>>Hey everyone, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I have the pleasure of welcoming back our most prolific guest on the cube in its history, the CMO of Fin Ad, Eric Herzog. Eric, it's great to see you. Welcome back, >>Lisa. It's great to be here. Love being on the cube. I think this might be number 55 or 56. Been doing 'em a long time with the Cube. You guys are great. >>You, you have, and we always recognize you lately with the Hawaiian shirts. It's your brand that's, that's the Eric Hizo brand. We love it. But I like the pin, the infin nut pin on brand. Thank you. >>Yeah. Oh, gotta be on brand. >>Exactly. So talk about the current IT landscape. So much change we've seen in the last couple of years. Specifically, what are some of the big challenges that you are talking with enterprise customers and cloud service providers? About what, what are some of those major things on their minds? >>So there's a couple things. First of all is obviously with the Rocky economy and even before covid, just for storage in particular, CIOs hate storage. I've been doing this now since 1986. I have never, ever, ever met a CIO at any company I've bid with. And I've been with four of the biggest storage companies on this planet. Never met a cio. Used to be a storage guy. So they know they need it, but boy, they really don't like it. So the storage admins have to manage more and more storage. Exabytes, exabytes, it just ballooning for what a storage admin has to do. Then you then have the covid and is it recession? No. Is it a growth? And then clearly what's happened in the last year with what's going on in Europe and the, is it a recession, the inflation. So they're always looking to, how do we cut money on storage yet still get what we need for our applications, workloads, and use cases. So that's definitely the biggest, the first topic. >>So never met a CIO that was a storage admin or as a fan, but as you point out, they need it. And we've seen needs changing in customer landscapes, especially as the threat landscape has changed so dramatically the last couple of years. Ransomware, you've said it before, I say it too. It's no longer if it's when it's how often. It's the frequency. We've gotta be able to recover. Backups are being targeted. Talk to me about some of, in that landscape, some of the evolutions of customer challenges and maybe those CIOs going, We've gotta make sure that our, our storage data is protected. >>So it's starting to change. However, historically with the cio and then when they started hiring CISOs or security directors, whatever they had, depending on the company size, it was very much about protecting the edge. Okay, if you will, the moat and the wall of the castle. Then it was the network in between. So keep the streets inside the castle clean. Then it was tracking down the bad guy. So if they did get over, the issue is, if I remember correctly, the sheriff of Nottingham never really caught Robinhood. So the problem is the dwell time where the ransomware malware's hidden on storage could be as much as 200 days. So I think they're starting to realize at the security level now, forget, forget the guys on the storage side, the security guys, the cso, the CIO, are starting to realize that if you're gonna have a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, must include storage. And that is new >>That, well, that's promising then. That's new. I mean obviously promising given the, the challenges and the circumstances. So then from a storage perspective, customers that are in this multi-cloud hybrid cloud environment, you talked about the the edge cloud on-prem. What are some of the key things from a storage perspective that customers have to achieve these days to be secure as data volumes continue to grow and spread? >>So what we've done is implement on both primary storage and secondary storage and technology called infin safe. So Infin Safe has the four legs of the storage cyber security stool. So first of all is creating an air gap. In this case, a logical air gap can be local or remote. We create an immutable snapshot, which means it can't be changed, it can't be altered, so you can't change it. We have a fenced forensic environment to check out the storage because you don't wanna recover. Again, malware and rans square can is hidden. So you could be making amenable snapshots of actually malware, ransomware, and never know you're doing it right. So you have to check it out. Then you need to do a rapid recovery. The most important thing if you have an attack is how fast can you be up and going with recovery? So we have actually instituted now a number of cyber storage security guarantees. >>We will guarantee the SLAs on a, the snapshot is absolutely immutable. So they know that what they're getting is what they were supposed to be getting. And then also we are guaranteeing recovery times on primary storage. We're guaranteeing recovery of under one minute. We'll make the snapshot available under one minute and on secondary storage under 20 minutes. So those are things you gotta look for from a security perspective. And then the other thing you gotta practice, in my world, ransomware, malware, cyber tech is basically a disaster. So yes, you got the hurricane, yes, you got the flood, yes, you got the earthquake. Yes, you got the fire in the building. Yes you got whatever it may be. But if you don't practice malware, ransomware, recoveries and protection, then it might as well be a hurricane or earthquake. It will take your data, >>It will take your data on the numbers of customers that pay ransom is pretty high, isn't it? And and not necessarily able to recover their data. So it's a huge risk. >>So if you think about it, the government documented that last year, roughly $6 trillion was spent either protecting against ransomware and malware or paying ransomware attacks. And there's been several famous ones. There was one in Korea, 72 million ransom. It was one of the Korea's largest companies. So, and those are only the ones that make the news. Most of 'em don't make the news. Right. >>So talk to me then, speaking and making the news. Nobody wants to do that. We, we know every industry is vulnerable to this. Some of the ones that might be more vulnerable, healthcare, government, public sector education. I think the Los Angeles Unified School district was just hit as well in September. They >>Were >>What, talk to me about how infin out is helping customers really dial down the risk when the threat actors are becoming more and more sophisticated? >>Well, there's a couple things. First of all, our infin safe software comes free on our main product. So we have a product called infin Guard for Secondary Storage and it comes for free on that. And then our primary storage product's called the Infin Box. It also comes for free. So they don't have to use it, but we embed it. And then we have reference architectures that we give them our ses, our solutions architects and our technical advisors all up to speed on why they should do it, how they should do it. We have a number of customers doing it. You know, we're heavily concentrated the global Fortune 2000, for example, we publicly announced that 26% of the Fortune 50 use our technology, even though we're a small company. So we go to extra lengths to a B, educated on our own front, our own teams, and then B, make sure they portray that to the end users and our channel partners. But the end users don't pay a dime for the software that does what I just described, it's free, it's included when you get you're Infin box or you're ingar, it's included at no charge. >>That's pretty differentiating from a competitive standpoint. I might, I would guess >>It is. And also the guarantee. So for example, on primary storage, okay, whether you'd put your Oracle or put your SAP or I Mongo or your sequel or your highly transactional workloads, right? Your business finance workload, all your business critical stuff. We are the first and only storage company that offers a primary guarantee on cyber storage resilience. And we offer two of them on primary storage. No other vendor offers a guarantee, which we do on primary storage. Whether you the first and right now as of here we are sitting in the middle of October. We are still the only vendor that offers anything on primary storage from a guaranteed SLA on primary storage for cyber storage resilience. >>Let's talk about those guarantees. Walk me through what you just announced. There's been a a very, a lot of productivity at Infin DAT in 2022. A lot of things that you've announced but on crack some of the things you're announcing. Sure. Talk to me specifically about those guarantees and what's in it for me as a customer. It sounds pretty obvious, but I'd love to hear it from you. >>Okay, so we've done really three different types of guarantees. The first one is we have a hundred percent availability guarantee on our primary storage. And we've actually had that for the last, since 2019. So it's a hundred percent availability. We're guaranteed no downtime, a hundred percent availability, which for our customer base being heavily concentrated, the global Fortune 2000 large government enterprises, big universities and even smaller companies, we do a lot of business with CSPs and MSPs. In fact, at the Flash Memory Summit are Infin Box ssa All Flash was named the best product for hyperscaler deployment. Hyperscaler basically means cloud servers provider. So they need a hundred percent availability. So we have a guarantee on that. Second guarantee we have is a performance guarantee. We'll do an analysis, we look at all their workloads and then we will guarantee in writing what the performance should be based on which, which of our products they want to buy are Infin Box or Infin Box ssa, which is all flash. >>Then we have the third one is all about cyber resilience. So we have two on our Infin box, our Infin box SSA for primary storage, which is a one the immutability of the snapshot and immediately means you can't erase the data. Right? Camp tamper with it. Second one is on the recovery time, which is under a minute. We just announced in the middle of October that we are doing a similar cyber storage resilience guarantee on our ARD secondary product, which is designed for backup recovery, et cetera. We will also offer the immutably snapshot guarantee and also one on the recoverability of that data in under 20 minutes. In fact, we just did a demo at our live launch earlier this week and we demoed 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data recovered in 12 minutes. 12 >>Minutes 2012. >>20 petabytes In >>12 bytes in 12 minutes. Yes. That's massive. That's massively differentiating. But that's essential for customers cuz you know, in terms of backups and protecting the data, it's all about recovery >>A and once they've had the attack, it's how fast you get back online, right? That that's what happens if they've, if they can't stop the attack, can't stop the threat and it happens. They need to get that back as fast as they can. So we have the speed of recovery on primary stores, the first in the industry and we have speed on the backup software and we'll do the same thing for a backup data set recovery as well. Talk >>To me about the, the what's in it for me, For the cloud service providers, they're obviously the ones that you work with are competing with the hyperscalers. How does the guarantees and the differentiators that Fin out is bringing to market? How do you help those cloud SPS dial up their competitiveness against the big cheeses? >>Well, what we do is we provide that underlying infrastructure. We, first of all, we only sell things that are petabyte in scale. That's like always sell. So for example, on our in fitter guard product, the raw capacity is over four petabytes. And the effective capacity, cuz you do data reduction is over 85 petabytes on our newest announced product, on our primary storage product, we now can do up to 17 petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack. So the value to the service rider is they can save on what slots? Power and floor. A greener data center. Yeah, right. Which by the way is not just about environmentals, but guess what? It also translate into operational expense. >>Exactly. CapEx office, >>With a lot of these very large systems that we offer, you can consolidate multiple products from our competitors. So for example, with one of the competitors, we had a deal that we did last quarter 18 competitive arrays into one of ours. So talk about saving, not just on all of the operational expense, including operational manpower, but actually dramatically on the CapEx. In fact, one of our Fortune 500 customers in the telco space over the last five years have told us on CapEx alone, we've saved them $104 million on CapEx by consolidating smaller technology into our larger systems. And one of the key things we do is everything is automated. So we call it autonomous automation use AI based technology. So once you install it, we've got several public references who said, I haven't touched this thing in three or four years. It automatically configures itself. It automatically adjusts to changes in performance and new apps. When I put in point a new app at it automatically. So in the old days the storage admin would optimize performance for a new application. We don't do that, we automatically do it and autonomously the admin doesn't even click a button. We just sense there's new applications and we automate ourselves and configure ourselves without the admin having to do anything. So that's about saving operational expense as well as operational manpower. >>Absolutely. I was, one of the things that was ringing in my ear was workforce productivity and obviously those storage admins being able to to focus on more strategic projects. Can't believe the CIOs aren't coming around yet. But you said there's, there's a change, there's a wave coming. But if we think about the the, the what's in it for me as a customer, the positive business outcomes that I'm hearing, lower tco, your greener it, which is key. So many customers that we talk to are so focused on sustainability and becoming greener, especially with an on-prem footprint, workforce productivity. Talk about some of the other key business outcomes that you're helping customers achieve and how it helps them to be more competitive. >>Sure. So we've got a, a couple different things. First of all, storage can't go down. When the storage goes down, everyone gets blamed. Mission. When an app goes down, no one really thinks about it. It's always the storage guy's fault. So you want to be a hundred percent available. And that's today's businesses, and I'd actually argue it's been this way for 20 years are 24 by seven by 365. So that's one thing that we deliver. Second thing is performance. So we have public