multi-cloud by Design and help you get to that multi-cloud by Design and leveraging the right yeah the right tools the right places and Dell was talking about that just that at Dell Technologies world just a couple months ago that most most organizations are multi-cloud by default not designed are you seeing any customers that are are able or how are you able to help customers go from that we're here by default for whatever reason acquisition growth.oit line of business and go from that default to a more strategic multi-cloud approach yes it takes planning and commitment you know you really need the business leaders and the technical leaders bought in and saying this is what I'm gonna do because it is a journey because exactly right M A is like inherited four different tools you have databases that kind of look similar but they're a little bit different but they serve four different things so at Rackspace we're able to help assess and we sit down with their teams we have very amazing rock star expertise that will come in and sit with the customers and say what are we trying to drive for it let's get a good assessment of the landscape and let's figure out what are you trying to get towards in your journey and looking at what's the best fit for that application from where it is now to where it is where it wants to be because we saw a lot of customers move to the cloud very quickly you know they went Cloud native very fast some of it made sense retailers who had the spikiness that completely made sense we had some customers though that we've seen move certain workloads they've been in the public Cloud now for a couple years but it was a static website it doesn't make as much sense anymore for certain things so we're able to help navigate all of those choices for them so it's interesting you just you just said something sort of offhand about having experts having them come in so if I am a customer and I have some outcome I want to achieve yes the people that I'm going to be talking to from Rackspace or from Rackspace and the people from Rackspace who are going to be working with the actual people who are deploying infrastructure are also Rackspace people so the interesting contrast there between other circumstances oftentimes is you may have a Global Systems integrator with smart people representing what a cloud provider is doing the perception if they try to make people perceive that okay everybody is working in lockstep but often there are disconnects between what the real capabilities are and what's being advertised so is that I mean I I know it's like a leading question it's like softball get your bats out but I mean isn't that an advantage you've got a single you know the saying used to be uh one throat to show now it's one back to pack because it's kind of Contour friendly yeah yeah but talk about that is that a real Advantage it does it really helps us because again this is our our this is our expertise this is where we where we live we're really close to the infrastructure we're great at the advisement on it we can help with those ongoing and day two management and Opera in operations and what it feels like to grow and scale so we lay this out cleanly and and clearly as possible if this is where we're really good we can we can help you in these areas but we do work with system integrators as well and part of our partner Community because they're working on sometimes the bigger overall Transformations and then we're staying look we understand this multi-cloud but it helps us because in the end we're doing that end to end for for them customer knows this is Rackspace and on hand and we we really strive to be very transparent in what it is that we want to drive and outcomes so sometimes at the time where it's like we're gonna talk about a certain new technology Dell might bring some of their Architects to the table we will say here is Dell with us we're doing that actively in the healthcare space today and it's all coming together but you know at the end of the day this is what Rackspace is going to drive and deliver from an end to end and we tap those people when needed so you don't have to worry about picking up the phone to call Dell or VMware so if I had worded the hard-hitting journalist question the right way it would have elicited the same responses that yeah yeah it drives accountability at the end of the day because what we advised on what we said now we got to go deliver yeah and it's it's all the same the same organization driving accountability so from a customer perspective they're engaging Rackspace who will then bring in dell and VMware as needed as we find the solution exactly we have all of the certification I mean the team the team is great on getting all of the certs because we're getting to handling all of the level one level two level three business they know who to call they have their dedicated account teams they have engagement managers that help them Drive what those bigger conversations are and they don't have to worry about the experts because we either have it on hand or we'll pull them in as needed if it's the bat phone we need to call awesome ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me today talking about what Rackspace is up to in the partner ecosystem space and specifically what you're doing to help Healthcare organizations transform and modernize we appreciate your insights and your thoughts yeah thank you for having us thank you pleasure for our guests and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022 we'll be back after a short break foreign [Music]

>>Welcome to the cubes dock, our main stage coverage here at DockerCon 2022. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We're here with cube alumni, a partner scene, the senior director of product and the developer platform at Google cloud, a partner. Great to see you. It's been a while how's things >>Great to see you, John. Thanks for having me. >>So obviously we've covered a lot about the Google's history and open source. If you go back, I mean go back generation 2000, it all started, it continues to continue to thrive the SDO, all the different projects you guys are around the future of containers and serverless all there. Give us the update. Why are customers choosing Google cloud? We're here at Docker con what's the big update from Google cloud's perspective from a, from a developer perspective? >>Well, John, uh, Google cloud has been, uh, the early cloud on containers, um, and by all measures from, we can, from what we can see, you know, it is the preferred cloud for container native workloads. Um, I think why our customers choosing cloud there's a, there's a few different reasons. Um, definitely one of the reasons is because it is a flexible and open platform. And I think that that is, uh, distinctive about Google cloud, as you mentioned, uh, many, many open source projects coming from Google and Google cloud in particular over the last 20 years, um, spanning, um, languages, um, you know, obviously, uh, the go programming language all the way to of course, Kubernetes. Um, and then, uh, more recently Isto and, uh, K native and many more, uh Tecton is one of the leading projects as well. Um, in the C I C D space. >>So I think that, uh, history is something that really attracts the developer population. It's also very, very important for enterprises that are, uh, modernizing and looking to accelerate their, uh, developer productivity. So that's been one major reason. I think the second major reason is really the security aspect, um, of the developer tool chain and in particular related to open source secure well, and I think the third, uh, reason that comes out, um, quite frequently when we, when we talk to our enterprise customers is Google cloud is unique in the multi-cloud space. Um, you know, one of the first, I think probably the first and, uh, only cloud provider to have a very strong multi-cloud strategy, uh, and that stems from the open source roots, but also, you know, uh, bringing more than just, uh, compute, bringing many of our data services also, uh, to the multi-cloud space. I think that's, those are the three reasons why, uh, developers often choose Google cloud. >>Yeah. And you see the multi-cloud also in a distributed computing environment. It's, I mean, multi-cloud is basically distributed computing where you've got hyperscalers and then edges emerging very quickly. Of course, we've talked about that in the past, on previous interviews, how security at the edge software opensource all coming together. Again, Kubernetes launched by Google contributed to the open source world that everyone knows that, or may not know that. Um, but, but that's key. Where do you see the container position come in? Because at the end of the day, containers is standard and now you've got Kubernetes and other parts wrapped around it. Where's container technology going in the coming, coming in the future years. Is it gonna be invisible? Is it gonna be programmable? What's your vision on that? >>This is an excellent question. And you're exactly right. You're seeing containers become mainstream. And some of the latest, uh, state of the, the state of the cloud business report, you're seeing, you know, 80% of enterprises, um, having some form of a container program and I've been involved in this industry since the very early days. So this is something we've been predicting, um, and it is happening even faster than expected. So that's becoming very mainstream, which is extremely exciting for us. Now you ask, you know, what is the future and what is the evolution of it? Um, so, and, and I think, uh, this is the right question because, um, you're seeing a lot of the future actually on Google cloud. Um, we're, we've won the, uh, Gartner and Forester quadrants as far as leader quadrants in, uh, you know, container offerings. And that's not just Kubernetes, of course, uh, Google Kubernetes engine has been, has been the leading area, but there's a whole host of offerings around that. >>Um, in particular I'd like to point out serverless containers with cloud run, as well as the entire DevOps pipeline around containers. And that's a big topic in the industry right now. It brings in, uh, security as related to, uh, developers. And then of course, uh, you know, providing an automated, secure pipeline for DevOps, um, as it relates to containers, we've had several announcements and, and, and a lot of success in this space. Uh, I, I can go through some of these things with cloud run, which is our serverless container offering. We've seen, uh, four X growth in adoption and, uh, consumption of that service last year in 2021. And that is continuing, uh, so it's very, very healthy and it is very much the reason customers are adopting. It is because they don't need to learn a lot of the underlying infrastructure. They don't need to manage any of the underlying infrastructure. >>There isn't necessarily a cluster to manage all of that is taken care of, uh, for them. And they can focus on their application. They can actually use, uh, make use of the benefits of containers, such as, uh, you know, scalability, um, such as, um, application awareness, uh, and such as a lot of the integrated tool chain for, uh, delivery for application delivery, right from your source repository into production, and then being able to bring out new versions of your application, test them, and then roll over. So this is kind of the new, uh, uh, generation I think is very much tied to the pandemic and what's happening in the world post pandemic, where developers are extremely important, developer productivity and, and fact developer work, life balance is extremely >>Important. Yeah. And I, and I think also one of the things that we're seeing to piggyback on that last comment, as well as your other points is developers have always been pulled to the front lines even 10 years ago. You saw the trend towards getting more closer to the customer now with cloud and edge and with open source being the innovation equation where entrepreneurs are starting projects, companies are starting projects, then they gotta get commercialized. So supply chain is a big discussion. We're hearing at Docker con we're hearing about shifting left of security data as code. You start to see the developer on the front lines in all aspects of this, and they want, they want security, they want efficiency, they want things in the pipeline. They don't wanna have to shift left, then come back again. So again, they starting to see this kind of productivity drive the business behavior of the companies cuz that's their, the value partners. That's the application side of cloud native. What's your thoughts for the developers who are doing that? What's in it for them with Google cloud? Why, why are you important to them? >>Yeah, and I think, uh, John, this is where, uh, developers, uh, tend to prefer Google cloud. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is, you know, we are very much, uh, centered around developers. Um, you know, my job is, uh, you know, Google cloud developer platform. And, uh, our goal is to provide ease of use the easiest cloud for developers. Something that is, um, you know, really allows them to get their work done quickly. Developers want to be exposed to the best technology. They want to be able to be exposed to it in a way that that integrates into their workflow that integrates into the tools that they're used to, um, and allows them to get their job done quickly. And so a lot of what we're doing in, in the developer space is providing an integrated stack. Um, you know, whether you're building a web application or you're building a mobile application, or you're trying to do data analytics, uh, Google cloud should be a place that you come to. >>That's easy for you to use, to get the job done. Um, and, and, and the security aspect is not something that developers like to deal with. They want that to be taken care of for them, um, troubleshooting as well, you know, troubleshooting and, and upgrading. And all of that is something that they wanna be taken care of. And so that is something that we're baking into the platform. And you'll see that in a lot of our tooling, um, you know, the build process, uh, we're providing salsa compliance, um, and, and build Providence for the security teams to be able to audit. But it's not something that the, that the developer needs to take care of. It's something that is just part of the, the build process built into, uh, say, uh, cloud run or GK built into our compute options for making >>It for them, making it easy, simple, and reduce the steps it takes to get the job done. So great stuff par, great to see you in the last 30 seconds, we have left. Just give a quick commercial for what the key projects are in open source. You're proud of that people should pay attention to, we got CubeCon coming up, uh, in, uh, Europe and north America. What are some of the successes that you like to point out? >>Well, I really encourage, uh, developers to go and take a look, a new look at, go go 1.8, add support for generics. It should open up a brand new set of applications. So I definitely encourage folks to, to take a look at that, um, of, of course ISEO and service mesh. As, as your container footprint grows, you have many microservices looking at service mesh, uh, extremely important, and it also allows you to get to that SRE type of, um, uh, DevOps model where, you know, you're securing your services. You're also, uh, being able to monitor and control, uh, service usage. And then the last one is of course Tecton and this is where secure software supply chain comes up. Part I'll >>Mention that. I wish I had 20 minutes. Love chatting with you. We'll catch up with you later on the cube we're here at DockerCon. Thanks for your time. Back to the DockerCon main stages of the cube. I'm John farrier, back to the main stage for more coverage.

>>I want to welcome back to the cubes coverage. We're here at another event in person I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We've got to CNCF coop con cloud native con for in-person 2021. And we're back. It's a hybrid event and we're streaming lives on all channels, as well as all the folks watching a great guest kicking off the show here from the co-chairs from cataract coast. Is that right? Danielle Cook. Who's the vice president at Fairwinds and John Foreman director at Accenture. Thanks for coming on your co-chair. Your third co-chair is not here, but you guys are here to talk about the cloud maturity model. Pretty mature funding is flowing tons of announcements. We're going to have a startup on $200 million. They're announcing in funding and observability of all of all hot spaces. Um, so the maturity is it's the journey in the cloud native space now is crossed over to mainstream. That's the we've been telling that story for a couple of years. Now, you guys have been working on this. Tell us about the cloud maturity model you guys worked on. >>So we got together earlier this year because we, um, four of us had been working on maturity models. So Simon Forester, who is one of the co-chairs, who isn't here, he had worked on a maturity model that looked at your legacy journey, all the way to cloud native, um, myself, I had been part of the Fairwinds team working on the Kubernetes maturity model. So, and then, um, we have Robbie, who's not here. And John Foreman, who we all got together, they had worked on a maturity model and we put it together and I've been working since February to go, what is cloud native maturity and what are the stages you need to go through to achieve maturity. So put this together and now we have this great model that people can use to take them from. I have no idea what cloud native is to the steps they can take to actually be a mature organization. >>And, you know, you've made it when you have a book here. So just hold that up to the camera real quick. So you can see it. It's very much in spirit of the community, but in all seriousness, it book's great, but this is a real need. What was the pain point? What was jumping out at you guys on the problem? Was it just where people like trying to get more cloud native, they want to go move faster. It was a confusing, what were the problems you solve in? >>Well, and if anything is, if we start at the beginning, right, there was during the cloud journey DevSecOps and the Kootenays being a thing that then there's journeys to DevSecOps tributaries as well. But everything is leading to cloud native. It's about the journey to cloud native. So everybody, you know, we're taught to go John, the ecosystem's an eyesore man. If I look at, you know, landscape, >>The whole map I >>Need, it's just like in trend map, it's just so confusing what we do. So every time we go to, I revert the wheel and I get them from zero to hero. So we just put together a model instead that we can re reuse yeah. As a good reference architecture. So from that is a primary, how we built because the native trademark you have with us today. So it's a five scale model from one to five what's twice today, or how to, to, you know, what our job is getting to a five where they could optimize a really rocket rolling. >>You know, it's interesting. I love these inflection points and, you know, being a student of history and the tech business there's moments where things are the new thing, and they're really truly new things like first-time operationalized dev ops. I mean the hardcore dev ops or early adopters we've been doing that, you know, we know that, but now mainstream, like, okay, this is a real disruption in a positive way. So the transformation is happening and it's new, new roles, new, new workflows, new, uh, team formations. So there's a, it's complicated in the sense of getting it up and running so I can see the need. How can you guys share your data on where people are? Because now you have more data coming in, you have more people doing dev ops, more cloud native development, and you mentioned security shepherds shifting left. Where's the data tell you, is it, as you said, people are more like a two or more. What's the, what's the data say? >>So we've had, so part of pulling this model together was your experience at Accenture, helping clients, the Fairwinds, um, experience, helping people manage Kubernetes. And so it's from out dozens of clusters that people have managed going, okay, where are people? And they don't even know where they are. So if we provide the guidelines from them, they can read it and go, oh, I am at about two. So the data is actually anecdotal from our experiences at our different companies. Um, but we, you know, we we've made it so that you can self identify, but we've also recognized that you might be at stage two for one application, but five for another application. So just because you're on this journey, doesn't mean everything is in, >>It's not boiler plate. It's really unique to every enterprise because they everyone's different >>Journey. Put you in journey with these things. A big part of this also torn apart one to five, your clients wants to in denial, you know? So, so Mr. CX level, you are level two. We are not, there's no way we would deal with this stuff for years. You've got to be a five. No, sorry. You're too. >>So >>There's use denial also about this. People think they do a cloud-native director rolling, and I'm looking at what they're doing and go, okay, do you do workups security? And they go, what's that? I go, exactly. So we really need to peel back the onion, start from seed year out and we need to be >>All right. So I want to ask more about the, um, the process and how that relates to the themes are involved. What are some of the themes around the maturity model that you guys can share that you see that people can look at and say, how do I self identify? What's the process will come to expect? >>Well, one of the things we did when we were putting it together was we realized that there were themes coming out amongst the maturity model itself. So we realized there's a whole people layer. There's a whole policy layer process and technology. So this maturity model does not just look at, Hey, this is the tech you need to do. It looks at how you introduce cloud native to your organization. How do you take the people along with it? What policies you need to put in place the process. So we did that first and foremost, but one of the things that was super important to all of us was that security was ever present throughout it. Because as everything is shifting left, you need to be looking at security from day one and considering how it's going to happen and roll out from your developers all the way to your compliance people. Um, it's super important. And one of the themes throughout. >>So, so it would be safe to say, then that security was a catalyst for the maturity models because you gotta be mature. I mean, security, you don't fool around security. >>About the last year when I created the program for, since I worked with Cheryl Holland, from CCF, we put together the community certification, her special program. I saw a need where security was a big gap in communities. Nobody knew anything about it. They wanted to use the old rack and stack ways of doing it. They wanted to use their tray micro tombs from yesteryear, and that doesn't work anymore. You need a new set of tools for Kubernetes. It's the upgrade system. It's different way of doing things. So that knowledge is critical. So I think you're part of this again, on this journey was getting certifications out there for people to understand how to do better. Now, the next phase of that now it's how do we put all these pieces together and built this roadmap? >>Well, it's a great group. You guys have the working groups hard to pronounce the name, but, uh, it's a great effort because one of the things I'm hearing and we've been reporting this one, the Cubans looking angle is the modern software developers want speed, and they don't want to wait for the old slow groups now and security, and it are viewed as blockers and like slow things down. And so you start to see a trend where those groups could provide policy and then start putting, feeding up, uh, data models that allow the developers in real time to do their coding, to shift left and to be efficient and move on and code not be waiting for weeks or days >>Comes to play. So today is the age of Caleb's right now, get up this emerging we're only to have now where everything is code policies, code, securities, code policies, cookie figures, code. That is the place for, and then again, walk a fusion more need for a cargo office. >>Okay. What's your thoughts on that? >>So I think what's really important is enabling service ownership, right? You need the developers to be able to do security, see policy, see it live and make sure that, you know, you're not your configuration, isn't stopping the build or getting into production. So, you know, we made sure that was part of the maturity model. Like you need to be looking continuous scanning throughout checking security checking policy. What is your process? Um, and we, you know, we made that ever present so that the developers are the ones who are making sure that you're getting to Kubernetes, you're getting to cloud native and you're doing it. >>Well, the folks watching, if you don't know the cloud native landscape slide, that ecosystem slide, it's getting bigger and bigger. There's more new things emerging. You see role of software abstractions coming in, automation and AI are coming in. So it makes