references talk about their SAP workload that used to take two hours, now takes 20 minutes, okay? We have another customer that was doing SAP queries. They improved their performance three times, Not 3%, not 3%, three times. So 300% better performance just by using our storages. They didn't touch the sap, they didn't touch the servers. All they do is to put our storage in there. >>So performance relates basically to applications, workloads and use cases and productivity beyond it. So think the productivity of supply chain guys, logistics guys, the shipping guys, the finance guys, right? All these applications that run today's enterprises. So we can automate all that. And then clearly the cyber threat. Yeah, that is a huge issue. And every CIO is concerned about the cyber threat. And in fact, it was interesting, Fortune magazine did a survey of CEOs, and this was last May, the number one concern, 66% in that may survey was cyber security number one concern. So this is not just a CIO thing, this is a CEO thing and a board level >>Thing. I was gonna say it's at at the board level that the cyber security threats are so real, they're so common. No one wants to be the next headline, like the colonial pipeline, right? Or the school districts or whatnot. And everybody is at risk. So then what you're enabling with what you've just announced, the all the guarantees on the SLAs, the massively fast recovery times, which is critical in cyber recovery. Obviously resilience is is key there. Modern data protection it sounds like to me. How do you define that and and what are customers looking for with respect to modern cyber resilience versus data protection? >>Yeah, so we've got normal data protection because we work with all the backup vendors. Our in ARD is what's known as a purpose built backup appliance. So that allows you to back at a much faster rate. And we work all the big back backup vendors, IBM spectrum Protect, we work with veritas vem com vault, oracle arm, anybody who does backup. So that's more about the regular side, the traditional backup. But the other part of modern data protection is infusing that with the cyber resilience. Cuz cyber resilience is a new thing. Yes, from a storage guy perspective, it hasn't been around a long time. Many of our competitors have almost nothing. One or two of our competitors have a pretty robust, but they don't guarantee it the way we guarantee it. So they're pretty good at it. But the fact that we're willing to put our money where our mouth is, we think says we price stand above and then most of the other guys in the storage industry are just starting to get on the bandwagon of having cyber resilience. >>So that changes what you do from data protection, what would call modern data protection is a combination of traditional backup recovery, et cetera. Now with this influence and this infusion of cybersecurity cyber resilience into a storage environment. And then of course we've also happened to add it on primary storage as well. So whether it's primary storage or backup and archive storage, we make sure you have that right cyber resilience to make it, if you will, modern data protection and diff different from what it, you know, the old backup of your grandfather, father, son backup in tape or however you used to do it. We're well beyond that now we adding this cyber resilience aspect. Well, >>From a cyber resilience perspective, ransomware, malware, cyber attacks are, that's a disaster, right? But traditional disaster recovery tools aren't really built to be able to pull back that data as quickly as it sounds like in Trinidad is able to facilitate. >>Yeah. So one of the things we do is in our reference architectures and written documentation as well as when we do the training, we'd sell the customers you need to practice, if you practice when there's a fire, a flood, a hurricane, an earthquake or whatever is the natural disaster you're practicing that you need to practice malware and ran somewhere. And because our recovery is so rapid and the case of our ingar, our fenced environment to do the testing is actually embedded in it. Several of our competitors, if you want the fenced environment, you have to buy a second product with us. It's all embedded in the one item. So A, that makes it more effective from a CapEx and opex perspective, but it also makes it easier. So we recommend that they do the practice recoveries monthly. Now whether they do it or not separate issue, but at least that's what we're recommending and say, you should be doing this on a monthly basis just like you would practice a disaster, like a hurricane or fire or a flood or an earthquake. Need to be practicing. And I think people are starting to hear it, but they don't still think more about, you know, the flood. Yeah. Or about >>The H, the hurricane. >>Yeah. That's what they think about. They not yet thinking about cybersecurity as really a disaster model. And it is. >>Absolutely. It is. Is is the theme of cyber resilience, as you said, this is a new concept, A lot of folks are talking about it, applying it differently. Is that gonna help dial up those folks just really being much more prepared for that type of cyber disaster? >>Well, we've made it so it's automated. Once you set up the immutable snapshots, it just does its thing. You don't set it and forget it. We create the logical air back. Once you do it, same thing. Set it and forget it. The fence forensic environment, easy to deploy. You do have to just configure it once and then obviously the recovery is almost instantaneous. It's under a minute guaranteed on primary storage and under 20 minutes, like I told you when we did our launch this week, we did 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data in 12 minutes. So that's pretty incredible. That's a lot of data to have recovered in 12 minutes. So the more automated we make it, which is what our real forte is, is this autonomous automation and automating as much as possible and make it easy to configure when you do have to configure. That's what differentiates what we do from our perspective. But overall in the storage industry, it's the recognition finally by the CISOs and the CIOs that, wait a second, maybe storage might be an essential part of my corporate cybersecurity strategy. Yes. Which it has not been historically, >>But you're seeing that change. Yes. >>We're starting to see that change. >>Excellent. So talk to me a little bit before we wrap here about the go to market one. Can folks get their hands on the updates to in kindergar and Finn and Safe and Penta box? >>So all these are available right now. They're available now either through our teams or through our, our channel partners globally. We do about 80% of our business globally through the channel. So whether you talk to us or talk to our channel partners, we're there to help. And again, we put our money where your mouth is with those guarantees, make sure we stand behind our products. >>That's awesome. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the program. Congratulations on the launch. The the year of productivity just continues for infinit out is basically what I'm hearing. But you're really going in the extra mile for customers to help them ensure that the inevitable cyber attacks, that they, that they're complete storage environment on prem will be protected and more importantly, recoverable Very quickly. We appreciate your insights and your input. >>Great. Absolutely love being on the cube. Thank you very much for having us. Of >>Course. It's great to have you back. We appreciate it. For Eric Herzog, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation live from Palo Alto.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host of the Cube, our 11th year covering V emeralds. Not in person. It's virtual. I'm with my coast, Dave. A lot, of course. Ah, guest has been on every year since the cubes existed. Sanjay Putin, who is now the chief operating officer for VM Ware Sanjay, Great to see you. It's our 11th years. Virtual. We're not in person. Usually high five are going around. But hey, virtual fist pump, >>virtual pissed bump to you, John and Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Here's a virtual hug. >>Well, so >>great. Back at great. >>Great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending the emerald this year because it's virtual again, it doesn't have the face to face. It is a community and technical events, so people do value that face to face. Um, but it is virtually a ton of content, great guests. You guys have a great program here, Very customer centric. Kind of. The theme is, you know, unpredictable future eyes is really what it's all about. We've talked about covert you've been on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? >>Ah, yeah. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We we felt as we thought, about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. You know, a virtual show of this kind and program of this kind. We all are becoming experts at many Ted talks or ESPN. Whatever your favorite program is 60 minutes on becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp, and everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. You know, Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content were reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes in something that is but 60 minutes. You you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynote an incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp and compelling. Thekla's piece of it needed also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible, made it a goal that if you're gonna do a break out session that has to be incorporate or lead with the customer, so you'll see not just that we have some incredible sea level speakers from customers that have featured in in our pattern, Mikey notes like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike or Lorry beer C I, a global sea of JPMorgan Chase partner Baba, who is CEO of Zuma Jensen Wang, who is CEO of video. Incredible people. Then we also had some luminaries. We're gonna be talking in our vision track people like in the annuity. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or Bryan Stevenson, the person who start in just mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a really key fighter for social justice and criminal. You know, reform and jails and the incarceration systems. And Malala made an appearance. Do I asked her personally, I got to know her and her dad's and she spoke two years ago. I asked her toe making appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting until we get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. >>So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VM. Where, uh, props to you guys, Where does this all tie together for in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on in a highly accelerated rate. You know, cov were not in person, but Cove in 19 has proven, uh, customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world, a lot. Lots changing. Multi cloud has been on the radar. You got security. All the things you guys are doing, you got the AI announcements that have been pumping. Thean video thing was pretty solid. That project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and and with VM where? What is the main theme? What what's their call to action? What's what do they need to be doing? >>I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is, as they think about everything in infrastructure, serves APS as they think about their APS. We want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their athletic applications. And we think that whole initiative off how you modernized applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college C, C plus, plus Java and then emerge, these companies have worked on J two ee frameworks. Web Logic, Be Aware logic and IBM Web Street. It made the development off. Whatever is e commerce applications of portals? Whatever was in the late nineties, early two thousands much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more Micro service based now with containers. We've been talking about kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise, contain a platform making some incredible investments, but we want to not just broaden this platform. We simplified. It is You've heard everything in the end. What works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t shirt sizing small, medium, large. So we now have tens Ooh, in the standard. The advanced the enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind that. That makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense it's sort of like an extra small. In addition to the small medium large so tends to and everything around at modernization, I think would be message number one number two alongside modernization. You're also thinking about migration of your workloads and the breadth and depth of, um, er Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve, not just use cases, you are traditionally done, but also new ai use cases. Was the reason Jensen and us kind of partner that, and I mean what a great company and video has become. You know, the king maker of these ai driven applications? Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet? Remember, that's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers. You know automotive banking fraud detection is a number of AI use cases that now get our best and we want it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the B c f e m A Cloud Foundation proposition to smart Knicks on Dell, HP Lenovo are embracing the in video Intel's and Pen Sandoz in that smart make architectural, however, that so that entire world of multi cloud being operative Phobia Macleod Foundation on Prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or Smart Knicks or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure, Google Multi Cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon that's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from, uh, Microsoft Azure about azure BMR solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside of modernization on the third priority, gentlemen would be security. It's obviously a topic that I most recently taken uninterested in my day job is CEO of the company running the front office customer facing revenue functions by night job by Joe Coffin has been driving. The security strategy for the company has been incredibly enlightening to talk, to see SOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to end point and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together MAWR capabilities with NSX and Z scaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, Lassiter wouldn't cover all of this. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those the three things I want them to take away what BMR is doing in the future of APS what you're doing, the future of a multi cloud world and how we're making security relevant for distributed workforce. >>I know David >>so much to talk about here, Sanjay. So, uh, talk about modern APS? That's one of the five franchise platforms VM Ware has a history of going from, you know, Challenger toe dominant player. You saw that with end user computing, and there's many, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. Let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are, uh, and but critical to that modern APS. Focus is developers, and I think it's fair to say that that's not your wheelhouse today, but you're making moves there. You agree that that is, that is a critical part of modern APS, and you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there. >>Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point, David. We way seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VM Ware is completely earned anyplace off rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. You know, we have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years 70 million virtual machines. But we have toe earn that right and containers, and I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers is their virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it will be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why, Why VM Where and why do you think we can win in their long term. What are we doing with developers Number one? We do think there is a container capability independent of virtual machine. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. You know, many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly pivotal and FDR now what's called Tan Xue have I mean the the case. Studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible. When I listen to them, you take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside, pick up a lot of the world. Now the pandemic is doing e commerce and curbside pick up people are going to the store, That's all based on Tan Xue. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact, tracing app. Some of the diagnostic tools built without they were the lab services and on the 10 zoo platform banks. Large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector. The U. S. Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are not public about how they're modernizing dams, and I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spend a significant part of my life is you know, it s a P and increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical. Use case in banking, public sector, telco manufacturing, CPG retail top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tan Xue portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that s a P type of dialogue because we're having an apse dialogue in the in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes Notice I haven't talked at all about kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or public sector or whatever have you now from a developer audience, which was the second part of your question? Dave, you know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know, as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with about two or three million from from the spring community and two or three million from the economic community. So think of those five million people who don't know us because of two acquisitions we don't. Obviously spring was inside Vienna where went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. A few weeks ago, we had spring one. You guys are aware of that? That conference record number of attendees okay, Registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000, which is, you know, much bigger than the physical event. And then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one, and we're really going to take care of that, That that community base of developers as they care about Java Manami also doing really, really well. But then I think the rial audience it now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation. That coupon at AWS re invent at ignite not just the world, I mean via world is not gonna be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're gonna have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's gonna be a multiyear effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today Kate or two on then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers AWS, Microsoft and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and remembers including that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community, takes a village to approach and an appeal to those developers. I think there will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to >>come. Santa, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the Web days and how the development environment change and how the simplicity came along very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys were doing pre and now during and Post Cove it. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi cloud. You guys were expanding your into end you had acquisitions, you mentioned a few of them. And then cove it hit. Okay, so now you have Everything is changing you got. He's got more complex city. You have more solutions, and then the customer psychology is change. You got to spectrums of customers, people trying to save their business because it's changed, their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from Cove it, whether it's a modern app, you know, coming like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, you know, they're trying to save down, modernized or or or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently, how you implement and how you support customers, because you already had kind of the whole multi cloud going on with the modern APS. I get that, but Cove, it has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business on re factor or double down and continue >>John. Great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February 1st week of March, actually back up, even in January, my last trip on a plane. Ah, major trip outside this country was the World Economic Forum in Davos. And, you know, there were thousands of us packed into the small digits in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. Little did we know. A month later, everything would change on DWhite. We began to do in late February. Early March was first. Take care of employees. You always wanna have the pulse, check employees and be in touch with them. Because the health and safety of employees is much more important than the profits of, um, where you know. So we took care of that. Make sure that folks were taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately not lost anyone to death. Covert. We had some covert cases, but they've recovered on. This is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation off skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, and it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I began to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know you, I run customer operations, all of the go to market field teams reporting to me on. I felt it was important for me to be showing up, not just in the big company meetings. We do that and big town halls where you know, some fractions. 30,000 people of VM ware attend, but, you know, go on, do a town hall for everybody in a virtual zoom session in Japan. But in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, uh, then do one in China and Australia kind of almost travel around the world virtually, and it's not long calls 25 30 minutes, where 1st 10 or 15 minutes I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries, the world encouraging them to focus on a few priorities, which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10 15 minutes and be, uh and then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier, because every one of us is going to resume button going from call to call the call. We're tired of T. There's also mental, you know, fatigue that we've gotta worry about. Mental well, being long term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. You know, 40 50%. My life has travel. It takes a day out of your life on either end, your jet lag. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or Beijing or to Bangalore or the London, getting between sites of these customers is like a 45 minute, sometimes in our commute. Now I'm able to do many of these 25 30 minute call, so I set myself a goal to talk to 1000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CEOs and CFOs from my times at S A P and VM ware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CEO or report directly to the legal counsel on accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,002,000 people we called email them. Man, I gotta tell you, people willing to talk to me just coming, you know, into this I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I have probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question, which is what do we tell the customer in terms about portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy on dial, kind of get scared of two things from the portfolio perspective. I think we began to don't notice two things. One is Theo entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I describe that as you know, for example, moving to Amazon is a migration opportunity to azure modernization. Is that whole Tan Xue Eminem? Migration of modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed data center spending might be on hold on freeze as people kind of holding till depend, emmick or the GDP recovers. But migration of modernization is accelerating, so we wanna accelerate that part of our portfolio. One of the products we have a cloud on Amazon or Cloud Health or Tan Xue and maybe the other offerings for the other public dog. The second part about portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security work from home work from anywhere. And that's that combination off workspace, one for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, common black envelope loud and the announcements we've now made with Z scaler for, uh, distributed work for security or what the analysts called secure access. So message. That's beautiful because everyone working from home, even if they come back to the office, needs a very different model of security and were now becoming a leader in that area. of security. So these two parts of the portfolio you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And the final thing, I would say, Guys, just on a soft note. You know, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy. You know what, 67 months into this pandemic to burn out? Ah, now I've encouraged my team. We've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you wanna do that will make your life better through this pandemic. That in practice is that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I began biking with my kids and during the summer months were able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often, and I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often, even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family or with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. >>So, Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with CSOs. I mean, I have a Well, maybe not not 1000 but dozens. And they're such smart people. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. Scott Stricklin on who is the C. C so of Wyndham? He was talking about the security club. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity, access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CSOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? >>Yeah. You know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year, maybe the year before, and what we were trying to do in security was really simplified because the security industry is like 5000 vendors, and it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy. You gotta have 5000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So ah, grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins and vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy and security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles. Uh, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of million's off workspace, one of carbon black endpoints that we manage and secure its incumbent enough to take security and making a lot more part of the infrastructure. Reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools. Andi, eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tool. So that's one other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be apart off that education off security professionals were both investing in ah, lot of off, you know, kind of threat protection research on many of our folks you know who are in a threat. Behavioral analytics, you know, kind of thread research. And people have come out of deep hacking experience with the government and others give back to the community and teaching classes. Um, in universities, there are a couple of non profits that are really investing in security, transfer education off CSOs and their teams were contributing to that from the standpoint off the ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also a treasure. So I think is we think about this. You're going to see us making this a long term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have, you know, a billion dollar plus of security is probably just two or three, and some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress sport. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity, and we think we need to do this both in building great product satisfying customers. But then also investing in the learning, the training enable remember, one of the things of B M worlds bright is thes hands on labs and all the training enable that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform. We in world in a variety of about the virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professional. >>So >>that's gonna be exciting, Because if you look at some of the evaluations of some of the pure plays I mean, you're a cloud security business growing a triple digits and, you know, you see some of these guys with, you know, $30 billion valuations, But I wanted to ask you about the market, E v m. Where used to be so simple Right now, you guys have expanded your tam dramatically. How are you thinking about, you know, the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets, and then, you know, saying, Okay, now we're gonna go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. >>Yeah, I think. Dave, listen, you know, I like davinci statement. You know, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and I think you've touched on something that which is cos we get bigger. You know, I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies. s a P and B M where the bulk of my last 15 plus years And if something I've learned, you know, it's very easy. Both companies was to throw these TLS three letter acronyms, okay? And I use an acronym and describing the three letter acronyms like er or s ex. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company. You know, Carol Property, for example. We just hired her from Google. Is our CMO her first comments like, My goodness, there is a lot of off acronyms here. I've gotta you need a glossary? I had the same reaction when I joined B. M or seven years ago and had the same reaction when I joined the S A. P 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have toe constantly. It's like an accordion like you expanded by making it mawr of luminous and deep. But as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders and I this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have this communication being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video off our five franchise pill. It's just so that the casual person didn't know VM where it could understand on. Then, when I'm on your shore and when on with Jim Cramer and CNBC, I try to simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify because the more you can talk and analogies and pictures, the more the casual user. I mean, of course, and some other audiences. I'm talking to investors. Get it on. Then, Of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or feeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Putin on my team is like, you know, empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We could go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels off that, and that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our borough come sort of Jeffrey Moore, Andi in the Jeffrey more context. You think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that what the Jason sees that are closest to you, that your customers are asking you to advance into on that, either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in the previous dialogue about the framework of build partner and by, and we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance and any of the moves we've made six years ago, seven years ago and I joined the I felt VM are needed to make a move into mobile to really cement opposition in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should by Air One, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we've ever done. Okay. Similarly, I'm sure prior to me about Joe Tucci, Pat Nelson. We're thinking about nice here, and I'm moving to networking. Those were too big, inorganic moves. +78 years of Raghu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to the make the move in the public cloud myself. Rgu pack very involved in the decision. Their toe partner with Amazon, the change and divest be cloud air and then invested in organic effort around what's become the Claudia. That's an organic effort that was an acquisition fast forward to last year. It took me a while to really Are you internally convinced people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in carbon black and endpoint security cement the security story that we're talking about? Rgu did a similar piece of good work around ad monetization to justify that pivotal needed to come back in. So but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, Is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner like you don't see us get into the hardware game we're partnering with. Obviously, the players like Dell and HP, Lenovo and the smart Knick players like Intel in video. In Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacent seas, for example, last year into app modernization up the stack and into security, which I'd say Maura's adjacent horizontal to us. We're now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, We then have to go and tell our customers. Right? And this entire effort of talking to CSOs What am I doing is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplified to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it. Received feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually, some of the moves were now making this year around our partnership in distributed Workforce Security and Cloud Security and Z scaler. What we're announcing an XDR and Security Analytics. All of the big announcements of security of this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last year. Well, you know, keynote around security, and now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. >>Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. So now we have a couple minutes left. But we did pull the audience and the community to get some questions for you, since it's virtually wanted to get some representation there. So I got three questions for you. First question, what comes after Cloud and number two is VM Ware security company. And three. What company had you wish you had acquired? >>Oh, my goodness. Okay, the third one eyes gonna be the turkey is one, I think. Listen, because I'm gonna give you my personal opinion, and some of it was probably predates me, so I could probably safely So do that. And maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else is no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think clouds gonna be with us for a long time. First off this multi cloud world, you just look at the moment, um, that AWS and azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible on I think this that multi cloud from phenomenon. But if there's an adapt ation of it, it's gonna be three forms of cloud. People are really only focus today in private public cloud. You have to remember the edge and Telco Cloud and this pendulum off the right balance of workloads between the data center called it a private cloud. The public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end. I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. Three other part that I think comes as a sequel to Cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities a serverless functions but also containers that you know. Obviously the one could think of that a sister topics to cloud but the entire world of containers. The other seat, uh, then cloud a cloud native will also be topics, but these were all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company? Absolutely. We you know, we aspire to be one of the leading companies in cyber security. I don't think they will be only one. We have to show this by the wealth on breath of our customers. The revenue momentum we have Gartner ranking us or the analysts ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants being viewed as an innovator simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking of the security conferences years ago. Now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and Cloud Security. The three Coppola's a lot more coming in Security analytics, Cloud Security distributed workforce Security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, BMR persist through this, we're planning for multi your five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course I mean, the competition is smaller. Companies that don't have the breadth and depth of the n words are Andy muscle and are going market. We just have to keep building great products and serving customer on the third man. There's so many. But I mean, I think Listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered this is before I joined so I could say the summit speculatively on. Don't you know, make this This is BMR. Sorry. This is Sanjay one's opinion. Not VM. I gotta make very, very clear. Well, listen, I would have if I was at BMO in 2012 or 2013. I would love to about service now then service. It was a great company. I don't even know maybe the company's talk, but then talk about a very successful company at that time now. Maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting Now I think that was during the time of Paul Maritz here and and so on. So for them, maybe there were other priorities the company need to get done. But at that time, of course, today s so it's not as big of a even slightly bigger market cap than us. So that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would have at that time fit very well with VM Ware. And then there's probably we don't look back and regret we move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made the big ones. Okay, Nice era air watch pop in black. Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership. Amazon. What? We're announcing this This, you know, this week within video and Z scaler. So you never look back and regret. You always look for >>follow up on that To follow up on that from a developer, entrepreneurial or partner Perspective. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm Where where where can people partner and play. Whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture back, funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with Govind, where's the white spaces with them? >>I think that, you know, there's gonna be a number off places where the Tan Xue platform develops, as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant toe all of that ecosystem around the C I. C. D type apply platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like, get lab, You know, all of the ways in which open source communities, you know will play alongside that Hash E Corp. Jay frog there number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to tend to, and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. You're going to hear more about that coming up from us on. Then there's the set of data companies, you know, con fluent. You know, of course, you've seen a big I p o of a snowflake. All of those data companies, we'll need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware is always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce. And Data and analytics placed on top of the modern day middleware, which is containers I think it's gonna be now does VM or play physically is a data company. We don't know today we're gonna partner very heavily. But picking the right set of partners been fluent is a good example of one on. There's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see us partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think, as you see us certainly produce out the VM Ware marketplace for developers. I think this is gonna be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those five million developers and work with the leading companies. You know, I use the example of get Lab is an example get help there. Others that appeal to developers tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset. With that, you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village off multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described. It's like, Listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience of all those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this on if you do that over many years, just like the security topic. This is a multi year pursuit for us to be relevant. Developers. We feel good about the future being bright. >>David got five minutes e. >>I thought you were gonna say Zoom, Sanjay, that was That was my wildcard. >>Well, listen, you know, I think it was more recently and very fast catapult Thio success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, sweet spot of the anywhere. I mean, you know, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and, well, back someone you always have to think about what's in the in the bailiwick of what's closest to us, but zooms a great partner. Uh, I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Erica, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time magazine Top 100. But what he's done is phenomenon. I think he could build a company that's just his important, his Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him. Don't sell, keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And you know, I'm as an immigrant. He's, you know, China. Born now American, I'm Indian born, American, assim immigrants. We both have a similar story. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him, from on speed on speed and how to move fast, he tells me he learns a thing to do for me on scale. We teach each other. It's a beautiful friendship. >>We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. One more zoom integration >>for a final word or the zoom that is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, Sanjay, Thank >>you for connecting with us. Virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. Um, it's gonna change. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. We're changing how you serve customers with new chief up commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys were flexing with the market and you got a tailwind. So congratulations, >>John and Dave. Always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership. Also with you. Congratulations of Successful Cube. And in its new digital format, Thank you for being with us With VM world here on. Do you know all that you're doing to get the story out? The guests that you have on the show, they look forward, including the nonviable people like, Hey, can I get on the Cuban like, Absolutely. Because they look at your platform is away. I'm telling this story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. >>I'm gonna bring more community. And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VM World story here of the emerald 2020. Sanjay Poon in the chief operating officer here on the Cube I'm John for a day Volonte. Thanks for watching Cube Virtual. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Mountain View, California. It's The Cube. Covering, DevNet Create 2019. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We are live, at Cisco DevNet Create 2019 in Mountain View at Computer History Museum. John this is the third DevNet Create, but DevNet started as this ground, small sort of grass roots out of Cisco Live, about five years ago now. You and I just came from the keynote, which I think is really awesome to highlight that it was kicked off by two, strong female leaders in technology, who will be on our program this week. I'd love to get your perspectives on what you saw and heard today, knowing the history of DevNet as you do. >> Yeah you mentioned strong leaders, Susie Wee has been promoted to Senior Vice President and CTO of DevNet and DevNet Create. Two communities and that's been a really an interesting ride because she's gotten real technical jobs but adds a good business acumen and saw the wave early on. I remember I met Susie Wee at I'd say almost seven years ago, in and around Palo Alto. She always had that energy, but she's super technical, great business mind. She saw the open source wave and cloud connecting. And then when she came to Cisco with DevNet, she took that open source kind of mojo, and took the developer communities, which were very centric, Cisco, plumbing, moving packets from point a to point b, configuring large scale networks to much more of a developer focus. And she's evolved that program and started DevNet create three years ago to bring in the cloud native, used to be called the hoodie crowd, you know the people who are coding in the cloud. Cloud first, and she she wanted to cross pollinate them together with DevNet. And the result of that experiment or that that kind of mechanism and community collaboration has changed the face of CisCo. >> Absolutely. >> You can see Chuck Robbins as the Ceo and others within Cisco, seeing that they're on this new wave and it's actually paying off dividens for them, it's changed their strategy, customers like it, the community has grown, the metrics are all kind of up in to the right, on terms of adoption. So, success from that experiment, their doubling down and their bringing real technology, real workshops, a real co-creation, a real community vibe and it's working. So again don't fix what's not broken. >> In terms of their community, one of the things that Susie mentioned this morning is that the DevNet community's now over 585 000 members strong. They talk about this, yes it's a conference but it's also, it's a strong community, it's hands on learning. It's code and the theme of the event: See it. Learn it. Code it. They did a great job only in the first hour of the keynote about actually showing some great examples and also how to your point, Cisco is evolving. Digitally, IT transformation and how they are really staying quite far ahead of their competition. >> It's interesting because you know, one of the things that we've been doing in theCUBE for 10 years, we seen a lot of trends come and go. This one we like a lot. We use the term builders creators, Andy Jassy used that term builders. That's what they talk about this new era of this renaissance of value creators. They're building stuff and with now Cloud Computing and with now AI and other things coming to the table, there's an unlimited tool set out there and platforms with and computing cloud cloud computing, you can now build things faster. So conceiving it, understanding and building it is critical. Now what's interesting about DevNet Create is that they're bringing in that again, that community vibe where, it's not just a bunch of hackathons and a bunch of rah rah, use our code and get developers locked into a platform. It's authentically and genuinely ripe, meaningful to the developers because they do it in a group setting. They do it with community. So the have, they do have hackathons, they've got creation tools, they've got different stations and they roll out the toys if you will. Meraki has things going on here, there's all this new technology. So Cisco's bringing the goods to the party. It's like I always say, when someone brings beer to the party, you know and we're going to have some good times. So they're bringing the technology and the tools in to the community without kind of jamming it down their throat. That creates a good vibe. That's cross-pollinating to the core Cisco with DevNet, and every year that DevNet's section within Cisco Live becomes the number one place everyone goes to because that's where the feedback is and the company's listening. And this is part of their fly wheel. So this is a game changer for Cisco because their culture was pretty much build networks, run them, lock'em down, highly secure. Everything's good but now the world's changed. They want programmability and this again, changes the culture of Cisco. So I think it's a great move and I love this, I love the vibe here and this event's popular because, there's engineers here. So you have people who are savvy with code, savvy with community and savvy with building and creating and being creators. So design thinking to hackathons to any workshop you can imagine. >> And there's engineers here to your point of all, and Susie's point to have all levels of all ages. And I'm always curious about the engineers and the folks who've been in an institution for a very long time and are very use to working in that traditional model. How do they get access to the right education tools, to start shifting their own mindset, because really, in this day and age, they don't have a choice. Whether they want to continue working at a company like a Cisco or any other company these days that has to be a tech company. So you see all levels of coding experience here. They provide education for that. You also see all levels of of the veterans, those in their early stages of their career. Those in their mid-careers. So a lot of collaboration in this community. >> And the CEO Chuck Robbins points out and always kind of gives Susie Wee call outs, because even though developer.cisco.com is the destination that you can go to learn. Go to developer.cisco.com to get kind of the goods. That's from Cisco's perspective. But what Susie and Chuck have recognized is that, the real action is out in the organic community. So the co-creation, the learnings. This is where the canary and the coal mines are. This is where, companies are getting early feedback on products. This is where peers are starting to figure out what's right. So if companies listen to their community, not just provide the goods and have, some destination urls to go to, to get onboarded. The action is in the organic communities. That's where people are developing friendships. That's where discovery's happening. People are learning and that's where the action's at. So Cisco's actually listening. So this is an interesting change for Cisco. >> And it seems like, to your point on the listening, it's almost becoming the lifeblood of Cisco and really giving them this fuel and momentum >> Yeah >> To allow any type of industry. The SVP and CT, I think CTO of Meraki was saying, we don't build specific solutions for specific verticals. This is for all types of verticals, because every industry has to transform and become a tech company. But this community really seems like it's, I don't want to say a rebirth of Cisco but it almost feels somewhat something similar, but really that lifeblood of this transforming organization. >> Well one of the things that's not going to be on, on the financial analysis in the, when you look at the 10 k's and all the Wall Street guys are going to go sprint got the numbers and look at the, the financial analysis. Try to figure out where the stock's going to be. But if you at what's going on with Cisco. If they can continue to do what they're doing. If they convert their core developers in DevNet and allow this cross-pollination and with cloud computing. You're going to start to see product transformations happen faster. You're going to start to see business results that aren't reflected at any kind of performer or forecasted financial analysis. And this is going to put pressure on Cisco. Cisco is under a lot of pressure and this old school guard managers at Cisco, are like 'no the data center, we got to hold down' and so, if you don't, if Cisco doesn't cannabilize itself by bringing in the new, faster. That's the trick of the management. This is Chuck Robbin's hardest job as the CEO. It's to understand when to start cannabilizing pre-existing businesses like data center servers, UCS and have them change over to a scalable revenue model on the cloud side. So they're in a transition. I think they're in good shape. The wave they're on is positive, but the real upside to this is, if they can convert those network engineers into coders. They would have an army of awesome, talented people setting and building out the next generation data centers to cloud computing architecture and serp. Strategic strike if they can pull it off and they continue to do it. That's what we're going to be watching. >> Well we're about six weeks or so I think, before Cisco Live, which is down in San Diego. The Cube will be there. >> Yeah. >> What are you thinking, you gave a pretty good, kind of your perspectives and what you're thinking. What are some of things that you think we're going to hear and see and feel and learn from Cisco Live ? >> I think we'll hear some more of the same of what we're seeing and hearing when we start Cisco Live. I still think that Cisco's got some internal re-organizations to do to get on this wave. There's an article in Fortune magazine this week, talking about the rise and fall of Kleiner Perkins. And the thesis was there on the wrong way, missed two generations of investments. Cisco right now has to decide what wave they're going to be riding in to the future. That's Chuck Robbins' strategic imperative, and I think we're going to start to see more and more of the Cisco ship turning to get on the wave of cloud, cloud native, hybrid cloud and I think multi-cloud is probably the biggest opportunity that Cisco has and I think in bringing multi-cloud as a multiple network, multiple programmable network. That to me is a wave worth riding. The question is, when doe he time the revenue? When doe the whole ship just go full steam ahead? I think it's still going to be in transition, but we'll probably hear more, more DevNet. More DevNet Create, more programmable networks, more use of data. A lot of multi-cloud. >> Yeah and there's, this year there are three tech tracks. One on Enterprise Transformation which is, something that we'll talk about with our guests over the next two days. And then we've got, businesses have real-time data access. AI, machine learning, infrastructures that are programmable. Now how are, what are the tools and the trends, that enterprises are using to generate business insights that actually drive outcomes. >> Yeah so I think that all these tracks kind of point to big high level pillar trends that I think Cisco has to really nail and I think, they have clear sight for this. They just got to put the wheels on the bus and get the bus rolling. And that is three areas. Application modernization. So renaissance and application development. So you're seeing a new kind of app developer emerging. We hear about that all the time. You know these guys want infrastructure's code. Those app developers are going to be coming in to the enterprise in a large scale, and they can either be hybrid and multi-cloud orient. So application modernization. A renaissance in applications. Cisco has to be on that and they got AppDynamics for that and a variety of other cool things. Hybrid and multi-cloud, absolutely is going to be the architecture for enterprises and third area is security. Those are the things I think, if Cisco could nail those three things. They would be well positioned. And they got to bring the tech to the table and their product leadership. So that to me I think that's, I think we're going to see a lot of that at Cisco Live and that's I think the core plan. >> Well we'll be listening for that over the course of the next two days. John and I are fortunate to be here for today and tomorrow with a spectrum of guests, from Cisco folks, DevNet folks, partners, users of the technology and members of, active members of the DevNet community. So John looking forward to being here the next two days. >> It's been great. >> Sick around >> John and I are going to be right back from Cisco DevNet Create 2019 with our first guest. (soft upbeat music)

>> (Announcer) From Mountain View, California it's the Cube. Covering the 15th Annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual Grow! Awards for the Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, ACG SV. That's a mouthful. I'm here with one of the ACG SV board members, Zac Mutrux, the District Sales Manager at Insperity. Hey, Zack, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm pleased to be here. >> So before we talk about what you're doing here at the 15th Annual Grow! Awards, tell our audience about Insperity. I was reading, I love taglines. >> Yes. >> And I see on your homepage, Insperity is obsessed with delivery HR mastery. Wow. >> Oh yeah. >> Obsessed and mastery. Those two words just jumped out. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do. >> Impressive, isn't it? Well, we actually just adjusted our tagline to HR that makes a difference. And that's really what it's all about. We feel like companies that are growing, if they're going to make it from good to the best, it has everything to do with the people. Attracting the best people and keeping them, developing them over time, and that's exactly what we do with our clients. >> So Insperity has been in business since 1986, and if I think of today's modern workforce, highly mobile, distributed, there's the whole on-demand industry. You guys have seen a tremendous amount of change that now can be massively influenced, and your customers can, using technology. Give me a little bit of that historical perspective on Insperity's inception and today's workforce, and how you're helping them attract and retain the best talent. >> Oh, absolutely. Well, when the company started it was in a maybe a 200 square foot room with one telephone between the two co-founders. There's no such thing as email. So, absolutely, there's been immense technological changes and there continues to be. I think that's one of the things that has been responsible for Insperity's success is its adoption of technology. Today we are as much a technology company as we are an employee benefits company, or an HR consulting company. It's really about creating a positive experience for the employees. That's part of being a competitive employer. >> Well it has to be a positive experience, right? For your customers. Because acquiring great talent is one thing, retaining them is another. And I want to kind of pivot off the retention there for a second. As the District Sales Manager, I was asking you before we went live, tell me maybe one of your favorite stories, and you said, "Wow". One of the great things, you guys are coming off great growth and FY18 revenue growth. One of the great things that Insperity has been really successful at is customer retention. And that's hard. You're proud of this. Tell us about that statistic that you mentioned, and how it is that Insperity is evolving and innovating over the last few decades to keep that retention number as phenomenal as it is. >> Well, Insperity's been named one of the most admired corporations in the country, actually, five years in a row by Fortune magazine. And that's the kind of press that you can't buy. One of the accolades that I'm most proud of is that in the past year our own employees named us one of the top 100 companies to work for in the United