it very challenging if you want to jump right in lifting and shifting to the clouds, really easy check, been there, done that, but companies want to refactor their applications, not just replatform refactoring means completely taking advantage of these higher level services. So, so it's going to be hard to navigate. So I guess with all that being said, what you guys advice to people who are saying, I need the navigation. I need to have the blueprint. What do I do? How do I get involved? And how do I leverage this? >>We want people to, you can go on to get hub and check out our group and read the maturity model. You can understand it, self identify where you're at, but we want people to get involved as well. So if they're seeing something that like, actually this needs to be adjusted slightly, please join the group. The cardiograph is group. Um, you can also get copies of our book available on the show. So if you, um, if you know, you can read it and it takes you line by line in a really playful way as to where you should be at in the maturity model. >>And on top of that, if you come Thursday was Sonia book. And of course, a lot of money, one day, I promise >>You guys are good. I gotta ask, you know, the final question is like more and more, just more personal commentary. If you don't mind, as teams start to change, this is obviously causing a lot of positive transformation if done, right? So the roles and the teams are starting to change. Hearing SRS are now not just the dev ops guys provisioning they're part of the, of the scale piece, the developers shifting left, new kind of workflows, the role of certain engineers and developers now, new team formations. Why were you guys seeing that evolve? Is there any trends that you see around how people are reconfiguring their team makeup? >>I think a lot of things is going to a single panic last tonight, where I'm taking dev and ops and putting them one panel where I can see everything going on in my environment, which is very critical. So right now we're seeing a pre-training where every client wants to be able to have the holy grail of a secret credit class to drive to that. But for you to get there, there's a lot of work you've got to do overnight that will not happen. And that's where this maturity model, I think again, will enhance that ability to do that. >>There's a cultural shift happening. I mean, people are changing there's new skillsets and you know, obviously there's a lot of people who don't have the skill. So it's super important that people work with Kubernetes, get certified, use the maturity model to help them know what skills they need. >>And it's a living document too. It's not, I mean, a book and I was living book. It's going to evolve. Uh, what areas you think are going to come next? So you guys have to predict if you had to see kind of where the pieces are going. Uh, obviously with cloud, everything's getting, you know, more Lego blocks to play with more coolness you have in the, in this world. What's coming next with Sue. Do you guys see any, any, uh, forecasts or >>We're working with each one of the tag groups within the CNCF to help us build it out and come up with what is next based on their expertise in the area. So we'll see lots more coming. Um, and we hope that the maturity grows and because of something that everybody relies on and that they can use alongside the landscape and the trail map. And, um, >>It's super valuable. I think you guys need a plug for any people want to, how they join. If I want to get involved, how do I, what do I do? >>Um, you can join the Carter Garfish group. You can check us out on, get hub and see all the information there. Um, we have a slack channel within the CNCF and we have calls every other Tuesday that people can see the pools. >>Awesome. Congratulations, we'll need it. And super important as people want to navigate and start building out, you know, you've got to edge right around the corner there it's happening real fast. Data's at the edge. You got cloud at the edge. Azure, AWS, Google. I mean, they're pushing really hardcore 5g, lot changes. >>Everybody wants to cloud today. Now one client is, one is more cloud. At least both the cloud is comfortable playing everywhere. One pump wife had DevOps. >>It's distributed computing back in the modern era. Thank you so much for coming on the keep appreciating. Okay. I'm Jennifer here for cube con cloud native con 2021 in person. It's a hybrid event. We're here live on the floor show floor, bringing you all the coverage. Thanks for watching station all day. Next three days here in Los Angeles. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Joining me next is bran Kirschner, the vice president of strategy at DataStax Brian. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Glad to be here. Excited to unpack this survey that DataStax recently did. This is with 500 or so it executives, technology practitioners talking about data strategy. Talk to me, first of all, about the state of the data, racist, the name of the survey. Why did data sect students? What was the impetus behind that? >>Yeah. Great question. Thank you. So, you know, um, we are in a race for our company. Every organization is in a race to find ways to use data in new ways to move the business forward, satisfy your customers and so on. Um, it's okay to have a strategy to be a leader. It's probably okay to have a strategy, to be a fast follower. It might even be okay to say we stayed in touch with best practices and once they're proven we adopt them, but what's not okay, is one to lose track of where you need to be relative to how the market's moving most important than your competitors. But in general, customer expectations, your employee partner expectations are going to be set by companies potentially in different industries. So you need to be at the right spot in your journey. So that's why we do a lot of benchmarking, but as important is as your particular company's context and history and situation and technical architecture, um, kind of comes in contact with a strategy that looks great on paper, you have to understand is something slowing us down that we didn't expect because of our culture or unspoken incentives or, you know, what is our next best step for us? >>So in this, in this dataset, we really look to identify the leaders who are having the most success and then work back from the patterns and practices we saw with them to how different, different types of companies at different stages of their journey can find their next best step to make the right progress. >>So the showed that a lot of companies have a data strategy. The execution piece is a, is a different story. Talk to me about how this survey defines a data leader. What is it, what are some of the key characteristics? Yes, >>There are quite a few. Um, in fact, what we've done over the last year that we fed into the survey was, you know, in the course of my work and my colleagues work, we talked with lots of CEOs, hands-on techno practitioners, CTOs, and so on. And we put all that conversation and qualitative insight together into, uh, about 70 measures. Um, and so that was all in the survey. And once we got the data back, uh, we did a cluster analysis, bringing some data science, the data strategy, if you will. Um, and that's surface these segments. Um, and for example, how much revenue you were generating from data was not part of the, so then we mapped these segments and these practices against that, and we say, oh, the leaders generating the most revenue from data. So that gave us some confidence in using these patterns and practices to bucketize folks. >>And you found that the data, those companies in the data leadership category were able to attribute more than 20% of their data of two gives me 20% of their revenue to data and analytics. Talk to me about that 20% benchmark is that considered where a lot of organizations need to aim to be because there's still a lot of money on the table. Yeah, >>That's right. That's right. So, you know, in common industry parlance as a standard, you know, materiality on the balance sheet is 10%. Um, and we've seen a pretty significant number of companies hit that mark. Um, what we saw, which is interesting in our data was, you know, that's kind of a comfortable benchmark to pick it's an industry standard data's material, Hey, congratulations. Uh, but you're actually drill down further and you look at that 20% mark and you say, well, 10% is probably not aiming nearly high enough because a significant proportion of these leaders have already gotten to that 20% mark. Um, and so it's in part, you know, again about that benchmarking where you are, where's your destination, your destination, probably isn't we're on the board, your destination probably isn't its material. Your destination is probably, you know, it's big and it keeps getting bigger. >>And where are these data leaders with respect to deploying a hybrid data strategy? What is it about how they're organized and structurally what they're doing that is positioning them to actually really drive incremental revenue from data? >>Yes. Yeah. What stands out about the leaders, um, is, and, you know, we see this in our data, you can see this in any number of analysts, firms and other data sources hybrid cloud strategy is, you know, the dominant strategy for large enterprises, right? It's about preserving your flexibility to operate in multiple clouds. And on-prem, so that's pretty well understood. What we saw in this data was overwhelmingly almost a hundred percent of the data leaders also say they're pursuing a hybrid data strategy. So they're already doing that kind of same level of thoughtfulness and planning about how can we get and deploy apps and compute everywhere to how can we store and deploy and redeploy data everywhere. And there's a real steep curve to the extent where the folks who are just starting out, who may have a strategy, but have taken very little action. None of them strongly agree that they have that type of hybrid data strategy. Um, and so the pattern qualitative pattern we see is companies go down this hybrid cloud compute strategy for good reasons, and it pays off, starts to pay off. And then they realize, oh, we should be doing the same thing for data. Um, and that's giving these leaders, you know, a lot of agility control, flexibility, um, and opportunities. >>One of the things I found interesting in the report from a statistics perspective is that those data leaders that you talked about that are able to, or able to attribute more than 20% of their revenue to data and analytics twice as many of those are two. And they're two X likely to be using a robust open source data stack talking about that as it plays into the computing strategy and the ability to convert data into revenue. >>That's right. So they're, they're, they're almost a hundred percent comparable to the hybrid data strategy. Almost a hundred percent are also increasing their use of open source software. And I kind of think about this from, from two dimensions, right? The, the hybrid cloud and hybrid data strategy gives you agility, optionality flexibility for your infrastructure, for your compute, for your storage and so on. Um, then it's about really making sure you're using the best of breed tools for the job of creating value with data. Um, and if you look backwards, um, you know, the track record of open source technologies, Apache Cassandra Kafka spark at some of just like, you know, the applications and experiences that are, you know, have, have, you know, validated the massive impact data can have on a business. Um, the track record of open source is strong and you look at the cycle of innovation and you see, you know, Kafka having emerged and now pulse are emerging as sort of a, a newer, more cloud friendly version of Kafka and flank kind of emerging as potentially a successor to spark that cycle of innovation, arguably is accelerating. >>Um, and so as you think about what's, you know, what's unique to us as a company, um, it's the data you have, right? No one has the customer interactions. You have, nobody has a business processes you have. So what you want to do is take those best of breed tools and have flexibility about the infrastructure services to support them and focus your people on doing great things with the data. So don't try to solve a problem that the open source ecosystem has already solved, right? If you're, if you're writing that code, instead of focusing on what differentiates your business, that's a miss. Um, so when you see the leaders leaning hard into, um, open source, you know, it's because they've got the clarity about, we differentiate by using these best of breed tools on our data, not reinventing the wheel, >>Are these companies, you mentioned culture a minute ago, and that's always something that I find intriguing because it's very hard to change. We've been in the last 16, 18 months in an, in a very fast pace of change, as we know, but are you seeing these data leaders that are companies that are reorienting towards a data culture where data is part of everyone's job? >>Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So they, so it's interesting. Um, a majority of all companies said that reacting to the COVID crisis did increase their pace of innovation, but again, it's almost universal among, among those leaders. Um, and one of the patterns that stands out is indeed, when you say making it everyone's job, I'll put finer point on it. It's saying accountability for creating value, generating revenue with data is the line of business is accountability. I'm in conversations. I've literally had CEOs say, it's not my problem anymore. It's my problem to help them execute on the ideas, right? And that can even raise the bar because now they're coming up with bolder, bigger ideas, but it's not about it being the custodians of the data, trying to go to the business and say, Hey, could you use some data it's business, general managers, VPs now accountable for how have you used data to drive revenue? >>How can it change the way you sell or the way you service customers? Um, and so on. And, and that, um, in part, what we heard from some folks was in organizations with progressive CEOs, chief data officers, they have been going to the side to the business side of things and saying, Hey, I think we've got ways to do business better, but there wasn't pressure on the business. They're like our business is going fine. Uh, but once COVID hit, it was okay. We need to take out costs. We need to find new ways to grow. Um, and there's sort of that that drove and organic embrace of, ah, I see, I want to pick up the reins and, you know, work with my technology partners to make it happen, but now I see we should be driving it on the business side. >>And have you seen in the COVID era data strategy become really a board level initiative and, and to your point, one of the things that you've found is, is it's not just the culture of data being core to everyone's job, it's the accountability level at the line of business level. But I imagine that that data strategy is indeed a board level initiative. >>That's right. That's the biggest, when you mentioned culture, the biggest of the segments is a group whose biggest challenge is cultural change about almost a third of, of all organizations. Um, and you see there, there's this big drop, you know, compared to the leaders of whether the data strategy is a board level discussion, right. And you see this big drop in other metrics where, you know, do you have a data strategy, mild agreement like, oh yeah, we talk about data of everybody talks about data. Um, but it's really about getting that top down. This is a true corporate priority, which kind of circles back to our initial conversation, you know, if the goal is 20% or more of your revenue from data, it better be a board level conversation. Right. And, and, you know, if you have an effective board, you want the board to be helping to drive toward that. Um, so it really closes the loop on, you know, again, calibrating, what's our aspiration, um, what's at stake. And if we believe in the data, you know, we shouldn't be hesitating to elevate this to the board level and get their attention on >>It. Right. Give me an example of a, of a customer that's doing that. That's a data leader that's doing this really well. And one that pivoted to be able to, to use data and extract value and revenue from it during the last year and a half, >>I would say it's a little bit less of a pivot and more of an amazing success story. Um, uh, because of you look backwards a few years ago, um, home Depot made a significant board level, you know, top-down, company-wide commitment to a very bold digital and data strategy. And so, you know, by 2019, um, for one example, you know, Forester ranked them as a top retail app, um, uh, for customers, um, and all that work, which is already paying off, right. They're making big investments, but they're getting big payoffs. Um, when COVID hits home, Depot is able to deploy curbside delivery as a service. They did not have a feature they did not have in weeks at scale, um, which drove even more outsized returns during COVID. Um, and so it's, it's a little, uh, you know, it's a less of a pivot, but more about the value of making that commitment. >>Um, because you know, they, weren't planning on deploying curbside delivery to the app in weeks, but when COVID hit, they were able to, because they already had the cultural change, the infrastructure, the metrics, the technologies in place. Um, and so, you know, it's really a message about don't wait, right? If you are going to fast follow, if you are going to be away for proven best practices, you don't want to start off the blocks at zero. When something disruptive happens, you want to have some success stories, some practice at it under your belt. So, you know, even if you're, if you're, if you're fortunate enough not to have been pushed into radical action because of COVID, don't, don't let that stop you from seizing the day and actually starting to move. >>I now I've, I think I'll never have the same opinion of, of home Depot. Again, I will always go on there looking for light bulbs and batteries and flashlights thinking of them as a data company, but as a company, that, to your point, committed to it and push that accountability out into those lines of business. How does, what did the survey show in terms of those data leaders embracing, uh, open source, embracing a hybrid data strategy? How does that facilitate that, driving that accountability into the lines of business so that that revenue that's sitting on the table from data can be unpacked. >>Yeah, it's, it's almost, I think, you know, if I look at it from the technology side, um, imagine, you know, in the past, you're the custodian of data, you know, as a CIO and your job is to kind of make, make, make, you know, data's not lost. We comply with regulations, you know, for the kind of way we run the business yesterday and today doesn't break tomorrow. And so if I think about the shifts to where the lines of business are now accountable for finding new ways to use data, what are the, to come up with? Like, you know, if you think about like, you know, innovating in business, um, taking data under the wing, right? Your job now, as a manager is innovate, innovate your business model, deliver something we never delivered before deliver something. No one in our industry delivers. So on the tech side, you know, it should be exciting, but it also means you may be on the hook for delivering some capability that your company had never thought about. >>Um, so that really gets back to this idea of like, do you have access to, you know, the best infrastructure services through hybrid cloud and data strategy? Are you set up to use best of breed tools, even if, you know, last year we didn't have a scenario that uses best of breed tools. Well, now that the businesses, I think it really hard on how we differentiate with data. They're probably going to come up with some big bold ideas, um, again, which should be exciting, but you gotta be ready to invest in change and something new as opposed to keeping the lights on. >>Right. I think that pace of innovation, I don't know, maybe it's permanently altered because of the scenario was one that nobody ever expected to be in. As we saw so much transformation in the last year and a half, and the pace of innovation change and, and the, you know, the places that are like the home Depot being able to radically change so quickly. And so we saw a lot of other businesses that could not do that. What are some of the market trends that you're seeing as we're now coming around the corner into the second half of 2021? >>I mean, the acceleration is a great point because when you're using data to deliver value to customers or create value for your business, things actually build on them on each other. Right. So, you know, data doesn't get used up until the, the amazing things about digital data. It can be used and reuse and recombined. So if you saw, for example, you know, leaders are well on the way before COVID, do you have real time inventory we'll share. Uh, but then once COVID hit, do you have real time inventory? And can you make a recommendation for somebody that's out of stock became like, wow, we should get that done ASAP. So then as you see folks do some necessary things, um, you start to see, well, if we've got real-time inventory and we can make recommendations, why are we getting a 360 degree view of the customer from that data plus marketing data, right? >>And now the value gets unlocked. Whereas if you said, you know, two years ago, how can we justify creating a 360 degree view of the customer, some organizations might've been like, well, we can, you know, it's hard to do. We can't see the value. Whereas once you're doing a couple of these use cases, it becomes obvious that they'd be better together. Right. And so, um, if you see, you know, the home Depot, I think you're going to see, um, you know, essentially every retailer that wants to stay competitive is going to follow in that path. >>Do you think that those companies that become data leaders or are on the path to become data leaders that have the hybrid data strategy that are embracing OpenStack? Is that mentality in your opinion, going to separate the winners and the losers going forward in the next year plus? >>Yeah, I mean, I think, I think in a sense it has to, uh, because again, as I think, you know, there was a trend already in place for all of us as consumers, right. We love, for example, delightful recommendations, you know, uh, companies and applications that know us and just make our lives better because they're smart, like Netflix and Spotify, right. The classic examples. Um, but now you think about for anything. So Cengage is an education platform company, and they talk about being the Netflix of education. Um, and you know, retailers like home Depot, like target have gotten super smart about things like recommendations. Um, and you know, in the case of home Depot, like connecting me with the data that explains how to do DIY projects and use the tools I'm trying to buy. So, you know, the bar just keeps getting raised to the point where, you know, you look at, you know, you look at a, the e-commerce site of the past, we just sort of a dumb e-commerce site where it's, I can pick things, put them in a cart and buy, you know, that's not acceptable by any stretch of the imagination today, right. >>Are there user reviews? Are there, you know, recommendations? We expect all of this. Um, and I think you'll see it, you know, obviously retail's heavily disrupted by COVID pointing into the sphere, so to speak, but I mean, telehealth is another example where, you know, I think the writing is on the wall. If you can't do telehealth as a health system or a hospital, you know, very soon you're going to have a big problem. >>Yeah. The consumer demand is incredible for, I want whatever it is, if it's I'm shopping on Amazon or if it's going to be, but I want them to know what to recommend to me next, based on what I just thought we have that expectation that the Netflix is and the Spotify is to your point have set. And we also have that expectation in our business life. So when folks are buying it, interacting with software, they want the same thing, right. It's not just limited to healthcare retailers. That's >>Right. And I that's that there's a virtuous cycle, right? If you think about companies, you know, making that cultural change, leaning into using data to make things better, it's not just for customers, it's for your employees, it's for your partners, it's for your business processes. Right. And how are you going to be able to hire people who are super excited about making things better for customers, if you're also not, you know, internally making things better for your employees, right. There's just a real disconnect in terms of, you know, culture and personnel. There. >>That's a great point. Those are in my opinion, inextricably linked, Brian, it's been great to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing with us. The state of the data raised very interesting sort of that you guys have done. Folks can get their hands on that lot of opportunity and a lot of money on the table for organizations in any industry. Thanks so much for joining me today, brand thank you for Brian Kirschner. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a cube conversation.