States. Which is, I think, the proof that we really know what we're doing with our clients. Because there are a lot of different companies out there, various competitors, and almost none of them are on that list. So, it's living our values and expressing through our service team, our extraordinary service team, that, I think, keeps our clients coming back to us year after year. About 85% renew. That's been consistent. A high level of client retention for the past three years. Even more extraordinary is that we've been growing both top line and bottom line revenue at the same time. So there's just a testament to our leadership, to our co-founder and CEO, Paul Sarvadi, and to the best of team-- >> But it sounds like it's a lot of symbiotic relationships between the internal retention at Insperity that is maybe leading through to your customers seeing, hey, there's not a high turnover here. These people are doing, they love what they're doing. They're working for a good company. So there's probably a lot of symbiotic behaviors. >> Well, that's exactly right. I think you really hit the nail of the head. It's about culture. It's a culture that starts from the top with leadership, and it filters down throughout the organization. And we're not looking to do business with every single company. We're looking to do business with the companies that believe the things that we believe. That is, companies that have high levels of commitment, trust, communication. They do better financially then companies that don't have those things. >> And along those lines, mentioning just before we wrap here, we are at the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight, where they're honoring two award winners. The Outstanding Growth Award winner is Arista Networks. And the Emerging Growth winner is Adesto Technologies. I'm excited to talk to them later. But I wanted to get a little bit of perspective on you've been involved as a board member of ACSG since last year. Tell me a little bit about what makes ACG SV worthy of your time. >> Oh, absolutely. That's a great question. It's just an extraordinary community, I think, of the top leaders in Silicon Valley come together. The monthly Key Notes add a lot of value. It's an intimate setting and there's real conversations that are taking place on topics that are relevant to today's professionals. So for me to be able to engage and hopefully add some value as a board member is privilege. >> And you can hear probably a lot of those conversations going on right behind Zac and me tonight. Zac, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Cube. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time. >> Oh, right, thank you, Lisa. >> For the Cube, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground. Thanks for watching. (pop electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE! Covering women transforming technology. >> Hi, welcome to theCube. Lisa Martin on the ground at the 3rd Annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware in Palo Alto, and I'm joined by an author and a senior VMware engineer, Pratima Rao Gluckman. Welcome to the Cube, Pratima. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here >> It's great to have you here. So you have been an engineer here for about ten years. You knew from when you were a kid, love this, engineer, you knew you wanted to be that. You fell in love with your first programming class. It was like a Jerry McGuire, you complete me kind of moment I'm imagining. Tell me a little bit about your career in engineering and specifically as a female. >> Okay, so I was raised, born and raised, in India, and I grew up in an environment where I was gender blind. You know, my oldest sister played cricket for the country. >> Lisa: Wow! >> And it was a man's game! You know and a lot of people kind of talked about that, but it wasn't like she couldn't do it, right? So, I always grew up with this notion that I could do anything, and I could be whoever I wanted to be. And then I came to the United States, and that whole narrative stayed with me, the meritocracy narrative. Like you work hard, you know, society, the world will take care of you, and good things will happen, but it wasn't until 2016 was when I had this aha moment, and that's when I suddenly felt, suddenly I was aware of my gender, and I was like, okay I'm a female in tech, and there's lots of challenges for women in tech. And I didn't quite realize that. It was just that aha moment, and VMware has been a great company. I've been with VMware for nine years, I started as an engineer, and I moved into engineering management. We had Diane Greene who founded the company, the culture was always meritocratic, but I think something in 2016 kind of made me just thinking about my career and thinking about the careers of the women around me, I felt like we were stuck. But at the same time be focused on the women that were successful, for instance Yanbing Li, who's our senior VP and general manager of our storage business. And we were talking about her, and I said, this is what I said, I said, "There are some women who are successful despite everything "that we're dealing with, and I just want "to know their stories, and I'm going to write this book." The moment I said that it just felt right. I felt like this was something I wanted to do, and the stories in this book are inspiring stories of these women, just listening to Laila Ali this morning, her inspirational story, and this book has around 19 stories of these executive women, and they're just not role models, I mean every story offers strategies of how to thrive in the tech world. >> So interesting that first of all I love the title, Pratima, of this book, "Nevertheless She Persisted." So simple, so articulate, and so inspiring. So interesting, though, that you were working as an engineer for quite a few years before you realized, kind of looked around, like, whoa, this is a challenge that I'm actually living in. Yanbing is a CUBE alumni, I love her Twitter handle. So you said all right, I want to talk to some women who have been persistent and successful in their tech careers, as kind of the genesis of the book. Talk to us about, maybe, of those 19 interviews that range from, what, c-levels to VPs to directors. What are some of the stories that you found, what kind of blew your mind of, wow, I didn't know that you came from that kind of background? >> So when I started off I was very ambitious. I said I'd go interview CEO women, and I did a lot of research, and I found some very disturbing facts. You know, Fortune Magazine lists Fortune 500 companies, and they rank them based on their prior year's fiscal revenues, and from that data there were 24 women CEOs in 2014. That number dropped to 21 in 2015, and it dropped again in 2016, but it went up slightly in 2017 to 32 women, which is promising, but back in 2018 we're down to 24. So we have very very few women CEOs, and when I started off I said I'll talk to the CEO women, and I couldn't find any CEO women, my network, my friends' network, And so I dropped one level and I said let me go talk to SVPs and when I looked at VMware and VMware's network, Yanbing was one of them, so she's in the book, and then I reached out to contacts outside of my network. So I have some women from LinkedIn, I have Google, I have Facebook, I have some women from startups. So I have around four CEOs in the book, I've got, and what's great about this book is it's got a diverse set of women. Right? They have different titles; I've got directors, senior directors, VPs, Senior VPs, GMs, and CEOs. And some of them have PhDs, some of them have a Master's Degree, and some actually don't have formal training in computer science. I thought this would be interesting because a woman with any background can relate to it. Right? And so that was helpful. And so that's kind of how I went off and I started to write this book. And when I interviewed these women, there was a common theme that just kept emerging, and that was persistence. And they persisted against gender bias, stereotype threat, just the negative messages from media and society. I mean like Laila Ali was talking about just even the messages she got from her dad. >> Right. >> Right? Someone who was so close to her who basically said "Women can't box." And that didn't stop her; I mean she persisted. When I was listening to her, she didn't use the word, but, you know, she said she was believing in herself and all that, but she persisted through all those negative messages, right? And she said no one can tell her what to do. (laughs) >> Yeah her confidence is very loud and clear, and I think that you do find women, and I imagine some of them are some of the interviewees in your book, who have that natural confidence, and as you were saying when Muhammad Ali was trying to talk her out of it, and trying to, as she said, "He tried to get me think it was my idea," but she just knew, well no, this is what I want to do. And she had that confidence. Did you find that a lot of the women leaders in this book had that natural confidence? Like you grew up in an environment where you just believed "I can do this, my sister's playing cricket." Did you find that was a common thread, or did you find some great examples of women who wanted to do something, but just thought "Can I do this?" And "How do I do that?" What was the kind of confidence level that you saw? >> I was surprised because I had a question on imposter syndrome, and I asked these women, Telle Whiteney, who's the CEO, she was the CEO, ex-CEO >> Lisa: Grace Hopper >> Yes. The founder of Grace Hopper. I asked her about imposter syndrome and this is what she told me, she said "I feel like I'm not good enough" and that actually gave me goosebumps. I remember I was sitting in front of greatness and this is what she was telling me. And then I asked her "How do you overcome it?" and she said "I just show up the next day." And that actually helped me with this book because I am not an author. >> That's persistence. >> I mean I am an author now but 2 years ago when I started to write this, writing is not my forte. I'm a technologist, I build teams, I manage teams, I ship products, I ship technical products, but everyday I woke up and I said, "I'm feeling like an imposter." It was just her voice right? Yanbing also feels the same way, I mean she does feel times where she feels like, "I'm lacking confidence here." Majority of the people actually, pretty much all the women, this one woman, Patty Hatter, didn't feel like she had imposter syndrome but the rest of them face it everyday. Talia Malachi who's a principal engineer at VMWare, it's very hard to be a PE, she said that she fights it every day, and that was surprising to me, right? Because I was sitting in front of all these women, they were confident, they've achieved so much, but they struggle with that every day. But all they do is they persist, they show up the next day. They take those little steps and they have these goals and they're very intentional and purposeful, I mean just like what Layla said, right? She said, "Everything that I've done in the last 20 years "has been intentional and purposeful." And that's what these women did. And I learned so much from them because 20 years ago I was a drifter (laughs) you know I just kind drifted and I didn't realize that I could set a goal and I could reach it and I could do all these amazing things, and I didn't think any of this was possible for me. But I'm hoping that some girl somewhere can read this book and say "You know what this is possible", right? This is possible and you know role models, I think we need lots of these role models. >> We do I think, you know imposter syndrome I've suffered for it for so long before I even knew what it was and I'll be honest with you even finding out that it was a legitimate issue was (exhales) okay I'm not the only one. So I think it's important that you, that these women and youth are your voice, in your book, identified it. This is something I face everyday even though you may look at me on the outside and think, "She's so successful, she's got everything." And we're human. And Laila Ali talked about of having to revisit that inner lawyer, that sometimes she goes silent, sometimes the pilot light goes out and needs to be reignited or turned back up. I think that is just giving people permission, especially women, and I've felt that in the keynote, giving us permission to go, "Ah, you're not going to feel that everyday, "you're not going to feel it everyday." Get up the next day to your point, keep persisting and pursuing your purpose is in and of itself so incredibly empowering. >> Right but also imposter syndrome is good for you and I talk about that a little bit in the book. And you know why it's good for you? It's you getting out of your comfort zone, you're trying something different, and it's natural to feel that way, but once you get over it, you've mastered that, and Laila talked about it too today she said, "You get uncomfortable to the point "where you get comfortable." >> Lisa: Yes. >> So every time that you find that you have this imposter syndrome, just remember that greatness is right around the corner. >> Yep. I always say "Get uncomfortably uncomfortable". >> Pratima: Yes. >> And I loved how she said that today. So one of the big news of the day is VMWare with Stanford announcing that they are investing $15,000,000 in a new Women's Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford. Phenomenal. >> Pratima: Yes. >> And they're really going to start studying diversity and there's so many different gaps that we face, wage gap, age gap, gender gap, you know mothers vs motherless gap, and one of the things that was really interesting that, I've heard this before, that the press release actually cited a McKinsey report that says, "Companies with diversity "on their executive staff are 21% more profitable." >> Yes. >> And that just seems like a, no duh, Kind of thing to me for organizations like VMWare and your other partners in this consortium of Wt Squared to get on board to say, "Well of course." Thought diversity is so important and it actually is demonstrated to impact a companies' profitability. >> Right, yeah. And that's true, I just hope that more people listen to it and internalize it, and organizations internalize that, and what VMWare's doing is fantastic. I mean I'm so proud to be part of this company that's doing this. And you Shelly talked about change right? She said, "I think, right now the way I feel "about this whole thing, is we need to stop talking about "diversity and inclusion, we just need to say "enough is enough, this is important, let's just do it." >> Lisa: We should make this a part of our DNA. >> Exactly. Just make it, why do we have to fight for all this, right? It's just pointless and you know, men have wives and daughters and mothers and you know, It impacts societies as a whole and organizations, and we have so much research on this and what I like about what the Stanford Research Lab is doing is, they're actually working with woman all the way from middle-school to high-school to the executive suite, and that's amazing because research has now shown, there was a report in March 2014 by a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, for Judith Warner, and so she documented, just with the rate of change, like I talked with all the percentages and the number of women CEOs, just with that rate of change, the equality of men and women at the top will not occur until 2085. >> Lisa: Oh my goodness. >> That's 63 years from now. That means all our daughters would be retired by then. My daughters was born on 2013 and so she won't live in a world of female leaders that's representative of the population. And so that realization actually really, really, really broke my heart and that made me want to write this book, to create these role models. And what Stanford is doing, is they're going to work on this and I'm hoping that they can make that transition sooner. Like we don't have to wait 'till 2085. I want this for my daughter. >> It has to be accelerated, yes. >> It has to be accelerated and I think all of us need to do that, our daughters should be in the 20s, 30s when this happens, not when they're in their 70s. >> Lisa: And retired. >> And retired, I mean we don't want that. And we don't know how that number's going to get pushed further, right? Like if we don't do anything now... It. (exhales) >> Lisa: Right. 