(upbeat music) >> From ''theCUBE studios,'' in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is ''theCUBE Conversation.'' >> Hi, I'm John Walls. And as we're all aware, technology continues to evolve these days at an incredible pace and it's changing the way industries are doing their business all over the world and that's certainly true in telecommunications, CSPs all around the globe are developing plans on how to leverage the power of 5G technology and their network operations are certainly central to that mission. That is the genesis of ''IBM's Cloud for Telecommunications Service.'' That's a unified open hybrid architecture, that was recently launched and was developed to provide telecoms with the solutions they need to meet their very unique network demands and needs. I want us to talk more about that. I'm joined by Steve Canepa, who is the Global GM and Managing Director of the communication sector at IBM. Steve, good to see you today. >> Yeah, you too, John. >> And Jeffrey Hammond. So, he's the Principal Analyst and Vice President at Forrester. Jeffrey, thank you for your time as well today. Good to see you. >> Thanks a lot. It's great to be here. >> Yeah, Steve, let's just jump right in. First off, I mean, to me, the overarching question is, why telecom, I know that IBM has been very focused on providing these kinds of industries specific services, you've done very well in finance, now you're shifting over to telecom. What was the driver there? >> First, great to be with you today, John, and, you know, if we look at the marketplace, especially in 2020, I think the one thing that's, everyone can agree with, is that the rate and pace of change is just really accelerating and is a very, very dynamic marketplace. And so, if we look at the way both our personal lives are now guided by connectivity, and the use of multiple devices throughout the day, the same with our professional lives. So, connectivity really sits at the heart of how value and solutions are delivered and for businesses, this is becoming a critical issue. So, as we work with the telecommunication providers around the world, we're helping them transform their business to make it much more agile, to make it open and make them deliver new services much more quickly and to engage digitally with their clients to bring that kind of experience that we all expect now, so, that the rate pace of change, and the need for the telecommunications industry to bring new value, is really driving a tremendous opportunity for us to work with them. >> Jeffrey what's happening in the telecom space? That, I mean, these aren't just small trends, right? These are tectonic shifts that are going on in terms of their new capabilities and their needs. I'm sure this digital transformation has been driven in some part by COVID, but there are other forces going on here, I would assume too. What do you see from your analyst seat? >> Yeah, I look at it, you know, from a glass half full and a glass half empty approach. From a half empty approach, the shifts to remote work and remote learning, and from traditional retail channels, brick and mortar channels to digital ones, have really put a strain on the existing networking infrastructure, especially, at the Edge, but they've also demonstrated just how critical it is to get that right. You know, as an example, I'm actually talking to you today over my hotspot on my iPhone. So, I think a lot more about the performance of my local cell tower now than I ever did a year ago. and I want it to be as good as it can possibly be and give me as many capabilities as it can. From a glass half full perspective, the opportunities that a modernized network infrastructure gives us are, I think, more readily apparent than ever, you know, most of my wife's doctor's appointments have shifted to remote appointments and every time she calls up to connect, I kind of cringe in the other room and it's like, are they going to get video working? Are they going to get audio working? Are they actually going to have to shift to an old-style phone call to make this happen? Well, things like 5G really are poised to solve those kinds of challenges. They promise, 5G promises, exponential improvements in connectivity speed, capacity, and reductions in latency that are going to allow us to look at some really interesting workloads, IOT workloads, automation workloads, and a lot of Edge use cases. I think 5G sets the stage or Edge compute. Expanding Edge compute scenarios, make it possible to distribute data and services where businesses can best optimize their outcomes, whether it's IOT enabled assets, whether it's connected environments, whether it's personalization, whether it's rich content, AI, or even extended reality workloads. So, you might seem like, that's what a little over the horizon, but it's actually not that far away. And as companies gain the ability to manage and analyze and localize their data, and unlocks real-time insights in a way that they just haven't had before, it can drive expanded engagement and automation in close proximity to the end point devices and customers. And none of that happens without the telco providers and the infrastructure that they own being on board and providing the capabilities for developers like me to take advantage of the infrastructure that they've put in place. So, my perspective on it is, that transformation, that digital transformation, is not going to happen on its own. Someone's got to provision the infrastructure, someone's got to write the code, someone's got to get the services as close to my cell tower or to the Edge as possible and so, that's one of the reasons that when we ask decision makers in the telco space about their priorities from a business perspective, what they tell us is, one of their top three priorities is, we need to improve our ability to innovate and the other two are, we need to grow our revenue and we need to improve our product and services. What's going on from a software perspective in the telco space, is set to make all three of those possible, from my perspective. >> You know, Steve, Jeffrey just unpacked an awful lot there, did a really nice job of that. So, let's talk about first off, that telco relationship IBM's had, or has. You work with data, the 10 largest communication service providers in the world, and I'm sure you're on this journey with them, right? They've been telling you about their challenges and you recognize their needs. This is, you have had maybe some specific examples of that dialogue, that has progressed as your relationship has matured and you provide a different service to them. What are they telling you? What did they tell you say, '' This is where we have got to get better. We've got to get a little sharper, a little leaner.'' And then how did IBM respond to that? >> Yeah, I mean, critical to what Jeffrey just shared is under the covers. You know, 5G is going to take five times the cost that 4G took to deploy. So, if you're a telco, you have to get much more efficient. You have to drive a much more effective TCO into cost of deploying and managing and running that network architecture. When the network becomes a software defined platform, it opens up the opportunity to use open source, open technology, and to drive a tremendous ecosystem of innovation that you can then capture that value onto that open software network. And as the Edge emerged as compute and storage and connectivity, both to the Edge as Jeffrey described, then the opportunity to deliver B2B use cases to take advantage of the latency improvements with 5G, take advantage of the bandwidth capabilities that you have moving video and AI out to the Edge, so, you can create insights as a service. These are the underlying transformations that the telcos are making right now to capture this value. And in fact, we have an institute for business value on our website. You can see some of the surveys and analysis we've done but 84% of the telco clients say, you know, '' Improving the automation and the intelligence of this network platform becomes critical.'' So, from our standpoint, we see a tremendous opportunity to create an open architecture to allow the telcos to regain control of their architecture so that they can pick the solutions and services that work best for them to create value for their customers and then allows them to deploy them incredibly quickly. In fact, just this last week, we announced a milestone with Bharti, a project that we're doing in India, already has over 300 million subscribers. We've taken their ability to deploy their run environment, one of the core domains of the network, where you actually do the access over the cell towers. We've improved that from weeks down to a few days. In fact, our objective is to get to a few minutes. Applying that kind of automation dramatically improves the kind of service they can deliver. When we talk about relationships we have with Vodafone, AT$T, Verizon, about working with them on their mobile Edge compute platforms, it will allow them to extend their network. In fact, with our cloud announcement that you highlighted at the top, we announced a capability called the IBM Cloud Satellite and what IBM Cloud Satellite does is, it's built with Red Hat, so, it's open architecture, it takes advantage of the millions and millions of upstream developers, that are developing every single day to build a foundational shift architecture that allows us to deploy these services so quickly and we can move that capability right now to the Edge. What that means for a telco, is they can deploy those services wherever they want to deploy them, on their private infrastructure or on a public cloud, on a customer's premise, that gives them the flexibility. The automation allows them to do it smartly and very quickly and then in partnering with clients, they can create new end Edge services, things like, you know, manufacturing 4.0 you may have heard of or as you mentioned, advanced healthcare services. Every single industry is going to take advantage of these changes and we're really excited about the opportunity to work in combination with the telcos and speed the pace of innovation in the market. >> Jeffrey, I'd like to go back to the Bharti there. I was going to get into it a little bit later but Steve brought it up. This major Indian CSP, as you mentioned, 300 million subs, 400 million around the world. What does that say to you in terms of its commitment and its, the needs that are being addressed and how it's going to fundamentally change the way it is doing business as far as setting the pace in the telecom industry? >> Well, I think, one of the things that highlights it is, you know, this isn't just a U.S phenomenon or a European phenomenon. Indeed, in some cases we're seeing countries outside the U.S in advance, moving faster, Switzerland, as an example. We expect 90% of the population in Germany to be covered by 5G By 2025, we expect 90% of the population in South Korea to be covered by 2026, 160 million connections in in China as well. So, in some ways, what's happening in the telco world is mirroring what has happened in the public cloud world, which is the world's gone flat. And that's great from a developer perspective because that means that I don't have to learn specialized technologies or specialized services, in order to look at these network infrastructure platforms as part of the addressable surface that I have. That's one of the things that I think has always held the larger developer population back and has kept them from taking advantage of the telco networks. Is, they've always been bit of a black box to the vast majority of developers, you know, IP goes in, IP comes out but that's about all the control I have, unless I want to go and dig deep into those, you know, industry specific specifications. I was cleaning out my office last week because I'm in the process of moving and I came across my '' IMS Explained Handbook from 2006,'' and I remember going deep into that because, you know, we were told that that's going to make it so that IT infrastructure and telco infrastructure is going to converge and it did to a little bit, but not in a way that all the developers out there could really take advantage of telco infrastructure. And then I remember the next thing was like, well, '' Java Amiens on the front end with mobile clients, that's going to make everything different and we're going to be able to build apps everywhere.'' What ended up being was we would write once and test everywhere, across all the different devices that we had to support. And you know, what really drove you equity? Was the iPhone and apps that we could use HTML like technology or that we could use Java to build and it exploded. And we got millions of applications on the front end of the network. What I see potentially happening now, is the same thing on the backend infrastructure side, because the reality is for any developer that is trying to build modern applications, that's trying to take advantage of cloud native technologies, things start with containers and specifically, OCI compliant containers. That is the basis for how we think about building services and handing them off to operators to run them for us. And with what's going on here, by building on top of OpenShift, you take that, you know, essentially de facto standard of containers as the way that we communicate on the infrastructure side globally, from a software development perspective and you make that the entry point for developers into the modern telco outcome system. And so, basically, it means that if I want to push all the way out to the Edge and I want to get as close as I possibly can, as long as I can give you a container to execute that capability, I'm well on the way to making that a reality, that's a game changer in my opinion. >> Yeah, I was on. >> Just to pick it, just if I could, just to pick up on that because I think Jeffrey made a really important point. So, it's kind of like, in a way, an auntie to the ball here is this open architecture because it empowers the entire ecosystem and it allows the telcos to take advantage of enormous innovation that's happening in the marketplace. And that's why, you know, the 35 ecosystem partners that we announced when we announced the IBM Cloud for telco, that's why they're so important because it allows you to have choice. But the other piece, which he hinted at, I wanted to just underscore, is today, in it kind of the first wave of cloud, only about 20% of the applications move to cloud. They were mostly funny digital applications. In fact, we moved our funny digital applications as well into Watson, we have over 1.5 billion customers of telcos today around the world that can access Watson, through our various chatbot and call center or an agent assist solutions we've deployed. But the 80% of applications that haven't moved yet, haven't moved because it's tough to move them, because they're mission critical, they need, you know, regulatory controls, they have to have world-class security, they need to be able to provide data sovereignty as you're operating in different countries around the world and you have to make sure that you have the data in places that you need, these are the attributes, that kind of open up the opportunity for all these other workloads to move. And those are the exact kind of capabilities that we've built into the IBM Cloud for telco, so that we can enable telcos to move their applications into this environment safely, securely, and do it, as Jeffrey described, on an open architecture that gives them that agility and flexibility. And we're seeing it happen real time, you know, I'll just give you another quick example, Vodafone India, their CTO has said publicly and moving to this cloud architecture, he sees it as a universal cloud architecture, so, they're going to run not just their internal it workloads, not just their network services, their voice data and multimedia network services workloads, but also their B2B enterprise workloads, as Jeffrey was starting to describe. Those workloads that are going to move out to the Edge. And by being able to run on a common platform, he's said publicly that they're seeing an 80% improvement in their CapEx, a 50% improvement in their OPEX, and then 90% improvement in the cost to get productions and services deployed. So, the ability to embrace this open architecture and to have the underlying capabilities and attributes in a cloud platform that responds to the specific needs of telco and enterprise workloads, we think is a really powerful combination. >> Steve, the ecosystem, Jeffrey, you brought it up as well. So, I'd like, just to give you a moment to talk about that a little bit, not a small point, by any means you have nearly 40 partners lined up in this respect, from a hardware vendor, software vendors, SAS providers. I mean, it's a pretty impressive lineup and what kind of a statement is that in your, from your perspective, that you're making to the marketplace when you bring that kind of breadth and depth, that kind of bench, basically the game? >> From our view, it's exciting, and we're only getting started. I mean, we literally have not made the announcement, just a matter of a couple of months ago, and every day that passes, we have additional partners that see the power in joining this open architecture approach that we've put in place. The reason that it delivers such values for all the players, you know, one of the hallmarks of a platform approach is that for every player that joins the platform, it brings value to all the players on the cloud. So as we build this ecosystem and we take the leverage of the open source community, and we build on the power of OpenShift and containers, as Jeffrey was saying, we're creating momentum in the marketplace and back to my very first point I made, when the market's moving really quickly, you've got to be agile. And to be agile in today's market, you have to infuse automation at scale, you have to infuse security at scale and you have to infuse intelligence at scale. And that's exactly what we can help the telcos do, and do it in partnership with these enterprise clients. Instinctively >> One of the values of that is that, you know, we're seeing the larger trend in the cloud native space of folks that used to build packaged software services, is essentially taking advantage of these architectural capabilities and containerizing their applications as part of their future strategy. I mean, just two weeks ago, Salesforce basically said, we're reinvisioning Salesforce as a set of containerized workloads that we deliver, SAP is going in very much the same direction. So as you think about these business workloads, where you get data coming from the infrastructure and you want to go all the way back to the back office and you want to make sure that data gets updated in your supply chain management system, being able to do that with a consistent architecture makes these integration challenges just an order of magnitude easier. I actually want to drill in on that data point for a minute because I think that that's also key to understanding what's going on here, because, you know, during the early days of the public cloud and even WebDuo before that, one of the things that drove WebDuo was the idea that data is the new Intel inside and in some ways that was around centralized data because we had 40 or 50 years to get all the data into the data centers and into the, and then put it in the public cloud. But that's not what is happening today. So much of the new data is actually originating at the Edge and increasingly it needs to stay at the Edge if for no other reason than to make sure that the folks that are trying to use it well aren't running up huge ingestion costs, trying to move it all back to the public cloud providers, analyze it and then push it back out and do that within the realm of the laws of physics. So, you know, one of the big things that's driving the Edge is, in the move toward the Edge, and the interest in 5G is that allows us to do more with data where the data originates. So, as an example, a manufacturer that I've been working with that basically came across exactly that problem, as they stood up more and more connected devices, they were seeing their data ingestion volume spiking and kind of running ahead of their budgets for data ingestion but they were like, well, we can't just leave this data and discard it at the Edge, because what happens if it turns out to be valuable for the maintenance, preventative maintenance use cases that we want to run, or for the machine wear characteristics that we want to run. So, we need to find a way to get our models out close to the data so we don't have to bring it all back to the core. In retailing, personalization is something that a lot of folks are looking at right now and even clientelling and that's, again, another situation where you want to get the data close to where the customer actually lives from a geographic basis and into the hands of the person that's in the store but you don't want to necessarily have to go and install a lot of complex hardware in the retail outlet because then somebody has to manage, you know, those servers and manage all those capabilities. So, you know, in the case of the retailer that I was working with, what they wanted was to get that capability as close as possible to the store, but no closer. And the idea of essentially a virtual back office that they could stand up whenever they opened up a new retail outlet, or even had a franchisee open up an outlet, was an extremely powerful concept and that's the kind of thing that you can do when you're saying,'' Well it's just a set of containers and if I have a, you know, essentially a control plane that I deploy it to, then I can do that on top of that telco provider that they sign up to be a strategic services provider.'' There are lots of other interesting scenarios, tourism, if you think about, you know, the tourist economies that we have around the world and the data that, you know, mobile devices throw off that let us get anonymized information about who's coming, where they're going, what they're spending, how long they're staying, there's a huge set of data there that you can use to grow revenue. You know, other types of use cases, transportation? We see, you know, municipal governments kind of looking at how they can use anonymized data around commute patterns to impact their planning. That's all data that's coming from the the telco infrastructure. >> You know, when we're talking about these massive advantages, right, as this hybrid cloud approach about skill ones, build one's, easy management, efficient management, all of these things, Steve, I think we almost, we'd be derelict to duty if we didn't talk about security a little bit. Just ultimately at the end of the day, you've got to provide this as you pointed out, world-class secure environment. And so, in terms of the hybrid approach, what kind of considerations do you have to make that are special to that and that are being deployed and have been considered >> You know, that's a great point. One of the benefits to Comms from moving to an open architecture, is that you componentize the framework of that architecture, and you have suppliers supplying applications for the various different services that we just talked through. And the ability then to integrate security is essentially a foundational element to the entire Premack architecture. We've stayed very compliant with the Nanci framework architecture and the way that we've worked with the telcos and bringing forth a solution, because we specifically want them to have the choice but how is that choice being married with the kind of security you just talked about. And to Jeffrey's point, you know, when you move those applications out to the Edge and that data, you know, many of the analysts are saying now by 2025, as much as 75% of the data created in the world will happen at the Edge. So, this is a massive shift. And when that shift occurs, you have to have the security to make sure that you're going to take care of that data in the way that it should be and that meets all regulatory, you know, governance already rules and regulations. So, that becomes really critical. The other piece though, is just the amount of value that gets created. The reason that data is at the Edge is because now you can act on it at the Edge, you can extract insights and in fact, most of the analysts will say,'' In the next three years, we'll see $675 billion of new value created at the Edge with these kinds of applications.'' And going back on the manufacturing example, I mean, we're already working today with manufacturers and they already had, you know, hundreds of IOT sensors deployed in the factory and we have an Edge application manager that extends right out to the far Edge, if you will, right out onto that factory floor to help get intelligence from those devices. But now think about adding to that the AI capabilities, the video capabilities, watching that manufacturing line to make sure every product that comes off that line is absolutely perfect, Watching the employees to make sure they're staying in safety zones, you know, watching the actual equipment itself to make sure it is performing the way it's supposed to, maybe using an analytics and AI capabilities to predict, you know, issues that might arise before they even happen, so you can take preventative action. This kind of intelligence, you know, makes the business run smarter, faster, more effective. So, that's where we see tremendous service. So, it's not just the fact that data will be created and it will be higher fidelity data to include the analytics, AI, you don't include unstructured data like video data and image data, audio data, but the ability to then extract insights and value out of it. And this is why we believe the ecosystem we talked about earlier, our partnership with the telco's and the ability to bring ecosystem partners and they can add value is just a tremendous momentum that we're going to build. >> Well, the market opportunity is certainly great. As you pointed out, a lot of additional value yet to be created, significant value and obviously, a lot of money to be spent as well by telcos, by some estimates, a hundred billion plus, just by the year 2022 and getting this new software defined platforms up and running. So, congratulations to IBM for this launch and we wish you continued success, Steve, in that endeavor and thank you for your time and Jeffrey, thank you as well for your insights from Forester. >> Always a pleasure. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe with digital coverage brought to you by Broadcom. >>So our final segment today, so we've discussed today, the value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forester with smartness here is also back global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and Richard, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So rich, we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing. >>Yeah. So it's a really good question because I think in operations for a number of reviews, we've kind of stand, uh, stood Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes. Or we just don't think about a tooling is often the last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. Uh, that problem is going to get worse if we do nothing. Um, you know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems where you got moving more and more into this hybrid world, the multicloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's hand goes up, say how many people have hired more staff in that time period. Zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to feel back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. >>Yeah. >>That's pretty good. So I'll do that. >>Yeah. So I think it said, I say it's related to a couple of things that probably everybody tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we'd have 5g, which is old set to transform the one that we know it, of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to become pivotal to the success of businesses. And as we seen with this, COVID, you know, transformation of the world that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previous equipment overlooked, because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People love being on the same page of this using two examples for hundreds of things that play a part in things not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to grind those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like pit Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21, after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate >>Shaking your head there when you, his mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about this sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean, we are firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the us GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So G the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right? And so someone was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when newsman highlights 5g, as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking their head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of, uh, the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point, Roger, where gonna stick with you. So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins. So as you talked about, you know, organizations and C-levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe, there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operation teams do. So. A quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Vice visibility. There's some question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-layered monetize spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application of it. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the opportunity to reduce the noise of a troubled tickets handle. It sounds pretty trivial, but as an average, you can imagine every shop is tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's desserts that get on a network and across an end-user application value chain, we're talking thousands, you know, across and end user application value chain could be million in a year. So, and so many of those are not really, you know, cause of concern because the problem is somewhere else. So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger the cost of whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. If so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, which is coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, those are some of the immediate cost savings. >>They are really, really significant. Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the end user application value chain and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end-user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment, it's something that in its own self has a massive cost to business, right? They could be point of sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a very interesting example. When we talk IOT, the integrity of the IOT machine is extremely pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. You could be running commands, which are super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast. >>We're sending everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost saving standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, you know, all that stuff. So these are a couple of very immediate funds, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI? >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it has been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency as humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was. One was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of the light. It wasn't the brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that cause it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we not understand, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? And I think companies are starting and then the pandemic, certainly you push this timeline. If you listen to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing. Now they're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that there, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, the use of digital services spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that, that things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very specific way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the, the innovation and the people really for these new ways of doing things starting, you know, w now, I mean, I think I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that, straighten out a little bit more. I think it really, people are going to take a hard look of where they are is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier, is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talked to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems, like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, clinical person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key moons, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in, in this mix. It's somewhat right. One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as an it, you know, when I talked to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going. And that's what we want to help our customers to. >>So rich, talk to us about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI. >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward in the way that they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better, um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have for now level one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We shouldn't be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole >>Great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the, for going on. I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things you have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, that's one strategy, we'd say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis that, Hey, what are the use cases that you're looking to drive, right? But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking quite active use cases, right? Or that that's a very, very important consideration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have vision, it reside, what are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any, you know, backward communication with all of that data in a process better. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid scenarios, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to, you have to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay. We've got this data cases and I think it's the judgment. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the two power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in critical applications, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, test driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases and location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point onward, it's all about realizing, you know, in terms of business outcomes, unless AI comes in as a digital labor, that shows you, I have, I have reduced your, this amount of, you know, time, and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource right in a month, in a year, or whatever, the timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've got all of that data into one system, maybe you can send it to another system and make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your streetlights and making sure that Hey, parent switched off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera >>For the audience, you can take her Raj, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? >>How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, uh, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers are going to have to, uh, have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart, shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. >>Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. >>We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time.