2085 becomes, what? >> I know! It's insane. >> In the spirit of being persistent, with the theme of this 3rd annual Wt Squared being Inclusion in Action, you're a manager and in a people or hiring role, tell me about the culture on your team and how your awareness and your passion for creating change here, lasting change. How are you actually creating that inclusion through action in your role at VMWare? >> So what I do is when I have to hire engineers on my team, I talk to my recruiter, have a conversation, I'm like, "I need more diversity." It's just not women, I want diversity with the men too. I want different races, different cultures because I believe that if I have a diverse team I'm going to be successful. So it's almost like I'm being selfish but that is very important. So I have that conversation with my recruiters, so I kind have an expectation set. And then we go through their hiring process and I'm very aware of just the hiring panel, like who I put on the panel, I make sure to have at least a women on the panel and have some diversity. My team right now is not really that diverse and I'm working hard to make that because it is hard, you know the pipeline has to get built at a certain point, and then start getting those resumes, but I try to have at least one female on the panel, and during the selection process the first thing I'll tell them is, let's get the elephant out of the room, age, gender, whatever, like let's take that out, let's just talk about skills and how well this person has done in an interview. And that's how I conducted and you know I've had fairly good success of hiring women on the team. But I've also seen that it's hard to retain women because they tend to drop-out faster than the men and so it's constant, it's just constant work to make that happen. >> Yeah. I wish we had more time to talk about retention because it is a huge issue. So the book is Nevertheless, She Persisted. Where can people get a copy of the book? >> So you can get it on Amazon, that's, I think, the best place to get it. You can also get it from my publisher's site which is FriesenPress. >> Excellent well Pratima thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing your passion, how your persisting, and how you're also helping more of us learn how to find that voice and pursue our passions, thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching. We are TheCUBE on the ground at VMWare for the Third Annual Women Transforming Technology Event. I'm Lisa Martin thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat happy music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBEConversations here at theCUBE Studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier here for a special Women in Tech and Technovation conversation with Tara Chklovski founder and CEO of Iridescent also runs TechNation and Anar Simpson global ambassador of TechNation. Great Women in Tech conversation and you guys have done amazing work, you're both rock stars. Thanks for spending the time. We just had a great chat about your event you had the 2017 World Pitch competition for girls in entrepreneurship in coding and everything else. Congratulations, so tell us about Technovation. What do you guys do and you guys are doing some amazing work. Tara start us off, where are you guys and what's going on? >> So Technovation is the world's largest technology entrepreneurship program for girls and girls aged middle school and high school are challenged that you have to find a problem in your community, to learn how to code a mobile application and learn how to start a startup from scratch all the way to the pitch video business plan. And through that process they are partnered with a woman in tech mentor and they go through a hundred hour learning experience. At the end of it they have to submit their apps and business plans for judging, and we have thousands of judges who are experts in tech from all over the world, review those and then we have a quarter final, semi final and then the big World Pitch competition that was held last week here in Silicon Valley. >> And this sounds so progressive and cutting edge. It sounds like what Palo Alto high school would do with Menlo and Sacred Heart and Castilleja, but this is not just Silicon Valley this is, I mean talk to us a little bit about the scope of the program. How do people get involved? Share some of the data. >> Yeah, totally, and so it is all over the world. We run in a hundred different countries, primarily brought and expanded through our work that our global ambassador Anar has done, and most of it is really trying to bring girls who would have never been exposed to technology entrepreneurship careers. And the way we work is really through partnerships, amazing organizations and visionary leaders who do the hard work of actually supporting these girls, getting these girls interested. So these girls would typically never go into careers in tech because they never see themselves as being interested and so the hook is that you want to find a problem in your community. You have to go out, talk to people, try to understand what is a big problem that is worth solving, and then we say, "Oh by the way, you know you could solve "this problem using technology." And so you get in a whole another group of people that would not normally access these careers. >> So is it an application process? Is it in the US? >> Anybody can. >> So anyone in the US. >> Anybody. >> So my daughter who wants to get some community hours could actually go take it to a whole other level. >> Totally, so you can just register. We haven't launched the new season yet but it'll be out live in October. Sign up, find a team of girls, and there's actually a documentary, an award-winning documentary done about the program. So the same woman who did Inconvenient Truth wanted to profile Women in Tech and she did a whole documentary about Technovation and it's called CodeGirl and you can get it on any online video platform. >> That's awesome, well congratulations. It's super impressive work, very inspirational. And Anar, you're bringing the global perspective in and we were talking before we came on camera that you had a goal. Share with us your five year goal and an update of where you are in taking this out beyond the United States. >> Sure, so you know five years ago I was a mentor for Technovation. It was my first time and it was an amazing experience, and we won in the local competition and the regional competition and then placed third in the final competition. And after that I had a conversation with Tara about the amazing experience that I had, and we were chatting and she said she'd love to take this globally. And being the type A enthusiast that I am, I said oh, well okay that's fine, you know, I come from Kenya. I've lived in Canada, so we've got three-- >> John: The perfect mix. >> Yeah, three countries already, but I'm sure we can take it global. Well in fact with our work together, I was able to take Technovation to 18 countries in the first year, 34 countries in the second year, 72 countries in the third year and this year we're at over a hundred countries. And it hasn't been an easy road. We keep saying this to each other, we just keep trying. Our focus is on getting this program. We don't get caught into anything politics or any otherwise, and we just want to get to as many girls as we can. And as Tara said, partnerships have played an immense role in getting Technovation all over the world. So initially it was just cold calls, people I knew in Kenya, people I knew in Canada, people I knew in LinkedIn, my little circle. But then my circle got bigger and bigger and then lots and lots of opportunities presented themselves and one of them was the Tech Women program that's run by the State Department. They bring in senior technical women to Silicon Valley for an internship and then I said to them, Oh and when they go back home, what do they do? Shouldn't they do Technovation? And so we've done good partnerships with them, we've done a good partnership with the UN women. We've been profiled in the United Nations high-level panel report, and these things keep happening and the... But it's not just because of the community or the relationships we're building. Our program works. It is credible. Our impact reports show that these girls end up in tech-related fields as they progress, and that's the whole point of our purpose, right? Is to say look, girls everywhere should be entering technology fields and what Technovation does it it's building a pipeline of young girls to enter these careers all over the globe. >> Well it's no secret that the folks that know me and watch theCUBE and know the show know that I'm a huge proponent for computer science and you know it's kind of similar, we kind of fell into that in the '80s. It's now become very interesting in that the surface area for computer science has increased a lot, and it's not just coding heads down and squashing bugs and writing code. There's been a whole nother evolution of soft skills, Agile, Cloud, you're seeing a full transformation with the potential unlimited compute available. With mobile now 10 years plus into the iPhone, you see new infrastructure developing. So it creates the notion that okay, you can bring the science of computers to a whole nother level. That must be attractive as you guys have that capability to bring that to bear in the programs. Can you guys comment on how you guys see just the role of computer science playing out? This is not a gender thing, just more of, as I have a young daughter I try to say it's not just writing code you can certainly whip out a mobile app but it's really bringing design to it or bringing a personal passion that you might have. So what are some of the patterns you're seeing in this surface area of what's now known as computer science? >> I think it's super important because as technology has progressed we've been able to provide this program. If we were still programming with you know, the in front of screens and doing the what you see is what you get kind of thing without, we would not be there. I think the big thing that's happened in the last 10 years is the mobile phone. I mean if you find a girl anywhere today in the world, chances are she'll have a mobile phone on her and she's going to be loathe for you to take that one thing from her. You could take other things from her, but try taking that phone away from her, she will not let you. And so the fact that she's so attached to that mobile phone means that you can then tell her, hey you don't have to be just a consumer of that thing. You can be a producer of that thing. Anything that you see on there, you can actually design. This is power. This is your thing to good and great and better, and if we can shift that in their minds that this is their link to the world that's wide open, we're seeing that. >> Well the world in consumed by it, I mean a lot of women in the world will be consumers of product. Certainly with AI, the conversation over the weekend I was having with folks is the role of women. It's super important not just in AI, but as software becomes cognitive, you have to align with half the audience that's out there. So it'd be hard for a guy to program something that's going to be more oriented towards a woman. But it brings up the question of application, and whether it's self-driving cars or utility from work to play and everything in between. Software, and the role of software's going to be critical and that seems to be pretty clear. The question is how do you inspire young girls? That's the question that a lot of fellow males that I talk to who are fathers of daughters and or are promoting Women in Tech and see that vision, what are some of the inspiration areas? How do you really shake the interest and how do you have someone really kind of dig in and enjoy it and taste it and feel it? >> Right, right. >> So there is some research to back what the formula is that works and to drive change in behavior. And so there is this, one of the biggest sort of names in cognitive psychology is Albert Bandura. He's a professor at Stanford. But basically it's the same principles that drives say the addiction from alcohol or weight loss or any kind of new behavior change. So the first is you need to have exposure to someone who you respect showing that this is something of meaning. So the key words are someone you respect, right? And so media can play a very big role here for scale, right otherwise it's only maybe your teacher or your parent and if they're not exposed to technology, they can't really affect your, and so media can play a huge role there. Second is the experience itself, right. Like how do you make it easy to get started, and then it's like learning from video games, right. So you make it very very easy, like the first step is just come over here it'll be fun, there's pizza, come right, like your friends are coming. But then the feedback has to be very fast, so the first step and that's where a good curriculum matters, right. So that's where also working on a mobile phone is very appealing even though many apps is-- >> John: It's relatable. >> It's relatable but the feedback is instantaneous, and so the programming