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi guys. Welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of DevOps and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where dev ops needs to go in order to be successful next year. So our guests today are, you've seen them all before Jeffrey Hammond is here. The VP and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. We've also got Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom's enterprise software division and Glenn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT guys. Welcome back. Great to have you all three together >>To be here. >>All right. So we're very, we're all very socially distanced as we've talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's, let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with Jeff. We're going to start with you spiritual co-location that's a really interesting topic that we've we've uncovered, but how much of the challenge is truly cultural and what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you then search then Glen Jeff, take it away. >>Yeah, I think fundamentally you can have all the technology in the world and if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization, you still won't be effective. Um, almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece, um, where I did a bunch of research around what made high performance teams, software delivery teams, high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the agile manifesto. Let's take that to today where developers are on their own in their own offices. If you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy, um, and they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. >>And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, uh, and got their teams in the right place and their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like, well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that would become the challenge is not, are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual co-location is so important because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a, from, from a, a, a shared purpose. Um, you know, surgeon, I worked together a long, long time ago, surgery it's been what almost 15, 16 years since we were at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual co-location between us, uh, because of the shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen, uh, in the industry. And that's a really powerful tool, uh, to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available, to build shared purpose on to the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual co-location to the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place, they can be incredibly valuable, especially when, when we don't have the luxury of physical locate, physical colocation. Hope. That makes sense. >>It does. I should have introduced us. This last segment is we're all spiritually co-located or it's a surge, clearly you're still spiritually co located with junk. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of co-location the cultural impact and how technology can move it forward. >>Yeah. So I think, well, I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think, you know, it starts with kind of a shared purpose and the other, I, Oh, individuals teams, uh, contributed to kind of a business outcome. What is our shared goal or shared vision? What's what is it we're trying to achieve collectively and, uh, keeping it aligned to that. Um, and so, so it's really starts with that now, now the big challenge, always these over the last 20 years, especially in large organizations, there's the specialization of roles and functions. And so we, we all that started to basically measure which we do, uh, on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome or purpose. We, we kind of revert back to, okay, what is my database all the time? What is my cycle time like? >>And, and I think, you know, which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens for these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing in the context of kind of these business outcomes. So, um, you know, probably one of my, um, theories of experience was to actually weakness at one of a large financial institution, um, you know, to stakeholders and quote development and operations staring at the same data, right. Which was related to, you know, in calming changes, um, testing, execution results, you know, covert coverage, um, official liabilities and all the all ran. It could have a direction leveling. So that's when you start to put these things in context and represent that in a way that these different stakeholders can, can look at from their different lens. And, uh, and it can start to basically communicate and understand of they jointly are competing to, uh, to, to that kind of common view or objective. >>And Glen, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your on spiritual co-location and the cultural part, the technology impact? >>Yeah, I mean, I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, um, the people and culture, the most important thing, actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you, um, who, who you can work with, have the same end goal in mind. And I've certainly found that with our, um, you know, continuing relationship with Broadcom, what it also does though, is although, you know, tools can accelerate what you're doing and can join consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BTS flagship transformation program, where we're trying to, as it says, simplify the number of systems stacks that we have, the number of products that we have actually at the moment, we've got different value streams within that program who have got organizational silos who were trying to rewrite, rewrite the wheel, um, who are still doing things manually. >>So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT, which is such a complex and very different environments. But in all areas, BT you're in whether it's a consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations, you know, we found that we need tools that can drive that consistency, but also flex to Greenfield brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as I say, for a number of different aspects, that you have the right partner, um, to drive the right culture, I've got the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate. They can't do that on their own, but they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do in it. And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a, quite a bit of a buzz phrase in there kind of testing world at the moment. >>But, you know, I could talk about things like continuous delivery director, one of Broadcom's tools, and it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own, it allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams, um, around, you know, could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of continuous delivery director, but it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >>Thanks, Ben. So we'd kind of sum that up. Autonomy collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics from your perspectives. What are the metrics that matter, Jeff? >>Well, I'm going to go right back to what Glenn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to, to make decisions, um, with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we at. Um, how do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable, you know, that could be sales revenue, it could be net promoter score. Uh, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization or other teams picking up the services, uh, that you've created. Um, one of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys and then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose, cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey, the value associated with it. >>And we're all measured on that. Um, there are flow metrics which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out from the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it? There are quality metrics, um, you know, some of the classics or maybe things like defect, density, or meantime to response. Um, one of my favorites came from a, um, a company called ultimate software where they looked at the ratio of defects found in production to defects found in pre production and their developers were in fact measured on that ratio. It told them that guess what quality is your job to not just the test? Uh, department's a group. The fourth level that I think is really important, uh, in, in the current, uh, uh, situation that we're in is the level of engagement in your development organization. >>We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric. How full was the parking lot at nine? And how full was it at five o'clock? I can't do that anymore since we're not physically co-located, but what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCM environment. You can look at, uh, the relative rates of churn. Uh, you can look at things like, well, are our developers delivering, uh, during longer periods earlier in the morning, later in the evening, are they delivering, uh, you know, on the weekends as well? Are those signs that we might be heading toward a burnout because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. Uh, so all of those in combination, uh, business value, uh, flow engagement in quality, I think form the backbone of any sort of, of metrics, uh, uh, a program. >>The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Um, unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data and that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say, you need to say, how is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing. And then what do we do to remove those blockers, uh, to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams the context that they need to do their job, uh, in a way that creates the most value for the customer. >>Great advice stuff, Glenn, over to your metrics that matter to you that really make a big, and also, >>How do you measure quality kind of following onto the advice that Jeff provided? I mean, Jeff provided some great advice. Actually, he talks about value. He talks about flow. Both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. Um, but there was this, I listened to a speaker called me Kirsten a couple of months ago. It talked very much about how important flight management is and removing, you know, and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, you know, making software changes, um, what is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to. So where are those areas where it takes too long? So I think that's a very important thing for us. It's, um, even more basic than that at the moment, we're on a journey from moving from kind of a waterfall to agile. Um, and the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is with waterfall, the, the business had a kind of comfort that, you know, everything was tested together and therefore it's safer. >>Um, and with agile, there's that kind of, how do we make sure that, you know, if we're doing things quick and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, um, that that's ready to go, or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence, um, and some of the metrics around that and how healthy those releases are, and actually saying, you know, we spend a lot of money, um, um, an investment setting up, Pat, our teams training our teams, are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly and are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment, but I think it's also about, you know, generally bringing it all together, the dev ops, you know, we've got the kind of value ops AI ops, how do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions and making sure that we are delivering the biggest bang for our buck, absolutely biggest bang for the buck, surge, your thoughts. >>Yeah. So I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. Um, these are kind of the most important metrics. And ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across a highly functional teams is engagements, right? When, when you see a team that's highly functioning, that's agile, that practices DevOps every day, they are highly engaged. Um, that that's, that's definitely true. Now the, you know, back to, I think, uh, GemCis point on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that, um, organizations traditionally have been kind of, uh, you know, setting up benchmarks, right? So what is a good cycle time? What is a good lead time? What is a good meantime to repair? The, the problem is that this is very contextual, right? It varies. It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. And so one of the things that we really need to evolve, um, as an industry is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about, are these four metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric to the business outcome. So that's one thing, the second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood. >>Yeah. >>So that cycle time, or, or, or what you perceive as being a buy cycle time or better quality, the problem is oftentimes like all, do you go and explore why, right. What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics and not on the eye type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. Um, you know, you look at, for instance, things like, you know, lead time, for instance, it's very common that, uh, organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to badly time. And so I think that there is, you know, the metrics there is, I think a lot of, uh, work that we need to do in terms of classifying this antibiograms, um, you know, back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of waterscrumfall as a, as a, as a key patterning industry or anti-fat. Um, but what our scrum fall right, is a key one, right. And you will detect that through defect, arrival rates. That's where that looks like an escort. And so I think it's beyond kind of the metrics is what do you do with those metrics? >>Right? I'll tell you a search. One of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is I think those of us had been in industry for a long time. We know the anti-patterns cause we've seen them in our career maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti-patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply, uh, machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. Um, so hopefully something that we'd see in the future with dev ops tools, because, you know, as a manager that, that, you know, may be only a 10 year veteran or 15 year veteran, you may be seeing these anti-patterns for the first time. And it would sure be nice to know what to do, uh, when they start to pop up, >>That would right. Insight, always helpful. All right, guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on the fit. The one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for and to put on our agendas for the next 12 months, Jeff, we'll go back to you. >>I would say, look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see, first of all, as we shift to remote central working, uh, we're unlocking new pools of talent, uh, we're, it's possible to implement, uh, more geographic diversity. So, so look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low-code tools to very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers that agile and dev ops are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative, uh, workers with algorithmic capabilities, >>Peanut butter and chocolate Glen, where do we go from there? What are, what's the one silver bullet that you think folks should be on the lookout for? >>I certainly agree that, um, low, low code is, uh, next year. We'll see much more low code we'd already started going, moving towards a more of a SAS based world, but Loco also, um, I think as well for me, um, we've still got one foot in the kind of cow camp. Um, you know, we'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and, and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last, um, the last thing for me is how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of, um, the life cycle, um, where, when I heard the word scrum for it kind of made me shut it because I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment. So we need to get beyond that. We need to be releasing, um, changes more frequently into production and actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production in going straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Um, yeah. Thank you. I haven't got any food analogies. Unfortunately >>We all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right. It starts to take us on that's what's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas. >>That's interesting. Right. So a couple of days ago we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's, it's all about the lost city, right? It's all about, we still are receiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me, the key advice is in order to create kind of that spiritual collocation in order to foster engagement, we have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams, to understand how they're delivering value and to align everything they do from a metrics to deliver it, to flow to those metrics. And only with that, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to really start to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive, not just speed, but business outcomes, >>All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me today and our guests. I think this was an incredibly valuable fruitful conversation, and we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually co-located with us today, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for Jeff Hammond serves Lucio and Glen Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the broad cops Broadcom dev ops virtual forum.

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi, Lisa Martin here covering the Broadcom dev ops virtual forum. I'm very pleased to be joined today by a cube alumni, Jeffrey Hammond, the vice president and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. Jeffrey. Nice to talk with you today. >>Good morning. It's good to be here. Yeah. >>So a virtual forum, great opportunity to engage with our audiences so much has changed in the last it's an understatement, right? Or it's an overstated thing, but it's an obvious, so much has changed when we think of dev ops. One of the things that we think of is speed, you know, enabling organizations to be able to better serve customers or adapt to changing markets like we're in now, speaking of the need to adapt, talk to us about what you're seeing with respect to dev ops and agile in the age of COVID, what are things looking like? >>Yeah, I think that, um, for most organizations, we're in a, uh, a period of adjustment, uh, when we initially started, it was essentially a sprint, you know, you run as hard as you can for as fast as you can for as long as you can and you just kind of power through it. And, and that's actually what, um, the folks that get hub saw in may when they ran an analysis of how developers, uh, commit times and a level of work that they were committing and how they were working, uh, in the first couple of months of COVID was, was progressing. They found that developers, at least in the Pacific time zone were actually increasing their work volume, maybe because they didn't have two hour commutes or maybe because they were stuck away in their homes, but for whatever reason, they were doing more work. >>And it's almost like, you know, if you've ever run a marathon the first mile or two in the marathon, you feel great and you just want to run and you want to power through it and you want to go hard. And if you do that by the time you get to mile 18 or 19, you're going to be gassed. It's sucking for wind. Uh, and, and that's, I think where we're starting to hit. So as we start to, um, gear our development chops out for the reality that most of us won't be returning into an office until 2021 at the earliest and many organizations will, will be fundamentally changing, uh, their remote workforce, uh, policies. We have to make sure that the agile processes that we use and the dev ops processes and tools that we use to support these teams are essentially aligned to help developers run that marathon instead of just kind of power through. >>So, um, let me give you a couple of specifics for many organizations, they have been in an environment where they will, um, tolerate Rover remote work and what I would call remote work around the edges like developers can be remote, but product managers and, um, you know, essentially scrum masters and all the administrators that are running the, uh, uh, the SCM repositories and, and the dev ops pipelines are all in the office. And it's essentially centralized work. That's not, we are anymore. We're moving from remote workers at the edge to remote workers at the center of what we do. And so one of the implications of that is that, um, we have to think about all the activities that you need to do from a dev ops perspective or from an agile perspective, they have to be remote people. One of the things I found with some of the organizations I talked to early on was there were things that administrators had to do that required them to go into the office to reboot the SCM server as an example, or to make sure that the final approvals for production, uh, were made. >>And so the code could be moved into the production environment. And so it actually was a little bit difficult because they had to get specific approval from the HR organizations to actually be allowed to go into the office in some States. And so one of the, the results of that is that while we've traditionally said, you know, tools are important, but they're not as important as culture as structure as organization as process. I think we have to rethink that a little bit because to the extent that tools enable us to be more digitally organized and to hiring, you know, achieve higher levels of digitization in our processes and be able to support the idea of remote workers in the center. They're now on an equal footing with so many of the other levers, uh, that, that, um, uh, that organizations have at their disposal. Um, I'll give you another example for years. >>We've said that the key to success with agile at the team level is cross-functional co located teams that are working together physically co located. It's the easiest way to show agile success. We can't do that anymore. We can't be physically located at least for the foreseeable future. So, you know, how do you take the low hanging fruits of an agile transformation and apply it in, in, in, in the time of COVID? Well, I think what you have to do is that you have to look at what physical co-location has enabled in the past and understand that it's not so much the fact that we're together looking at each other across the table. It's the fact that we're able to get into a shared mindspace, uh, from, um, uh, from a measurement perspective, we can have shared purpose. We can engage in high bandwidth communications. It's the spiritual aspect of that physical co-location that is actually important. So one of the biggest things that organizations need to start to ask themselves is how do we achieve spiritual colocation with our agile teams? Because we don't have the, the ease of physical co-location available to us anymore? >>Well, the spiritual co-location is such an interesting kind of provocative phrase there, but something that probably was a challenge here, we are seven, eight months in for many organizations, as you say, going from, you know, physical workspaces, co-location being able to collaborate face to face to a, a light switch flip overnight. And this undefined period of time where all we were living with with was uncertainty, how does spiritual, what do you, when you talk about spiritual co-location in terms of collaboration and processes and technology help us unpack that, and how are you seeing organizations adopted? >>Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's a great question. And, and I think it goes to the very root of how organizations are trying to transform themselves to be more agile and to embrace dev ops. Um, if you go all the way back to the, to the original, uh, agile manifesto, you know, there were four principles that were espoused individuals and interactions over processes and tools. That's still important. Individuals and interactions are at the core of software development, processes and tools that support those individual and interact. Uh, those individuals in those interactions are more important than ever working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is still more important, but when you are trying to onboard employees and they can't come into the office and they can't do the two day training session and kind of understand how things work and they can't just holler over the cube, uh, to ask a question, you may need to invest a little bit more in documentation to help that onboarding process be successful in a remote context, uh, customer collaboration over contract negotiation. >>Absolutely still important, but employee collaboration is equally as important if you want to be spiritually, spiritually co-located. And if you want to have a shared purpose and then, um, responding to change over following a plan. I think one of the things that's happened in a lot of organizations is we have focused so much of our dev ops effort around velocity getting faster. We need to run as fast as we can like that sprinter. Okay. You know, trying to just power through it as quickly as possible. But as we shift to, to the, to the marathon way of thinking, um, velocity is still important, but agility becomes even more important. So when you have to create an application in three weeks to do track and trace for your employees, agility is more important. Um, and then just flat out velocity. Um, and so changing some of the ways that we think about dev ops practices, um, is, is important to make sure that that agility is there for one thing, you have to defer decisions as far down the chain to the team level as possible. >>So those teams have to be empowered to make decisions because you can't have a program level meeting of six or seven teams and one large hall and say, here's the lay of the land. Here's what we're going to do here are our processes. And here are our guardrails. Those teams have to make decisions much more quickly that developers are actually developing code in smaller chunks of flow. They have to be able to take two hours here or 50 minutes there and do something useful. And so the tools that support us have to become tolerant of the reality of, of, of, of how we're working. So if they work in a way that it allows the team together to take as much autonomy as they can handle, um, to, uh, allow them to communicate in a way that, that, that delivers shared purpose and allows them to adapt and master new technologies, then they're in the zone in their spiritual, they'll get spiritually connected. I hope that makes sense. >>It does. I think we all could use some of that, but, you know, you talked about in the beginning and I've, I've talked to numerous companies during the pandemic on the cube about the productivity, or rather the number of hours of work has gone way up for many roles, you know, and, and, and times that they normally late at night on the weekends. So, but it's a cultural, it's a mind shift to your point about dev ops focused on velocity, sprints, sprints, sprints, and now we have to, so that cultural shift is not an easy one for developers. And even at this folks to flip so quickly, what have you seen in terms of the velocity at which businesses are able to get more of that balance between the velocity, the sprint and the agility? >>I think, I think at the core, this really comes down to management sensitivity. Um, when everybody was in the office, you could kind of see the mental health of development teams by, by watching how they work. You know, you call it management by walking around, right. We can't do that. Managers have to, um, to, to be more aware of what their teams are doing, because they're not going to see that, that developer doing a check-in at 9:00 PM on a Friday, uh, because that's what they had to do, uh, to meet the objectives. And, um, and, and they're going to have to, to, um, to find new ways to measure engagement and also potential burnout. Um, friend of mine once had, uh, had a great metric that he called the parking lot metric. It was helpful as the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five? >>And that gives you an indication of how engaged your developers are. Um, what's the digital equivalent equivalent to the parking lot metric in the time of COVID it's commit stats, it's commit rates. It's, um, you know, the, uh, the turn rate, uh, that we have in our code. So we have this information, we may not be collecting it, but then the next question becomes, how do we use that information? Do we use that information to say, well, this team isn't delivering as at the same level of productivity as another team, do we weaponize that data or do we use that data to identify impedances in the process? Um, why isn't a team working effectively? Is it because they have higher levels of family obligations and they've got kids that, that are at home? Um, is it because they're working with, um, you know, hardware technology, and guess what, they, it's not easy to get the hardware technology into their home office because it's in the lab at the, uh, at the corporate office, uh, or they're trying to communicate, uh, you know, halfway around the world. >>And, uh, they're communicating with a, with an office lab that is also shut down and, and, and the bandwidth just doesn't enable the, the level of high bandwidth communications. So from a dev ops perspective, managers have to get much more sensitive to the, the exhaust that the dev ops tools are throwing off, but also how they're going to use that in a constructive way to, to prevent burnout. And then they also need to, if they're not already managing or monitoring or measuring the level of developer engagement, they have, they really need to start whether that's surveys around developer satisfaction, um, whether it's, you know, more regular social events, uh, where developers can kind of just get together and drink a beer and talk about what's going on in the project, uh, and monitoring who checks in and who doesn't, uh, they have to, to, um, work harder, I think, than they ever have before. >>Well, and you mentioned burnout, and that's something that I think we've all faced in this time at varying levels and it changes. And it's a real, there's a tension in the air, regardless of where you are. There's a challenge, as you mentioned, people having, you know, coworker, their kids as coworkers and fighting for bandwidth, because everyone is forced in this situation. I'd love to get your perspective on some businesses that are, that have done this well, this adaptation, what can you share in terms of some real-world examples that might inspire the audience? >>Yeah. Uh, I'll start with, uh, stack overflow. Uh, they recently published a piece in the journal of the ACM around some of the things that they had discovered. Um, you know, first of all, just a cultural philosophy. If one person is remote, everybody is remote. And you just think that way from an executive level, um, social spaces. One of the things that they talk about doing is leaving a video conference room open at a team level all day long, and the team members, you know, we'll go on mute, you know, so that they don't have to, that they don't necessarily have to be there with somebody else listening to them. But if they have a question, they can just pop off mute really quickly and ask the question. And if anybody else knows the answer, it's kind of like being in that virtual pod. Uh, if you, uh, if you will, um, even here at Forrester, one of the things that we've done is we've invested in social ceremonies. >>We've actually moved our to our team meetings on, on my analyst team from, from once every two weeks to weekly. And we have built more time in for social Ajay socialization, just so we can see, uh, how, how, how we're doing. Um, I think Microsoft has really made some good, uh, information available in how they've managed things like the onboarding process. I think I'm Amanda silver over there mentioned that a couple of weeks ago when, uh, uh, a presentation they did that, uh, uh, Microsoft onboarded over 150,000 people since the start of COVID, if you don't have good remote onboarding processes, that's going to be a disaster. Now they're not all developers, but if you think about it, um, everything from how you do the interviewing process, uh, to how you get people, their badges, to how they get their equipment. Um, security is a, is another issue that they called out typically, uh, it security, um, the security of, of developers machines ends at, at, at the corporate desktop. >>But, you know, since we're increasingly using our own machines, our own hardware, um, security organizations kind of have to extend their security policies to cover, uh, employee devices, and that's caused them to scramble a little bit. Uh, so, so the examples are out there. It's not a lot of, like, we have to do everything completely differently, but it's a lot of subtle changes that, that have to be made. Um, I'll give you another example. Um, one of the things that, that we are seeing is that, um, more and more organizations to deal with the challenges around agility, with respect to delivering software, embracing low-code tools. In fact, uh, we see about 50% of firms are using low-code tools right now. We predict it's going to be 75% by the end of next year. So figuring out how your dev ops processes support an organization that might be using Mendix or OutSystems, or, you know, the power platform building the front end of an application, like a track and trace application really, really quickly, but then hooking it up to your backend infrastructure. Does that happen completely outside the dev ops investments that you're making and the agile processes that you're making, or do you adapt your organization? Um, our hybrid teams now teams that not just have professional developers, but also have business users that are doing some development with a low-code tool. Those are the kinds of things that we have to be, um, willing to, um, to entertain in order to shift the focus a little bit more toward the agility side, I think >>Lot of obstacles, but also a lot of opportunities for businesses to really learn, pay attention here, pivot and grow, and hopefully some good opportunities for the developers and the business folks to just get better at what they're doing and learning to embrace spiritual co-location Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on the program today. Very insightful conversation. >>My pleasure. It's it's, it's an important thing. Just remember if you're going to run that marathon, break it into 26, 10 minute runs, take a walk break in between each and you'll find that you'll get there. >>Digestible components, wise advice. Jeffery Hammond. Thank you so much for joining for Jeffrey I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum >>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom, >>Continuing our conversations here at Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum. Lisa Martin here, please. To welcome back to the program, Serge Lucio, the general manager of the enterprise software division at Broadcom. Hey, Serge. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. So I know you were just, uh, participating with the biz ops manifesto that just happened recently. I just had the chance to talk with Jeffrey Hammond and he unlocked this really interesting concept, but I wanted to get your thoughts on spiritual co-location as really a necessity for biz ops to succeed in this unusual time in which we're living. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation in terms of cultural change versus adoption of technologies? >>Yeah, it's a, it's, it's quite interesting, right? When we, when we think about the major impediments for, uh, for dev ops implementation, it's all about culture, right? And swore over the last 20 years, we've been talking about silos. We'd be talking about the paradox for these teams to when it went to align in many ways, it's not so much about these teams aligning, but about being in the same car in the same books, right? It's really about fusing those teams around kind of the common purpose, a common objective. So to me, the, this, this is really about kind of changing this culture where people start to look at a kind of OKR is instead of the key objective, um, that, that drives the entire team. Now, what it means in practice is really that's, uh, we need to change a lot of behaviors, right? It's not about the Yarki, it's not about roles. It's about, you know, who can do what and when, and, uh, you know, driving a bias towards action. It also means that we need, I mean, especially in this school times, it becomes very difficult, right? To drive kind of a kind of collaboration between these teams. And so I think there there's a significant role that especially tools can play in terms of providing this complex feedback from teams to, uh, to be in that preface spiritual qualification. >>Well, and it talked about culture being, it's something that, you know, we're so used to talking about dev ops with respect to velocity, all about speed here. But of course this time everything changed so quickly, but going from the physical spaces to everybody being remote really does take it. It's very different than you can't replicate it digitally, but there are collaboration tools that can kind of really be essential to help that cultural shift. Right? >>Yeah. So 2020, we, we touch to talk about collaboration in a very mundane way. Like, of course we can use zoom. We can all get into, into the same room. But the point when I think when Jeff says spiritual, co-location, it's really about, we all share the same objective. Do we, do we have a niece who, for instance, our pipeline, right? When you talk about dev ops, probably we all started thinking about this continuous delivery pipeline that basically drives the automation, the orchestration across the team, but just thinking about a pipeline, right, at the end of the day, it's all about what is the meantime to beat back to these teams. If I'm a developer and a commit code, I don't, does it take where, you know, that code to be processed through pipeline pushy? Can I get feedback if I am a finance person who is funding a product or a project, what is my meantime to beat back? >>And so a lot of, kind of a, when we think about the pipeline, I think what's been really inspiring to me in the last year or so is that there is much more of an adoption of the Dora metrics. There is way more of a focus around value stream management. And to me, this is really when we talk about collaboration, it's really a balance. How do you provide the feedback to the different stakeholders across the life cycle in a very timely matter? And that's what we would need to get to in terms of kind of this, this notion of collaboration. It's not so much about people being in the same physical space. It's about, you know, when I checked in code, you know, to do I guess the system to automatically identify what I'm going to break. If I'm about to release some allegation, how can the system help me reduce my change pillar rates? Because it's, it's able to predict that some issue was introduced in the outpatient or work product. Um, so I think there's, there's a great role of technology and AI candidate Lynch to, to actually provide that new level of collaboration. >>So we'll get to AI in a second, but I'm curious, what are some of the, of the metrics you think that really matter right now is organizations are still in some form of transformation to this new almost 100% remote workforce. >>So I'll just say first, I'm not a big fan of metrics. Um, and the reason being that, you know, you can look at a change killer rate, right, or a lead time or cycle time. And those are, those are interesting metrics, right? The trend on metric is absolutely critical, but what's more important is you get to the root cause what is taught to you lean to that metric to degrade or improve or time. And so I'm much more interested and we, you know, fruit for Broadcom. Are we more interested in understanding what are the patterns that contribute to this? So I'll give you a very mundane example. You know, we know that cycle time is heavily influenced by, um, organizational boundaries. So, you know, we talk a lot about silos, but, uh, we we've worked with many of our customers doing value stream mapping. And oftentimes what you see is that really the boundaries of your organization creates a lot of idle time, right? So to me, it's less about the metrics. I think the door metrics are a pretty, you know, valid set metrics, but what's way more important is to understand what are the antiperspirants, what are the things that we can detect through the data that actually are affecting those metrics. And, uh, I mean, over the last 10, 20 years, we've learned a lot about kind of what are, what are the antiperspirants within our large enterprise customers. And there are plenty of them. >>What are some of the things that you're seeing now with respect to patterns that have developed over the last seven to eight months? >>So I think the two areas which clearly are evolving very quickly are on kind of the front end of the life cycle, where DevOps is more and more embracing value stream management value stream mapping. Um, and I think what's interesting is that in many ways the product is becoming the new silo. Uh, the notion of a product is very difficult by itself to actually define people are starting to recognize that a value stream is not its own little kind of Island. That in reality, when I define a product, this product, oftentimes as dependencies on our products and that in fact, you're looking at kind of a network of value streams, if you will. So, so even on that, and there is clearly kind of a new sets, if you will, of anti-patterns where products are being defined as a set of OTRs, they have interdependencies and you have have a new set of silos on the operands, uh, the Abra key movement to Israel and the SRE space where, um, I think there is a cultural clash while the dev ops side is very much embracing this notion of OTRs and value stream mapping and Belgium management. >>On the other end, you have the it operations teams. We still think business services, right? For them, they think about configure items, think about infrastructure. And so, you know, it's not uncommon to see, you know, teams where, you know, the operations team is still thinking about hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of business services. And so the, the, there is there's this boundary where, um, I think, well, SRE is being put in place. And there's lots of thinking about what kind of metrics can be fined. I think, you know, going back to culture, I think there's a lot of cultural evolution that's still required for true operations team. >>And that's a hard thing. Cultural transformation in any industry pandemic or not is a challenging thing. You talked about, uh, AI and automation of minutes ago. How do you think those technologies can be leveraged by DevOps leaders to influence their successes and their ability to collaborate, maybe see eye to eye with the SRS? >>Yeah. Um, so th you're kind of too. So even for myself, as a leader of a, you know, 1500 people organization, there's a number of things I don't see right. On a daily basis. And, um, I think the, the, the, the technologies that we have at our disposal today from the AI are able to mind a lot of data and expose a lot of, uh, issues that's as leaders we may not be aware of. And some of the, some of these are pretty kind of easy to understand, right? We all think we're agile. And yet when you, when you start to understand, for instance, uh, what is the, what is the working progress right to during the sprint? Um, when you start to analyze the data you can detect, for instance, that maybe the teams are over committed, that there is too much work in progress. >>You can start to identify kind of, interdepencies either from a technology, from a people point of view, which were hidden, uh, you can start to understand maybe the change filler rates he's he is dragging. So I believe that there is a, there's a fundamental role to be played by the tools to, to expose again, these anti parents, to, to make these things visible to the teams, to be able to even compare teams. Right. One of the things that's, that's, uh, that's amazing is now we have access to tons of data, not just from a given customer, but across a large number of customers. And so we start to compare all of these teams kind of operate, and what's working, what's not working >>Thoughts on AI and automation as, as a facilitator of spiritual co-location. >>Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's um, you know, th there's, uh, the problem we all face is the unknown, right? The, the law city, but volume variety of the data, uh, everyday we don't really necessarily completely appreciate what is the impact of our actions, right? And so, um, AI can really act as a safety net that enables us to, to understand what is the impact of our actions. Um, and so, yeah, in many ways, the ability to be informed in a timely matter to be able to interact with people on the basis of data, um, and collaborate on the data. And the actual matter, I think is, is a, is a very powerful enabler, uh, on, in that respect. I mean, I, I've seen, um, I've seen countless of times that, uh, for instance, at the SRE boundary, um, to basically show that we'll turn the quality attributes, so an incoming release, right. And exposing that to, uh, an operations person and a sorry person, and enabling that collaboration dialogue through data is a very, very powerful tool. >>Do you have any recommendations for how teams can use, you know, the SRE folks, the dev ops says can use AI and automation in the right ways to be successful rather than some ways that aren't going to be nonproductive. >>Yeah. So to me, the th there, there's a part of the question really is when, when we talk about data, there are there different ways you can use data, right? Um, so you can, you can do a lot of an analytics, predictive analytics. So I think there is a, there's a tendency, uh, to look at, let's say a, um, a specific KPI, like a, an availability KPI, or change filler rate, and to basically do a regression analysis and projecting all these things, going to happen in the future. To me, that that's, that's a, that's a bad approach. The reason why I fundamentally think it's a better approach is because we are systems. The way we develop software is, is a, is a non-leader kind of system, right? Software development is not linear nature. And so I think there's a D this is probably the worst approach is to actually focus on metrics on the other end. >>Um, if you, if you start to actually understand at a more granular level, what har, uh, which are the things which are contributing to this, right? So if you start to understand, for instance, that whenever maybe, you know, you affect a specific part of the application that translates into production issues. So we, we have, I've actually, uh, a customer who, uh, identified that, uh, over 50% of their unplanned outages were related to specific components in your architecture. And whenever these components were changed, this resulted in these plant outages. So if you start to be able to basically establish causality, right, cause an effect between kind of data across the last cycle. I think, I think this is the right way to, uh, to, to use AI. And so pharma to be, I think it's way more God could have a classification problem. What are the classes of problems that do exist and affect things as opposed to analytics, predictive, which I don't think is as powerful. >>So I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, that just came off the biz ops manifesto. You're one of the authors of that. I want to get your thoughts on dev ops and biz ops overlapping, complimenting each other, what, from a, the biz ops perspective, what does it mean to the future of dev ops? >>Yeah, so, so it's interesting, right? If you think about DevOps, um, there's no felony document, right? Can we, we can refer to the Phoenix project. I mean, there are a set of documents which have been written, but in many ways, there's no clear definition of what dev ops is. Uh, if you go to the dev ops Institute today, you'll see that they are specific, um, trainings for instance, on value management on SRE. And so in many ways, the problem we have as an industry is that, um, there are set practices between agile dev ops, SRE Valley should management. I told, right. And we all basically talk about the same things, right. We all talk about essentially, um, accelerating in the meantime fee to feedback, but yet we don't have the common framework to talk about that. The other key thing is that we add to wait, uh, for, uh, for jeans, Jean Kim's Lascaux, um, to, uh, to really start to get into the business aspect, right? >>And for value stream mapping to start to emerge for us to start as an industry, right. It, to start to think about what is our connection with the business aspect, what's our purpose, right? And ultimately it's all about driving these business outcomes. And so to me, these ops is really about kind of, uh, putting a lens on this critical element that it's not business and it, that we in fact need to fuse business 19 that I need needs to transform itself to recognize that it's, it's this value generator, right. It's not a cost center. And so the relationship to me, it's more than BizOps provides kind of this Oliver or kind of framework, if you will. That set the context for what is the reason, uh, for it to exist. What's part of the core values and principles that it needs to embrace to, again, change from a cost center to a value center. And then we need to start to use this as a way to start to unify some of the, again, the core practices, whether it's agile, DevOps value, stream mapping SRE. Um, so, so I think over time, my hope is that we start to optimize a lot of our practices, language, um, and, uh, and cultural elements. >>Last question surgeon, the last few seconds we have here talking about this, the relation between biz ops and dev ops, um, what do you think as DevOps evolves? And as you talked to circle some of your insights, what should our audience keep their eyes on in the next six to 12 months? >>So to me, the key, the key, um, challenge for, for the industry is really around. So we were seeing a very rapid shift towards kind of, uh, product to product, right. Which we don't want to do is to recreate kind of these new silos, these hard silos. Um, so that, that's one of the big changes, uh, that I think we need to be, uh, to be really careful about, um, because it is ultimately, it is about culture. It's not about, uh, it's not about, um, kind of how we segment the work, right. And, uh, any true culture that we can overcome kind of silos. So back to, I guess, with Jeffrey's concept of, um, kind of the spiritual co-location, I think it's, it's really about that too. It's really about kind of, uh, uh, focusing on the business outcomes on kind of aligning on driving engagement across the teams, but, but not for create a, kind of a new set of silos, which instead of being vertical are going to be these horizontal products >>Crazy by surge that looking at culture as kind of a way of really, uh, uh, addressing and helping to, uh, re re reduce, replace challenges. We thank you so much for sharing your insights and your time at today's DevOps virtual forum. >>Thank you. Thanks for your time. >>I'll be right back >>From around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of devops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to Broadcom's DevOps virtual forum, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by another Martin, very socially distanced from me all the way coming from Birmingham, England is Glynn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT. Glynn, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. I'm looking forward to it. As we said before, we went live to Martins for the person one in one segment. So this is going to be an interesting segment guys, what we're going to do is Glynn's going to give us a really kind of deep inside out view of devops from an evolution perspective. So Glynn, let's start. Transformation is at the heart of what you do. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the >> transformation that you are still responsible for driving? Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year. >>Um, and although working for BT, which is a global telecommunications company, um, I'm relatively resilient, I suppose, as a, an industry, um, through COVID obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges. And if anything, it's actually caused us to accelerate our transformation journey. Um, you know, we had to do some great things during this time around, um, you know, in the UK for our emergency and, um, health workers give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them. And that's spent that we've had to deliver changes quickly. Um, but what we want to be able to do is deliver those kinds of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency. Um, so we were already on the kind of journey to agile, but ever more important now that we are, we are able to do those, that kind of work, do it more quickly. >>Um, and that it works because the, the implications of it not working is, can be terrible in terms of you know, we've been supporting testing centers,  new hospitals to treat COVID patients. So we need to get it right. And then therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do it really has taken on a new scale and what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. Um, you know, what I would say is that, you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have small cost challenges. We have to obviously, um, deal with the fact that, you know, COVID 19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less costs, but having to deliver more value quicker and  to higher quality. So yeah, certainly the finances is, um, on our minds and that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth, but we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value. Um, especially in these times when there are financial challenges on companies. So one of the things that I want to ask you about, I'm again, looking at DevOps from the inside >>Out and the evolution that you've seen, you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think dev ops, we think speed. But one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on is we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that you've seen there as, as needing to get, as you said, get things right, but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers. How have you seen that cultural shift? >>Yeah, I think, you know, before test teams for themselves at this part of the software delivery cycle, um, and actually now really our customers are expecting that quality and to deliver for our customers what they want, quality has to be ingrained throughout the life cycle. Obviously, you know, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left. Um, how do we do shift left testing? Um, but for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities shared capabilities throughout the life cycle that drive automation, drive improvements. I always say that, you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator. And one thing that we were finding on our dev ops journey was that we  would be trying to do certain things quick, we had automated build, automated tests. But if we were taking a weeks to create test scripts, or we were taking weeks to manually craft data, and even then when we had taken so long to do it, that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later on in the life cycle, or even in our production environment, we just couldn't afford to do that. >>And actually, focusing on continuous testing over the last nine to 12 months has really given us the ability to deliver quickly across the whole life cycle. And therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi agile kind of thing, where we did the user stories, we did a few of the kind of agile ceremonies, but we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more waterfall releases. And, you know, when we didn't think of ourselves. So we've done a lot of work on every aspect, um, especially from a testing point of view, every aspect of every activity, rather than just looking at automated tests, you know, whether it is actually creating the test in the first place, whether it's doing security testing earlier in the lot and performance testing in the life cycle, et cetera. So, yeah,  it's been a real key thing that for CT, for us to drive DevOps, >>Talk to me a little bit about your team. What are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through life cycle? >>Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this. Um, you know, there's a thing that I think people will probably call it a customer experience gap, and it reminds me of a Gilbert cartoon, where we start with the requirements here and you're almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver is completely different. So we think the testing team or the delivery teams, um, know in our teeth has done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria, but then our customers are saying, well, actually that's not working this isn't working and there's this kind of gap. Um, we had a great launch this year of agile requirements, it's one of the Broadcom tools. And that was the first time in, ever since I remember actually working within BT, I had customers saying to me, wow, you know, we want more of this. >>We want more projects to have extra requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration, but how do we actually, you know, do that and have something that both the business and technical people can understand. And we've actually been working with the business , using agile requirements designer to really look at what the requirements are, tease out requirements we hadn't even thought of and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage. And what we actually deliver at the end of it, not only have we been able to generate tests more quickly, but we've got much higher test coverage and also can more smartly, using the kind of AI within the tool and then some of the other kinds of pipeline tools, actually deliver to choose the right tasks, and actually doing a risk based testing approach. So that's been a great launch this year, but just the start of many kinds of things that we're doing >>Well, what I hear in that, Glynn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Talk to me about it. And I liked that perspective. This is a very challenging time for everybody in the world, but it sounds like from a collaboration perspective you're right, we talk about that a lot critical with devops. But those challenges there, you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pivot so fast? >>I mean, you talked about culture. You know, BT is like most companies  So it's very siloed. You know we're still trying to work to become closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around how would you integrate with other tools? How would you integrate with the various different technologies. And BT, we have 58 different IT stacks. That's not systems, that's stacks, all of those stacks can have hundreds of systems. And we're trying to, we've got a drive at the moment, a simplified program where we're trying to you know, reduce that number to 14 stacks. And even then there'll be complexity behind the scenes that we will be challenged more and more as we go forward. How do we actually highlight that to our users? And as an it organization, how do we make ourselves leaner, so that even when we've still got some of that legacy, and we'll never fully get rid of it and that's the kind of trade off that we have to make, how do we actually deal with that and hide that from our users and drive those programs, so we can, as I say, accelerate change,  reduce that kind of waste and that kind of legacy costs out of our business. You know, the other thing as well, I'm sure telecoms is probably no different to insurance or finance. When you take the number of products that we do, and then you combine them, the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we, as a business are trying to simplify, we are trying to do that in an agile way. >>And haven't tried to do agile in the proper way and really actually work at pace, really deliver value. So I think what we're looking more and more at the moment is actually  more value focused. Before we used to deliver changes sometimes into production. Someone had a great idea, or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago, but actually then we ended up deploying it and then we'd look at the users, the usage of that product or that application or whatever it is, and it's not being used for six months. So we haven't got, you know, the cost of the last 12 months. We certainly haven't gotten room for that kind of waste and, you know, for not really understanding the value of changes that we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing of the moment, it's really taking that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management, what bits of our process are actually taking too long. And we've started on that journey, but we've got a hell of a long way to go. But that involves looking at every aspect of the software delivery cycle. >> Going from, what 58 IT stacks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be, simplifying sounds magical to everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we were started on a continuous testing journey, and I think that's just the start. I mean as I say, looking at every aspect of, you know, from a QA point of view is every aspect of what we do. And it's also looking at, you know, we've started to branch into more like AI, uh, AI ops and, you know, really the full life cycle. Um, and you know, that's just a stepping stone to, you know, I think autonomics is the way forward, right. You know, all of this kind of stuff that happens, um, you know, monitoring, uh, you know, watching the systems what's happening in production, how do we feed that back? How'd you get to a point where actually we think about change and then suddenly it's in production safely, or if it's not going to safety, it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey, but if we want to, you know, in a world where the pace is in ever-increasing and the demands for the team, and, you know, with the pressures on, at the moment where we're being asked to do things, uh, you know, more efficiently and as lean as possible, we need to be thinking about every part of the process and how we put the kind of stepping stones in place to lead us to a more automated kind of, um, you know, um, the future. >>Do you feel that that planned outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered, given this massive shift that you're experiencing? >>I think it's starting to, and I think, you know, as I say, as we look at more of a value based approach, um, and, um, you know, as I say, print, this was a kind of flow management. I think that that will become ever, uh, ever more important. So, um, I think it starting to people certainly realize that, you know, teams need to work together, you know, the kind of the cousin between business and it, especially as we go to more kind of SAS based solutions, low code solutions, you know, there's not such a gap anymore, actually, some of our business partners that expense to be much more tech savvy. Um, so I think, you know, this is what we have to kind of appreciate what is its role, how do we give the capabilities, um, become more of a centers of excellence rather than actually doing mounds amounts of work. And for me, and from a testing point of view, you know, mounds and mounds of testing, actually, how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of, um, create it? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. >>What are some, as we look forward, what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next, say six to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? >>Yeah, I think, um, you know, certainly for, for where we are as a company from a QA perspective, we are, um, you let's start in bits that we do well, you know, we've started creating, um, continuous delivery and DevOps pipelines. Um, there's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for me, I I've challenged my team with saying how do we do an automated journey? So if I put a requirement in JIRA or rally or wherever it is and why then click a button and, you know, with either zero touch for one such, then put that into production and have confidence that, that has been done safely and that it works and what happens if it doesn't work. So, you know, that's, that's the next, um, the next few months, that's what our concentration, um, is, is about. But it's also about decision-making, you know, how do you actually understand those value judgments? >>And I think there's lots of the things dev ops, AI ops, kind of that always ask aspects of business operations. I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kinds of decisions. How does it all try and tie it together? As I say, even still with kind of dev ops, we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing some, doing similar kinds of things, but they're all kind of working in silos. So I think having AI ops as it comes more and more to the fore as we go to cloud, and that's what we need to, you know, we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know, so we need to make sure the technologies work with cloud as well as you can have, um, legacy systems, but it's about bringing that all together and having a full, visible pipeline, um, that everybody can see and make decisions. >>You said the word confidence, which jumped out at me right away, because absolutely you've got to have be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question then for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, dev ops, to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? >>I think the, the, the, the, the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology. Um, we've actually taken a human centered design, uh, as a core principle of what we do, um, within the it part of BT. So by using human centered design, that means we talk to our customers, we understand their pain points, we map out their current processes. Um, and then when we mapped out what this process does, it also understand their aspirations as well, you know? Um, and where do they want to be in six months? You know, do they want it to be, um, more agile and, you know, or do they want to, you know, is, is this a part of their business that they want to do one better? We actually then looked at why that's not running well, and then see what, what solutions are out there. >>We've been lucky that, you know, with our partnership, with Broadcom within the payer line, lots of the tools and the PLA have directly answered some of the business's problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, um, you know, especially if the business hold the purse strings, which in, in, uh, you know, in some companies include not as they do there is that kind of, you know, almost by understanding their, their pain points and then starting, this is how we can solve your problem. Um, is we've, we've tended to be much more successful than trying to impose something and say, well, here's the technology that they don't quite understand. It doesn't really understand how it kind of resonates with their problems. So I think that's the heart of it. It's really about, you know, getting, looking at the data, looking at the processes, looking at where the kind of waste is. >>And then actually then looking at the right solutions. Then, as I say, continuous testing is massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with Apple towards looking at visual AI. And actually there's a common theme through that. And I mean, AI is becoming more and more prevalent. And I know, you know, sometimes what is AI and people have kind of this semantics of, is it true AI or not, but it's certainly, you know, AI machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work. And it's allowing us to be much more effective, be quicker in what we do and be more accurate. And, you know, whether it's finding defects running the right tests or, um, you know, being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. >>Well, thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight outlook at dev ops sharing the successes that you're having, taking those challenges, converting them to opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes, or maybe slightly behind advice enter. They appreciate it. We appreciate your time. >>Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, really. Thank you for inviting me. I have a extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. >>Excellent. Me too. I've learned a lot for Glenn Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube >>Driving revenue today means getting better, more valuable software features into the hands of your customers. If you don't do it quickly, your competitors as well, but going faster without quality creates risks that can damage your brand destroy customer loyalty and cost millions to fix dev ops from Broadcom is a complete solution for balancing speed and risk, allowing you to accelerate the flow of value while minimizing the risk and severity of critical issues with Broadcom quality becomes integrated across the entire DevOps pipeline from planning to production, actionable insights, including our unique readiness score, provide a three 60 degree view of software quality giving you visibility into potential issues before they become disasters. Dev ops leaders can manage these risks with tools like Canary deployments tested on a small subset of users, or immediately roll back to limit the impact of defects for subsequent cycles. Dev ops from Broadcom makes innovation improvement easier with integrated planning and continuous testing tools that accelerate the flow of value product requirements are used to automatically generate tests to ensure complete quality coverage and tests are easily updated. >>As requirements change developers can perform unit testing without ever leaving their preferred environment, improving efficiency and productivity for the ultimate in shift left testing the platform also integrates virtual services and test data on demand. Eliminating two common roadblocks to fast and complete continuous testing. When software is ready for the CIC CD pipeline, only DevOps from Broadcom uses AI to prioritize the most critical and relevant tests dramatically improving feedback speed with no decrease in quality. This release is ready to go wherever you are in your DevOps journey. Broadcom helps maximize innovation velocity while managing risk. So you can deploy ideas into production faster and release with more confidence from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi guys. Welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of dev ops and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where dev ops needs to go in order to be successful next year. So our guests today are, you've seen them all before Jeffrey Hammond is here. The VP and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. We've also Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom's enterprise software division and Glenn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT guys. Welcome back. Great to have you all three together >>To be here. >>All right. So we're very, we're all very socially distanced as we've talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's, let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with Jeff. We're going to start with you spiritual co-location that's a really interesting topic that we've we've uncovered, but how much of the challenge is truly cultural and what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you then search then Glen Jeff, take it away. >>Yeah, I think fundamentally you can have all the technology in the world and if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization, you still won't be effective. Um, almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece, um, where I did a bunch of research around what made high-performance teams, software delivery teams, high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the agile manifesto. Let's take that to today where developers are on their own in their own offices. If you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy, um, and they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. >>And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, uh, and got their teams in the right place and their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like, well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that would become the challenge is not, are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual co-location is so important because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a, from, from a, a shared purpose. Um, you know, surgeon, I worked together a long, long time ago. So it's been what almost 15, 16 years since we were at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual co-location between us, uh, because of the shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen in the industry. And that's a really powerful tool, uh, to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available, to build shared purpose on to the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual co-location to the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place, they can be incredibly valuable, especially when, when we don't have the luxury of physical locate physical co-location. Okay. That makes sense. >>It does. I shouldn't have introduced us. This last segment is we're all spiritually co-located or it's a surge, clearly you're still spiritually co located with jump. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of co-location the cultural impact and how technology can move it forward. >>Yeah. So I think, well, I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think, you know, it starts with kind of a shared purpose and the other understanding, Oh, individuals teams, uh, contributed to kind of a business outcome, what is our shared goal or shared vision? What's what is it we're trying to achieve collectively and keeping it kind of aligned to that? Um, and so, so it's really starts with that now, now the big challenge, always these over the last 20 years, especially in large organization, there's been specialization of roles and functions. And so we, we all that started to basically measure which we do, uh, on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome or purpose. We, we kind of reverted back to, okay, what is my database all the time? What is my cycle time? >>Right. And, and I think, you know, which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens or these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing in the context of kind of these business outcomes. So, um, you know, probably one of my, um, favorites experience was to actually weakness at one of a large financial institution. Um, you know, Tuesday Golder's unquote development and operations staring at the same data, right. Which was related to, you know, in calming changes, um, test execution results, you know, Coverity coverage, um, official liabilities and all the all ran. It could have a direction level links. And that's when you start to put these things in context and represent that to you in a way that these different stakeholders can, can look at from their different lens. And, uh, and it can start to basically communicate and, and understand have they joined our company to, uh, to, to that kind of common view or objective. >>And Glen, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation and the cultural part, the technology impact? >>Yeah, I mean, I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, um, the people and culture, the most important thing, actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you, um, who, who you can work with, have the same end goal in mind. And w I've certainly found that with our, um, you know, continuing relationship with Broadcom, what it also does though, is although, you know, tools can accelerate what you're doing and can join consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BTS flagship transformation program, where we're trying to, as it can, it says simplify the number of systems stacks that we have, the number of products that we have actually at the moment, we've got different value streams within that program who have got organizational silos. We were trying to rewrite, rewrite the wheel, um, who are still doing things manually. >>So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT, which is such a complex and very dev, uh, different environments, depending on what area of BT you're in, whether it's a consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations, you know, we found that we need tools that can, um, drive that consistency, but also flex to Greenfield brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as I say, for a number of different aspects, that you have the right partner, um, to drive the right culture, I've got the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate. They can't do that on their own, but they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do in it. >>And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a, quite a bit of a buzz phrase in their kind of testing world at the moment. But, you know, I could talk about things like continuous delivery direct to when a ball comes tools and it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own, it allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams, um, around, you know, could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of continuous delivery director, but it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >>Thanks, Ben. So we'd kind of sum it up, autonomy collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics from your perspectives. What are the metrics that matter? Jeff, >>I'm going to go right back to what Glenn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to, to make decisions, um, with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we look at. Um, how do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable, you know, that could be sales revenue, it could be net promoter score. Uh, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization or other teams picking up the services, uh, that you've created. Um, one of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys and then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose, cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey, the value with it. >>And we're all measured on that. Um, there are flow metrics which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out from the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it? There are quality metrics, um, you know, some of the classics or maybe things like defect, density, or meantime to response. Um, one of my favorites came from a, um, a company called ultimate software where they looked at the ratio of defects found in production to defects found in pre production and their developers were in fact measured on that ratio. It told them that guess what quality is your job to not just the test, uh, departments, a group, the fourth level that I think is really important, uh, in, in the current, uh, situation that we're in is the level of engagement in your development organization. >>We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric helpful was the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five o'clock. I can't do that anymore since we're not physically co-located, but what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCM environment. You can look at, uh, the relative rates of churn. Uh, you can look at things like, well, are our developers delivering, uh, during longer periods earlier in the morning, later in the evening, are they delivering, uh, you know, on the weekends as well? Are those signs that we might be heading toward a burnout because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. Uh, so all of those in combination, uh, business value, uh, flow engagement in quality, I think form the backbone of any sort of, of metrics, uh, a program. >>The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Um, unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data and that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say, you need to say, how is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing. And then what do we do to remove those blockers, uh, to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams the context that they need to do their job, uh, in a way that creates the most value for the customers. >>Great advice stuff, Glenn, over to your metrics that matter to you that really make a big impact. And, and, and also how do you measure quality kind of following onto the advice that Jeff provided? >>That's some great advice. Actually, he talks about value. He talks about flow. Both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. Um, but there was this, I listened to a speaker, uh, called me Kirsten a couple of months ago. It taught very much around how important flow management is and removing, you know, and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, you know, making software changes, um, what is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to. So where are those areas where it takes long? So I think that's a very important thing for us. It's even more basic than that at the moment, we're on a journey from moving from kind of a waterfall to agile. Um, and the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is with waterfall, the, the business had a kind of comfort that, you know, everything was tested together and therefore it's safer. >>Um, and with agile, there's that kind of, you know, how do we make sure that, you know, if we're doing things quick and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, um, that that's ready to go, or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence, um, and some of the metrics around that and how, how healthy those releases are, and actually saying, you know, we spend a lot of money, um, um, an investment setting up our teams, training our teams, are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly and are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment, but I think it's also about, you know, generally bringing it all together, the dev ops, you know, we've got the kind of value ops AI ops, how do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions and making sure that we are, um, delivering the biggest bang for our buck, absolutely biggest bang for the buck, surge, your thoughts. >>Yeah. So I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. Um, these are kind of the most important metrics. And ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across a highly functional teams is engagements, right? When, when you see a team that's highly functioning, that's agile, that practices DevOps every day, they are highly engaged. Um, that that's, that's definitely true. Now the, you know, back to, I think, uh, Jeff's point on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that, um, organizations traditionally have been kind of, uh, you know, setting up benchmarks, right? So what is a good cycle time? What is a good lead time? What is a good meantime to repair? The, the problem is that this is very contextual, right? It varies. It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. >>And so one of the things that we really need to evolve, um, as an industry is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about our, these four metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric to the business outcome. So that's one thing. The second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood is that, you know, when you have a bad cycle time or, or, or what you perceive as being a buy cycle time or better quality, the problem is oftentimes like all, do you go and explore why, right. What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics and not on the eye type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. Um, you know, if you look at, for instance, things like lead time, for instance, it's very common that, uh, organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to badly time. >>And so I think that there is, you know, the only the metrics there is, I think a lot of work that we need to do in terms of classifying, descend type patterns, um, you know, back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of waterscrumfall as a, as, as a key pattern, the industry or anti-spatter. Um, but waterscrumfall right is a key one, right? And you will detect that through kind of a defect arrival rates. That's where that looks like an S-curve. And so I think it's beyond kind of the, the metrics is what do you do with those metrics? >>Right? I'll tell you a search. One of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is I think those of us had been in industry for a long time. We know the anti-patterns cause we've seen them in our career maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti-patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply, uh, machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. Um, so hopefully something that we'd see in the future with dev ops tools, because, you know, as a manager that, that, you know, may be only a 10 year veteran or 15 year veteran, you may be seeing these anti-patterns for the first time. And it would sure be nice to know what to do, uh, when they start to pop up, >>That would right. Insight, always helpful. All right, guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on this. The one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for and to put on our agendas for the next 12 months, Jeff will go back to you. Okay. >>I would say look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see, first of all, uh, as we shift to remote central working, uh, we're unlocking new pools of talent, uh, we're, it's possible to implement, uh, more geographic diversity. So, so look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low-code tools to very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers that agile and dev ops are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative, uh, workers with algorithmic capabilities, >>Peanut butter and chocolate Glen, where do we go from there? What are, what's the one silver bullet that you think folks to be on the lookout for now? I, I certainly agree that, um, low, low code is, uh, next year. We'll see much more low code we'd already started going, moving towards a more of a SAS based world, but low code also. Um, I think as well for me, um, we've still got one foot in the kind of cow camp. Um, you know, we'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last, um, the last thing for me is how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of, um, the, the life cycle, um, where, when I heard the word scrum fall, it kind of made me shut it because I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment we need to get beyond that. We need >>To be releasing, um, changes more frequently into production and actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production and go straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Um, yeah. Thank you. I haven't got any food analogies. Unfortunately we all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right. It starts to take us home. That's what's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas? >>That's interesting. Right. So a couple of days ago we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's all about the lost city, but it's all about sweet. We still are receiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me, the key advice is in order to create kind of a spiritual collocation in order to foster engagement, we have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams, to understand how they're delivering value into aligning everything they do from a metrics to deliver it, to flow to those metrics. And only with that, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to really start to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive, not just speed, but business outcomes, >>All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me today and our guests. I think this was an incredibly valuable fruitful conversation, and we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually co-located with us today, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. Thank you for Jeff Hammond serves Lucio and Glen Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the broad cops Broadcom dev ops virtual forum.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel. First up. We're gonna have Mitt Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoes. That's on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to Cape Cod. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognized that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. That, and if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to, to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, or training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And mic to you. Why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the agile movement since it started two decades with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think that was just no. Did we really need to improve at the business level? Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the manifesto provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea, that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant Lightswitch. Everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. They really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today are being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. >>Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business nightie, you know, in many ways and make cover. Does agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all the way we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability, and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these, uh, discuss inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP, uh, different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with you, Tom, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build system, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to you Nick. Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating half so high performing organizations, we can measure third and 10 float time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Cause you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you, when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or, um, attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect of the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured, right >>Surgery. I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. I wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Um, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spike, just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, it's all about bringing the data in context, in the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to the business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know, metrics that they are used to to actually track you start to, to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that DC is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating, uh, some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what w why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of the past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, um, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and, uh, even if you're in a, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to follow up by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here, where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less than less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are, we are making progress. Right, >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a, a student of agile when, when you look at the opportunity with ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both Sergeant Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for, for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an ITK, from where, for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and that we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and together this coalition >>Of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. Alright, so we had surge, Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube, it's a biz ops manifesto and unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of BizOps manifesto, unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition and welcome back Friday, Jeff Frick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios. And we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto, unveil exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest to share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why the biz ops manifesto, why the biz optical edition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, uh, why this coalition? >>Yeah, so, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right. Well, you know, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to, you know, the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud, you know, this whole movement, right. And, um, in resonates with me, because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we've talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that, that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations. And then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with Deb, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to it. And it's a great way to catalyze that conversation. That I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customers, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments. Cause you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talked about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plant. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're going to, we're going to adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, all sudden the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammering up the, uh, the thing in the Lutheran church with their, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways you bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster and everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote unquote, where we were lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time. >>And right. A lot of our customers still do that, but you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. We've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training and investment. Um, and then, you know, I think, uh, leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we, we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people got to make trade offs. They got to make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project and product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking about, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience is delivered through a product or a service. That's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models yeah. With software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before COBIT hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now we're in October and this is going to be going on for a while. And it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders LeanKit immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just gonna be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue, uh, or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also, you know, none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of lock in, uh, and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yep. Like you said, this is all, it's all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity and inclusion. Right. And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words that goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terra firma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative. Right. And, uh, and it's happening, both of those things right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it. And at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. We're Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad to be a part of it. >>All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil you're on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling, or we're excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a fairly early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development games, such as object programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I had the fortunate of working with, and really our goal was. And of course, there's, as, as you noticed, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we can make it 10 times easier to white coat. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are wanting to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking from Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a sparking into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates and that company that was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language to make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the biz ops coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed to soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of the organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of measures. Pretty >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, nobody has unlimited resources. And ultimately you have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, roughly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, uh, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author from project to product and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book? Or is it a little bit of both? >>That's a great question. It's not one I get asked very often cause to me it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get, that we've learned how to master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me, how you teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with question replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the future? >>And how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that, that concept of flow to these end to end value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like that and point out promoter scores, rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So that the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results and the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more, >>I love it. I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto in two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value, uh, in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things of funding projects and cost centers, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value you fund to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your bottleneck is. And this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated, then having them context, which I'm trash. So the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving a device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And I, you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say, it's just whack-a-mole right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud was taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of that approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with, with tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value that for us to get that learning loop going. >>So I think I've seen all of these cloud deployments and one of the things that's happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float for us rather than costs where we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month, but once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's it that's, what's catalyzed. This interesting shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how big, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements you delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the full frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring cost to measuring value, to survive in the subscription economy. >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and, and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps, and can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and 5g. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, this is going to overwhelm and one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect collected at the right way. You want that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning effectively. And there've been the number of data warehouses in a typical enterprise organization. And the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so yes, you understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes. What is your time to value these metrics like full time? You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? >>Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that had to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So that data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analyst and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with, with the development teams. You know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engaging with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, there's the manifesto, but the key thing is just to get you set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a probably value stream that's mission critical. It could be your new mobile and web experiences or, or part of your cloud modernization platform or your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on the people, on the development teams, the people in leadership all the way up to the CEO. And one of the, what I encourage you to start is actually that content flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that Adrian Cockcroft. When the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream, measure, sentiment, flow time, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the business, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come due from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for awhile and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry, uh, the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, uh, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. >>Um, so the, the, the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach and many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, I've been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, uh, the BizOps concept and the business manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which have been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also, uh, tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's seeking. >>Right, right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result could have a traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, um, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. >>And, and he talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of beavers. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze this system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume variety of philosophy of the data, uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today to really help organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their blog. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention in our survey, we did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand how many we're tracking business outcomes I'm going to do with the software executives. It executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of a software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take, you know, another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the, it teams, whether it's operations, software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with what the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and, and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamic on the, on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifesto to exist. >>So, uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might still my all time favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change because that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an, an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time, and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, there, they have estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So, so that's one dimensional portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are, we're really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality and I've always believed that the fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for a core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yeah, if you look at our, it, operations are operating there, we're using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database off time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptight, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social, a mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric. And some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to, um, Charles you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, like for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that super insightful, but I guess you just got to get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind in these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really wrong requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong, uh, kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I were to remember correctly, over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach these core requirements to be completely defined before software development starts, let me pause there we're 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering on the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria? And so that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the, the, um, you know, various Doris dilemna the key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of, uh, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered the length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. >>All right. I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos. Cause you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including either your, your competition and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, these values, these principles. >>So first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, DS concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors such as desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, fall years, people would have been LP, large organizations, do digital transformation vendors. We're providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in, in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story and again, congrats to you and the team. >>Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. >>Oh, my pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps manifest to go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by bill. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that we'll actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. Uh, and we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. Right. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the biz ops coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly, um, no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data-driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that's evolved over, over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is, this is going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before Hey, asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on a former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, it's suggested we need, um, data and, um, the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current. And we, we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we called it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. Yeah. >>I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but it turned out 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything thought we knew, but I wanna, I wanna follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the BizOps when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve double down they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic, on digital projects. It's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to, um, cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. >>Right, right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they are, the projects that are working well are, you know, when I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't want to be driving around on them very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? That's funny you bring up contract management. >>I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and was like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts contractor in people's drawers and files and homes, and Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar projects. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with, with digital, you know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>Yeah. I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, and you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. I agree. Totally. Alright, Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. Take care. Alright. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vale. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core of founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel first up. We're gab Mitt, Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoe sits on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to kickoff. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's, it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognize that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, we're training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And Nick to you, why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So Ben close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. >>And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think as satisfies noted, uh, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, uh, trying to make sure that they can adapt quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver the customer sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the that's manifested provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're >>Still struggling with the kind of a changes in culture that they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today, or being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage with this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business. And it, you know, in many ways, uh, make covered that agile really emerged from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all that we, we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning kind of these, uh, kind of inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to act now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with Utah, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of the behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that, um, most organizations still don't have data-driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build a system, >>If we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to, to you Nick cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure at antenna flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction, your developers measurably, it goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these, these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my adult team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm gonna back to you Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for, because you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that, that you kick out. And, you know, my favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for a cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect to have the decision to confirm it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame >>That decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right, >>Sir, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if that had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond, and pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people, or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Uh, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spoke just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, he told about bringing the data in context and the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is all the number of defects or velocity or whatever over your metrics that you're used to, to actually track you start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are, the effecting, basically a metric of that that is really relevant. And then what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's, it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and many organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in the limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what, why, why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of a past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and even if you're in, uh, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to fall by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date, you never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and, and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but we are, we are making progress. Right. >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a student of agile. When, when you look at the opportunity with biz ops and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both search and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really this, these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics. So when, from where for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value. And that will help you that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Uh, congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition, uh, of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. >>Thank you. >>Alright, so we had surge Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. Variety. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios, and we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto unveil some exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest is share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why >>The biz ops manifesto, why the biz ops coalition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, why this coalition? >>Yeah. So, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something that I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right? Well, no, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud this whole movement. Right. And, um, it resonates with me because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we have talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether, you know, I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with dev, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to. And I, and it's a great way to catalyze that conversation that I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And, and as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customer, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments because you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talk about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as opposed to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities, and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plan. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're gonna, we're gonna adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model to, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, also the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and, you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammer and up the, a, the thing in the Lutheran church with it, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster in everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote, unquote work. We lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time, and right. >>A lot of our customers still do that, but, you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core to the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. I mean, we've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training investment. Um, and then, you know, I think a leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people gotta make trade offs. They gotta make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project, the product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking to Mick, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience, that's delivered through a product or a service that's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models, you know, with software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before covert hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But th the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now, we're in October, and this is going to be going on for a while, and it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders leaned to immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just going to be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, when we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the, you would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And, and so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also know none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of, of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yeah, like you said, this is all, this all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity inclusion. Right? And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words and goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terrafirma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative, right. And, uh, and this happening, both of those things, right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it, and at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. Well, Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad >>That'd be part of it. All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil here on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling or excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development teams, such as object oriented programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I have the fortune of working with, and really our goal was. And of course there's as, as you know, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model back then was all about changing the way that we work, uh, was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write code. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are, who want to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a spark and into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates on that company. I was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working in that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the BizOps coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of advisors. >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, no one has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author, a project, a product, and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book or is it a little bit about, >>Well, that's a great question. It's not what I get asked very often. Just to me, it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get to, we've learned how to master individual flow. That is this beautiful book by me, how he teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the feature and how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? >>Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that co that concept of flow to these entwined value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like the employee net promoter scores rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results in the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more happy. >>I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And, you know, I love that, you know, took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones that are undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things, a funny projects and cost centers, uh, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your boggling like is, and this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So let's, you actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated around having them context, which on thrash. So it, the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal and the, and you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where that bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say defense just whack them. All right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud. It's taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of the approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. >>Whereas if you focus on getting closer to the customer and reducing your cycles out on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with the tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value for us to get that learning loop going. So I think I've, I've seen all these cloud deployments and one of the things happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float us rather than costs when we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's, it that's, what's catalyzed. This industry shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's, and they're winning the business, not you. So, one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experience as well. That really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how much, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements we delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the flow frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you deliver to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value, to survive. And in the subscription economy, >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and a data driven decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps. And you can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, is this gonna overwhelm? And one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect, collected that the right way you want it, that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there've been the number of data where, how has this in a typical enterprise organization and the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes, what is your time to value through these metrics like full time? >>You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that have to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So the data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader. He, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with the, with the development teams. I know I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, for the manifesto. But the key thing is just, it's definitely set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a product value stream. That's mission critical if it'd be on your mobile and web experiences or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on, but the people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO, and one of the, where I encourage you to start is actually that end to end flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that when the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream measure, Antonin flow time, uh, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube for our ongoing coverage of the big unveil. It's the biz ops manifesto manifesto unveil. And we're going to start that again from the top three And a Festo >>Five, four, three, two. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for a while and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>Absolutely. So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry of the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, a, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard >>Business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. Um, so the, the, the key challenge that we're faced with is really that we need a new approach. And many of the players in the industry, including ourselves have been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, a, the BizOps concept and the BizOps manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which has been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's taking. >>Right. Right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March, and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of a, the traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, uh, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises and end. >>He talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of behaviors. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze the system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required, uh, as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume of variety of philosophy of the data. Uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today, truly out organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their block. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention an hour survey. We did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand only we're tracking business outcomes. I'm going to get the software executives, it executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the it teams, whether it's operation software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with the, the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamics on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifestor to exist, >>Uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might steal my all time. Favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change cause that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, they're, they've estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So that's one dimension on portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality. And so I've always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yet, if you look at our, it, operations are operating, they were using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database of time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And, uh, and so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric, and what's hard, the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric and some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate, um, the key challenges you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, right, for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we've talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that, uh, super insightful, but I guess you just gotta get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you've got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really role requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach is for requirements to be completely defined before software development starts. Let me pause there where 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering all the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria. And so that, that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the innovator's dilemma. The key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of a, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered at length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. Right. >>I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos because you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your, your competition and, and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, values, these principles. >>So, first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that, um, things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies, or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, these concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change, uh, some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors and suggest desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our, our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, thought leaders, people who have been LP, larger organizations do digital transformation vendors, were providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on these digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story. And again, congrats to you and the team. Thank you. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it, and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled and brought to you by >>This obstacle volition. Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He's a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. And we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution, the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there had been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the BizOps coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I, I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data-driven decisions, which is the number three of four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that evolved over over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is this going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support, but the problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least, um, recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system. And that I believe would add to, um, the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before I asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on the former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, as I suggested we need, um, data and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we call it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. >>Yeah. I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but I turned down 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything and thought we knew, but I want to, I want to follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We've got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and, and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve doubled down, they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out, um, in the pandemic on digital projects, it's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. Right, >>Right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that, that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they, I, the projects that are working well are, you know, what I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while, and we really don't want to be driving around on, um, and then very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny you bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and I've like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts are in people's drawers and files and homes. And Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar project. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on, on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can, most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity, and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. >>I agree. Totally >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I got to dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one. And to me, I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vail. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] me [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] um [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so so [Applause] so [Music] so welcome to cyber security insights we're excited to talk to you today about some of the key developments in the cyber security area let me start off by saying you know security's always been a board room topic boards care about it but right now it's actually getting even more important given what's happening covered 19 given the risk the world faces the fact that 70 percent of the workforce is now really working from home at vmware we have all of our employees working for we made that a mandate not just required but we're taking a cautious approach as to how they come back that's the reality of many of our customers but the bad guys are not staying still 148 increase in ransomware during this time they're just looking for every way to take advantage of innocent people working at home and then we've seen 52 percent increase of all attacks in the march time frame targeting the financial sector so it's very important that you we have a different approach to security because our belief is the security industry has been broken uh you'll see on this chart 5000 odd vendors 15 or 20 different categories and it's often i described like going to a doctor to stay healthy and she tells you you've got to take 5 000 tablets and you fall off your chest and that's just not possible you know so how do you prevent staying having 5000 tablets taking 5000 tablets to stay healthy you eat your vegetables your fruit your proteins drink your water you make it part of your hygiene and that's what needs to happen in security we've got to move away from this bolted on approach siloed approach where you've got you know various differences feels like even 5000 tablets 5000 security tools are all kind of like healthcare deem themselves very important and also from security that's just focused on threats and the new approach needs to be one that's more built-in intrinsically part of the platform like making a part of your diet more unified as opposed to just siloed across all of the key pillars of security and a lot more context-centric rather than just threat centric to do this we've been looking at kind of the value proposition of vmware we're you know about a 10.8 billion dollar company and have played across these three or four layers off being a digital foundation for the world any cloud any app any device with intrinsic security you've seen this from us several uh over the last several years what we've sought to do is layer into that diagram five or six important control points in security that we think are going to be super important to make security intrinsic let's start off on the bottom right corner of this with network security we think a new approach for network security means that if you look at data center networking or firewalls or load balancing or sd-wan what is a 30 billion dollar opportunity a new approach you know could be one way you could have in one platform all of those capabilities in something that's more software-defined that's what we've been doing uh in with nsx a platform some customers call us sort of the tesla of networking because we're taking a somewhat you know traditional hardware-defined approach to networking and building a more software-defined networking stack for security much the same way a tesla is building a software-defined car if you go to the left-hand side you see kind of the endpoints but it's two different forms of endpoint an endpoint that's on the client side near the device a laptop tablet a phone or a endpoint that's closer to the server a workload or a container and in both areas we believe we have an opposition proposition to really be the best uh security solution for endpoint and workload security identity we think there's a tremendous opportunity to be the best solution that not just some ourselves but also partners with the best of breed players for example um octa or azure active directory in cloud security we're going to do a lot ourselves for example cloud security posture management but we're also going to partner with the likes of well web gateways and and proxies like z scale or netscope and then analytics is the big kahuna because the more data that you have the more equipped you are to prevent breaches and what we believe here is this notion of what the analysts are now calling xdr collecting telemetry from all of these control points which we have exposure to network endpoint workload identity cloud and having one big data lake where you reason over this with a variety of behavioral and ai algorithms and then provide the best way by which you can protect customers from possible future security events this is something we well best because we actually collecting the most telemetry of anybody from disparate different sources and you're gonna only see this increase so vmware's proposition uh as you look at this we today have a billion dollar security business i know you're gonna listen to that and say wow where did that come from some customers call us one of the best kept uh security secrets in the industry uh a significant about that comes from network security a growing part of it now comes from endpoint security we think the opportunity is to take that billion dollar business it's about 20 000 odd customers and double or triple that by really focusing in these five or six control points you're going to see us build the best products in each of these categories but one that's intrinsic and also works between them in ways that are incredible let me give you a couple examples with carbon black we're going to make it agentless on the server side with vsphere nobody else can do that we're going to do that and you're going to see that very soon with carbon black we're going to make it unified with workspace 1 on the console so you have a unified approach there on both the console and the agent something that you also start seeing from us very soon these are things that nobody else in users can do network security you're going to see from one platform data center networking load balancing firewalls and sd-wan beautiful security-centric networking story so this is the approach for folks and now i think as we listen to several of the thought leaders and analysts you're going to hear them get into this story in more detail thank you very much let's continue in this show cyber security insights and now we'd like to explore the unified approach of security and i.t how do you unify them as a foundation for success our special guest today is chris sherman who's senior analyst at forrester and a pretty renowned security uh researcher and thought leader himself chris welcome to the show great to be here with you sanjay you know i'm sitting here in my living room in cleveland ohio as we uh ride down the curve right fighting off a cabin fever and staying healthy hope you're doing the same chris i'm doing well but listen i look at your beautiful looking um you know i can't confess that my background is my natural i've got a virtual background is that actually your living room or is that a virtual background it is this is my living room we built the house last year and it's also my little private iot lab because you know i'm a huge nerd and i love my devices we've been you know kind of a big fan of a lot of the forester research zero trust security you mentioned your research and iot uh i.t security and i'd like to explore this a little further with you chris i'm a big fan of your research read a lot of your stuff uh but let's kind of focus in you know clearly in this time having security strategy and i.t strategy be together in this current climate many organizations have had to pivot uh due to covert 19. you know one example is employees having to work at home which raises a whole host of cyber security issues and you know having reviewed the research results it makes them i think even more relevant the need for security and i.t to join forces i believe right now to defeating the cyber criminals during the pandemic um so that we don't have this risk and quite frankly you know we've been finding the risk is even higher because the bad guys aren't sleeping uh even if there's a crisis going on so maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this research and your findings absolutely yeah so you know i think the genesis of this research really started with a conversation i had with some of your team members back in november uh we talked about you know the high level of friction between these two teams right between i.t and security and frankly the lack of support that a lot of the existing tools in the market really have for you know integrating the two and when you look across the industry there really aren't a whole lot of resources for buyers or you know technology strategists that you know want to understand these dynamics and you know this is really what led to vmware commissioning forester to uh you know this past february to survey over 1400 security and it ops decision makers across the globe we really wanted to probe those dynamics right you know what's holding companies back from eliminating this friction right this really was actually the largest sample size of any commissioned study that i've been a part of here at forester and it really led to some excellent results and and data as you know from the uh published research i'm looking forward to to reading them and knowing more about it and you know i think if you think about the research and uh you know there's a shift in security driving alignment and collaboration security and it's you know kind of the top initiative we see in the next 12 months uh maybe even tell us about why the relationship between these security and id teams um you know are important whys have been strained across both you know all three of people process and technology yeah i mean so i team security really are two sides of the same coin right but unfortunately their teams have struggled to work well together for many years according to our survey date it's gotten to the point where 83 of both team staff report a negative relationship between the two it's very unfortunate but there are many reasons for this you know many reasons for this friction especially with the vp director and manager roles between the security and the ite teams you know at a high level most of this is driven by the fact that security and i.t have differing priorities right our data backs us up you know you have i.t on one side that's focused on technology efficiency and uptime and from our conversations with it staff it's clear you know they view security as philosophically opposite you know to this right often as roadblocks to accomplishing their goals and then on the other side security's top priority is as you'd expect responding to security events and incidents and preventing compromises and this difference in priorities is the source of a lot of friction also both security and i.t staff are really unhappy with the technology that the tools specifically that they're using or the security tools the c cios and csos you know that we talked to all had the same complaint they have too many disjointed tools in fact the average across our study was 27 security products on average in each organization and even the most established security solutions like take firewalls for example you know it caused some serious angst right we found that only 52 percent of respondents felt that their firewalls were satisfactory in terms of the performance and the security uh efficacy i think you know listen a couple of points i'll point point out from what you talked about that resonate deeply with us one is when you talked about uh i don't know it was 25 or 27 odd tools i'd be surprised the number of csos i talked to who say it's in the dozens one i think i always sort of keep a record for the number of tools i've heard one tell me it was like 100 different security tools i asked you know him was there a hundred different consoles so it's just the number of tools and consoles uh the other one that you resonated with me was even in one of the more mature areas like firewalls you would have thought oh people are really happy there we find the same level of dissatisfaction with people saying listen traditional hardware-based approaches appliance-based approaches lots of policy way way too complicated um now let's talk a little bit about staffing i think it's it's you know listen at the end of the day security is a team sport it does depend on products and processes and technology but there's also people and you know we security teams are understaffed they're increasingly dealing with a complex portfolio of these non-integrated products how uh is this impacting teams and what can companies you do as you advise them to reduce complexity from the plethora of different products that are often point products today well you're right right finding and training the right item security staff is really critical to the success of the respective teams unfortunately this continues to be a major pain point right across the whole industry in fact 64 of the security teams that we surveyed and 53 of the it teams reported they're understaffed but yeah i mean amid this global pandemic when most organizations are focused on surviving and you know maybe keeping the lights on or i guess in this case maybe the vpn's running right and getting by with limited resources and protecting an increasingly remote workforce it's much more difficult to collaborate and work together across teams but our data showed that one of the major results of this you know the formation of communication silos you know teams aren't communicating enough right they're they're communicating within their or organization designed for their particular use case right with very little integration and collaboration across those silos and you know this is where tools could help right most of the time though they the tools actually just reflect or amplify those silos by reinforcing the division right between the two teams ultimately organizations may be looking for technologies that can support the needs of both it and security right this will help alleviate any tension that might arise over things like competition over limited resources right ideally once the teams come together and agree on goals as well as objectives and and measures of success for that matter right they can address their technology stack inherent complexity wisely said listen the security attacks are becoming more sophisticated uh organizations are considering now i think the approach as you've described is a unified strategy to address these critical issues uh can you tell us more about how you've seen these unified approaches to security strategy being effective well so i mean it seems like we've been talking about unifying the tools and strategies by you know i.t ops and security for years right but it's only been recently that we've seen the two sides really demonstrate any appetite to actually do so unfortunately most of the tools again right on the market are focused on one or the other and integrations are only starting to really accelerate to the point where our true unified vision is even possible this not only aligns teams under common goals right having a common tool set but it also aligns workflows between those two teams and helps foster collaboration uh listen uh you mentioned a couple of these these examples are really good for people to kind of grop you know in this have you uh outside of these exams or any other sort of tangible results uh that you think companies can expect uh as they bring together their security and id strategies and make them more unified what are the results from your research you think customers can expect to gain yeah there are several other you know clear benefits right that we identified in this research right the benefits to unifying the tech stacks between it ops and security our research showed that companies with a unified strategy reported fewer security incidents fewer data breaches which makes sense right given how critical endpoint configuration and overall i.t hygiene is to the security posture of an organization also you know building security capabilities directly into the it infrastructure helps to motivate non-security staff to take some ownership right over basic security fundamentals and this all helps speed right this this increases the speed to you know both detect new threats and uh respond once they're you know identified you know time to containment right this was also validated by our survey data a common strategy really can empower both to you know mitigate risk ensure continuous compliance and improve you know their threat response uh workflows you know between the two teams really companies need to find tools that meet the needs of both teams and at the end of the day as you pointed out security is a team sport right we all benefit from working together to protect the business and its employees right from malicious actors especially in these difficult times that's great chris thank you for uh your research um um so i just encourage all of you are listening um if you want to um you know get chris's research um you know go to this url on the screen here and you'll be able to download it uh we're excited about it i mean listen you know personally when i watch it teams and security teams sometimes sort of spar each other um you know i i i think that increasingly whether the security team reports under the cio sometimes that's the case sometimes security teams report into the chief legal officer or they report maybe into the cfo wherever reporting structures are only you have to build a team sport because there's aspect of this that's policy aspects of this that are technology there are aspects of this that are people uh thank you for this research chris as always i'm a fan of uh the stuff as are all of we and what you're right so it's always good to be able to see more this is also much of the other extended uh forest to work like zero trust that have become kind of the things that i've seen now becoming more pervasive in the industry so thank you all for listening to this uh and we hope we'll continue to serve you in the course of this program cyber security insights with more insights like this it's my pleasure right now to also continue this uh cyber security insights series now with a wonderful interview um with the head of security and infrastructure at circle k suzanne hall um i've had a chance to briefly meet her prior to this and she's got an incredible vision of how infrastructure security comes together uh in the context of retail so i'm looking forward to the discussion suzanne thank you for joining us today thanks sanjay glad to be here great hey listen maybe i'll start with um you know circle okay some folks may know you in the locality in the areas where they shop or whatever have you but many folks around the country may not and we're assuming there'll be a very large audience watching this tell us a little bit about the company what you guys do uh what's your vision and how are you serving uh customers and consumers oh terrific oh well yeah so circle k uh many people do not realize it's actually a canadian-owned company we are a global uh convenience and fuel service organization uh with with offices all across north america uh large part of northern europe um and with franchises in a large part of asia as well we're the second largest convenience store company in the world and the 11th largest retailer we yeah we acquired circle k the brand um back in the early 2000's and uh our goals right now over the next five years are to try and double in size um which is a pretty aggressive goal goal considering uh our organization which really is taking a you know 60 billion dollar organization and trying to double that in the next five years so wish us luck let's focus now a little bit more on the infrastructure and security part of it um it's interesting that you own both as you think about those areas um you know how are they linked together and what have you been doing to tie uh infrastructure topics and security topics which are often you know you have a ciso and then a cto owns infrastructure in your case you own both and i think it's a classic way in which you know we're trying to kind of get traditional it teams the security work world to go you're living it then you're breathing and you're implementing your team uh how is it working out and how are you making it work yeah oh sorry it was actually a key part of me being attracted to the to this world i've been here about 18 months um i really feel for certain organizations culturally if you can make it work where security operations can function together um it really empowers your security team to move things quickly and it also gives me the opportunity to take ultimately super scarce resources from the security side and build uh more security acumen within my network teams and my hosting teams and my infra um so that i get actually really smart technologists that also get security collaborating with really great security folks that also get technology there's a lot of synergies that i that i get from that from combining these two organizations and where circle k was before i got here you know we we um did need to rapidly mature a lot of our security program um because it had just um grown uh i think the organization grew beyond the competencies of the security team before i got here and so by having both sides of that house i was really able to move things quickly um kind of i don't have to i don't have to uh negotiate between the network team and the hosting team the security team because they all report up to me and i get i get to pick who wins all the time so it works really well i'd love to talk to you but just cover it it's on on everybody's mind it's changed transformed how we all work you and i are doing this interview work from home uh if we were doing it in different concerts i have to come to you or come to us we have done this in the studio together or in an event um and certainly it's you know kind of changing the ways in which we work and family life and so on and so forth but how is it changing your business how is it changing your i.t organization uh and how have you had to adapt to um you know this time that we're sheltering place work at home yeah well it's really it's changed everything for us as i'm sure for for most of your of your clients as well um you know obviously serp okay being convenience we are uh on the front lines we are open across the globe we may have some small stores that may get closed for periodic periods of time or maybe some shortened hours but we've got convenience workers and gas station workers working around the globe through coven so we've had to change how the stores look and feel um we've had to rapidly deploy things like curbside delivery to really adjust to uh customers um wants and expectations and then we've had to take the entire back office and put people working at home which was not our culture um before this all happened and we had to do that almost like in watching a wave go across the globe as it started uh offices started closing in northern europe first uh and then and then all the way through to ireland and then and then obviously the east coast and canada and all the way through to the west coast so um we actually had a very short period of time to create a remote working uh operation um luckily enough um we had some really talented folks we put a couple different solutions in place and uh within two weeks or so we were able to get everybody working remotely that could work remotely and then that really empowered us to support all those operations folks that needed to get things like plexiglass into the stores hand sanitizers into the stores masks uh um into the stores uh to serve our customers and to serve our staff i'd like to move on um then to the um the kind of the context of this infrastructure and i.t workers and security work i.t teams and security teams working better together one of the things we find often and we did some research with forester that where companies performed well and had great you know security prevention practices breaches places where i t and security work well together and traditionally often csos uh may be separate from the infrastructure team sometimes csos don't even report into ci support elsewhere and that can be uh not intensely so sometimes intentionally but often just a silo or a warring mentality you're good evidence now where you're bringing these together let's talk a little away from technology for a second and the people process collaboration how have you been able to bring these cultures together so that they work together for the common good of either cost saving protection whatever have you yeah you know um and so i've had the benefit of being a cso and a cio and a couple different organizations and also i was in i was in consulting for many years i worked for a big four uh from a letter of cyber practice with one of the big four firms and i'll tell you cyber programs uh move fast forward best when there's a couple of key elements in place and the first one is you have to have shared goals anytime that the cyber team is trying to implement something um in that the network team isn't on board with or the network team picked a tool they don't want to implement the tool that the cyber team is as um and has selected i mean that's that's always a recipe for failure so somehow you have to really work on aligned goals and i do that even though i own the infrastructure teams and the security teams um nobody's successful if we're not all successful together and really focusing on what does success look like for for each one of the each one of our areas and look sometimes you know we do have to take some uh educated risks in the environment you know for responding to things quickly but we also don't take we don't um let those risks sort of linger and and never get remediated right so we really work together to make sure that any new risks that we're taking on we have a focus on how we're going to mitigate that and we hold ourselves accountable and um and the network team is equally accountable for responding to security events as a security team is the key element i also say to my security teams is when you're working with production operations teams and and folks you've got to have skin in the game you've got to recognize that they're trying to keep systems up and running 24 7 you know for the operations of the organization right so we can take credit cards and cash in the stores and make the sales and deliver the goods and services when we need to if the security team isn't seen as fully on board with that mission and that um that responsibility then there's there's a non-equity sort of relationship going on between the two different teams so you really need to bring them all together and make sure that everybody um understands supports each other's wins and goals it's awesome that you've been a cio and a ciso and you've seen all of these in various different companies i'm sure maybe in smaller bigger wherever have you so you're able to really relate to that uh i find the csos i talk to uh most of my relationships in the years past have been with cfos and cios uh i set myself a personal goal this year as we started getting more into security as i've been shaping that strategy of the company to meet a thousand cesars i was 15 years ago at symantec and most of the csos i know are retired and moved on so uh it's a good new way of my understanding and i find as i talk to them so refreshing the ones who are strategic like yourself uh have had tremendous experience in id or are also owned them and are able to paint a vision that's very collaborative as to as opposed to ones who don't then are also able to strategically bring teams together so it's really good to to see that i'd like to kind of just work a little bit more into security because i mean your strategy plays into the reason we're quite carbon black um and you i have some obviously you know knowledge and investment vmware but i'm listening as i was listening to prior to getting on to this you know program together you're probably doing more with carbon black which is awesome i mean it'll probably strengthen our relationship with vmware too and of course but we can talk a little bit about that what's been your history carbon black why you picked them and where do you see that going on the endpoint security um and then i'll talk a little bit about how we're trying to try that into infrastructure too yeah so um so my relationship with carbon black goes back to uh almost right after i first arrived at circle k um obviously i know uh from having come from consulting a number of different uh tools and products out there um although carbon black always had a really good reputation and strength and um i went to carbon black pretty early on and said you know here's my here's my situation i've got a little bit of carbon black and a little bit of other things in different places i really want to standardize on a single tool i really want to get to a better visibility of my overall network and of my of my risks and ultimately i want to have a single pane of glass but um that you know i've got folks working from an eyes on 24 7. um you know carbon black hands a table really quickly and had a great vision uh for how they could get us uh standardized across some different versions that we had um and when i said okay i want to do this in six weeks or fewer um they didn't say we can't make that happen um i think a lot of people on my team wish that they'd said that we can't make that happen but um but now we were able to really rather quickly um deploy and and get up to speed across all of our stores across all of our networks all of our you know we're a very distributed organization i've got offices all across north america and europe um and uh and we were able to in six weeks get get standardized and get things up and running and i had gained great visibility uh in that and i'm a big believer when looking at all sorts of tools whether they're input tools or security tools that you know you can tell whether or not you've picked the right solution if it's fit for purpose relatively quickly if it feels like it's too hard to implement if it just feels like it's you're not getting the value out of out of something in a relatively quick period of time you really do need to look at whether or not the tool you're looking at is fit for purpose in your environment and i would say the carbon black team and the carbon black tool that made it really easy for us and um you know it's giving us great visibility we have been able to uh detect and respond to a number of different instances you know retail is a very uh high threat high target industry these days um so it's been it's been super helpful in us defending um circle k in our environment and with 130 000 employees i suspect your number of endpoints are in the tens of thousands on the client side and probably just as many in terms of server-side endpoints right so your your kind of surface area of potential endpoints is pretty large oh indeed and you know but you know you have over 15 000 stores every store has multiple point of sale systems and at multiple uh computers laptops tablets devices um and that's and that's even before i go out into the uh what we call the forecourt which is where the gas dispensers and pumps are so yeah it's very complex well listen we look forward to that journey together part of what she has talked about here is a key part to our vision uh folks listening to this is to basically bring together security to make it key parts of the infrastructure both in the endpoint the network and the cloud thank you for your partnership i look forward to getting to know you and your team better um thank you also for all you're doing to serve the community during these tough times especially those workers at circle key that are the front line in the stores we appreciate you tremendously and we look forward to continuing this dialogue thank you very much thank you thank you everybody for watching this cyber security insight segments titled security as a team sport we talked about the shift in security and how security is moving to a shared responsibility model in this team sport in this segment we also discussed the benefits of a consolidated security and an i.t strategy that allows for fewer breaches and a faster response to security incidents as key benefits that have implemented a common strategy for those who have done this i encourage all of you to watch this part two of cyber security insights the securities of dual mission and we will have two security leaders discussing how security helps not only protect but help drives the business forward thank you all for watching this segment [Music] you