language that the girls use is block based so even though you don't have any prior programming background you can still build a working app so that's critical. Then human beings get tired very easily and so the feedback needs to keep changing. It has to be unpredictable. The third piece is that of expectations, and so you have to have very high expectations, and so that's why this current discussion around cognitive differences in gender I feel is missing the point because it's not what you're born with, what are you capable of? And so if we looked at our genetics we would never go to space, we would never go to the deepest parts of the ocean because we are not meant for that, right? But we had really high visions and expectations and so human beings rose to that. And then the last piece is less relevant in developed countries but it's still important so, it's sort of the human energy. We are not a brain dissociated from the body. We are connected, right, and so if you're hungry and tired and sleepy, not the right time to sort of make a dramatic change in your interests. So this is relevant, if for us, we try to figure out which countries are we going to work in, so post conflict, war torn areas are not the best areas to start a new program in. You need the right partners. >> So you're saying the biological argument of, of course they're different, men and women. >> Yes. >> But it's the capability, that's where people are missing the boat. >> And the support system, right? So have high expectations, provide them with the right support, but the most important thing is your own beliefs in that. >> Let's get your thoughts on that because I think you guys have a great program with Technovation. You mentioned mentors, key part of the formula most likely. What we hear in the conversations I've had with women peers has been you know, there's a real call to arms at the executive level now, folks my age in their fifties who made it who are there succeeding. They really want to give back and they really have recognized the value of having that peer mentorship and then inspiring the young generation. Whether it's part of the things we cover like Grace Hopper or Technovation things that you do. Or even just mentoring in their own communities. What does that mentorship look like that you guys see, that you'd like to see doubled down on or areas you'd like to see tweaked or perceptions that need to change. What's your thoughts on mentorship and the role of inspiring young girls? >> Mentorship from men? >> John: Men and women, I mean. >> From both. >> John: Well I see the mentoring with women, that's the first step. >> Right. >> I have a whole nother conversation in my opinion that the men need training. Not just like go to class and learn how to talk but how to empathize. >> Well my big thing has been that you know when you wanted to encourage women up the ladder in your companies or you want to encourage women to actually get in to technical roles. That intent should not be placed in the CSR department of your organization 'cause that speaks volumes, right. To say oh, well that's in the social responsibility department or the HR, that just says okay, so you're not really, you don't think we're capable of helping you with your product or service. We're sort of part of this and it's like, no, you know. So I think you want to mainstream it, which is what a lot of I and D things are trying to do now. >> John: Inclusion and diversity. >> Inclusion and diversity techs. >> To make it part of the fabric not a department checkbox. >> Exactly, and-- >> That's what you're getting at right? >> Exactly, and you know the evolvement of these departments to include everybody and to make it more diverse is going to be not frictionless, it will be friction until a time where it won't even be necessary. I and D departments should have one goal, which is to work themselves out of a job. If they can work themselves out of a job, then the company would have done what it needs to be done. But I think-- >> John: Meaning it's self sufficient, it's self governing. People are humans, there's respect for individuals. >> Yes. >> I mean this is basically comes down to if you look at it as humans it takes, every conversation could be tabled as, what? There's a person on the other side, it's a human being. Not a woman or a white male or whatever. >> And you know-- >> There's not there yet, but I mean certainly that would be the end game, so in that scenario that department's out of business the I and R, the inclusion and diversity department has done it's job. >> You don't need one, because exactly. You don't need one because you know, you're okay, and I think capabilities is really important. In corporations, and this isn't anybody's fault. This is just how it's been done. This has just been the culture of it, right? Who gets invited to which meetings? Who gets invited to which conferences, right? And so we heard the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki saying you know, she had to sort of elbow a little bit to say why am I not allowed at a certain conference? And it's like, maybe just wake up to that and say, well why aren't you involving more people at conferences and think tanks because you know, I come from a oil and gas background, and people used to do a lot of deals on the golf course because oil and gas people play golf a lot and a lot of deals used to happen. Well in the Valley we don't play golf a lot but we do do other things, conferences or get togethers and if you don't include the people in your team as groups or representationally well then they're not going to be there when you make these decisions. So maybe just be a little bit-- >> Exclusionary is a problem and Kleiner Perkins was taken to task. They had ski trips apparently planned and they didn't, well mostly guys and they didn't invite the woman partner. It was a big scandal. This is where they kind of make that, it's a normative thing they've got to change the norms. >> It's change the norms and if you actually want your company which is made of all kinds of people, to move really far ahead, don't be like that. Include everybody because the only goodness about that is you'll go forward. You don't include somebody, well you're going to hurt them and then they won't be able to contribute because they just can't and then your product or your service is going to fail. It's really simple. >> You mentioned the Susan Wojcicki post, was an article in Fortune magazine where she wrote a guest article and she mentioned her daughter. >> Yes. >> Was feeling the narrative which by the way changed from the original Google memo to have a different meaning, but that's what she heard. So the question to you guys that I have on that is with Technovation and the work that you're doing, you're exposed to a lot of the ecosystem, across the world not just in the US from young girls. >> Yes. >> They see what's coming down from the top or the media, so certainly it's the game of telephone as things translate down to the level of the girls. Is there a pattern that you see emerging in their eyes as they look at this nonsense of narratives that are moving around. It's kind of a moving train the narrative of gender, Women in Tech but ultimately they have to internalize it and what patterns do you see and what do you guys do to either nullify that misperception and how do you amplify the real perceptions? >> Can I take that one? I was in Nairobi at the Safaricom headquarters. I don't know if you know Safaricom but these are the people who came up with M-PESA, and this is the currency that you can do on your mobile phone and Kenya uses M-PESA, like almost everybody in Kenya uses M-PESA. So Safaricom is a big tel-co and it's a big deal in Kenya, and Safaricom has taken Technovation, it has embraced Technovation in a big way. And the people who embraced Technovation at Safaricom in a big way are both male. So Josephine who is a tech woman fellow who came here and then went back and started Technovation. Her director, Clibeau Royal, he's male and the CEO of Techno, CEO of Safaricom is Bob Collymore and he's also male and these men, if I could clone these men in every country with every company you would see this sort of moving away and shifting away that women aren't good engineers or can't be good engineers. They are embracing it in such a way, not because they like Technovation because they know for their business having more women and equal women and a diverse company is making their product and their goods better. >> John: Yeah, their arbitraging the labor pool, why would you ignore talent? >> Exactly. >> Whether they're over 50 or they're women, it doesn't matter. >> I want to add to that, so there's quite a bit of data, so the pattern's are not anything different from what the message girls get from school and parents, right. So if you look at the data, there are a hundred countries that legally discriminate against women. And so what industry, what message industry is telling is really firstly doesn't filter through to the larger population. Silicon Valley is a completely different bubble. But overall the message is girls are given is like, this is not for you, right, and so especially in some of the more sort of populous dense countries in the world. And so we have to fight a lot of these kinds of perceptions from the ground up, and the number one sort of gatekeeper is the father and so a key part of what we have now done to date is to provide sort of education and training to the parents because... There's a very moving story that, we work in a remote town in South India and a mentor who's very dedicated has been trying to get these girls to participate in Technovation. He did that and then there were, one girl was actually offered a job but the father kept sort of saying no, not needed, no girl in my family ever needs to work, but he fought it. And then so then the girl actually gets a job, and then a year later the father calls the mentor and said, "You know what, I'm so grateful that you did it "because a day after she got the job I got hit in "an accident and I lost my job." But it's these kind of perceptions that have to be changed one person at a time, which is what makes this very hard. Unless you actually are able to get the media to change sort of the messaging. And I think in the US which is, there is some very interesting studies on that question, right. If you were to think, would there be more women in STEM in poorer developing countries versus richer highly developed countries, where would you see more women in STEM? The answer is actually the women in poorer countries like Iran, Malaysia. The reason is because in an individualistic society like in the US where there's a lot of emphasis on materialistic but it's also about are you happy? The conversation has changed to, from parents telling children do what makes you happy, and then you're very prone to advertising, and advertising works when it's highly targeted and highly gendered. And so in the '60s there was no such thing as pink and blue, now there is pink and blue, right? And so now we have just made our entire society entirely susceptible to advertising, and girls are passive and compliant and boys are aggressive. And so then when you are looking at the board structures, there's no, it's very very hard to fix the problem right there, right? You have to go down deeper because you don't get leaders who are compliant, maybe secretaries are compliant. But you have to fix the message that teachers give girls, that parents give their baby girls when they're born. And so industry is just sort of in the spotlight right now, but the issue is not that of industry it's also that of society. >> Industry (mumbles) are supporting you guys is interesting that this industry seems to be chipping, and certainly Silicon Valley's a little bit different as you said, but in general it is a cultural parent thing. Any plans there with Technovation to have a parent track? (laughing) >> Yes totally, I mean I think right now 10% of parents actually volunteer to be mentors, kind of like say Girl Scout troop leaders and so we are trying to figure out okay what is a way to involve parents and to make them part of the discussion. >> Well we'll keep the conversations going with Technovation you guys do incredible work. I'll just end the segment here by just telling a little bit about what you're working on right now? What are your goals? What are you passionate about? What are some of the things you'd like to do in the next half of the year, next year? What are some of the things going, Tara, you start. >> I think for us is to go deeper, so we are just launching a partnership with MIT to increase sort of the rigor of the curriculum, the rigor of the training and also provide more personalized learning and so this is the power of technology so we don't want to have girls drop out of the program because it's a hard program. So really trying to bring the best from industry to support that. >> Right and so you know my goal is to get Technovation to all the countries in the world, but keeping in mind we're making sure that it's delivered in a really good way and so girls complete the program et cetera, and the model that I hope to replicate in many other countries is the model that we're trying within Canada. So the new Canadian government is very interested in making sure that all of its citizens are you know, innovative, ready for the technology change that's coming there, and they launched a new fund called CanCode and so we have been part of that application process and we hope to have Technovation in almost every city in Canada, across Canada, and to really get this going and we, right now Canada is, everybody's like, you know, favorite country. And we hope that if we can do this in Canada, then other countries will follow and so that this program will get to as many girls as it can. >> Well you know how I feel. I feel computer science training in general should be standard in curriculums, because of all the conversation around automation. Automation is the fear is that jobs will go away. The data we have from our research over at Wikibon shows that the billions being automated away is non-differentiated labor. >> Right. >> Which implies that a working knowledge of those machines will shift to the value side. So you know I'm on the pro side of AI and automation personally. Especially I think it's great for-- >> But there's an education side too. >> There's the education side and I think this is a real fun area. You guys are at the cutting edge of it, both doing great work. I appreciate you taking the time and we'll have you back in for an update. Tara, Inar thanks so much. This is theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat happy music)

(lively music) >> Announcer: It's the CUBE, covering SAPPHIRE NOW 2017, brought to you by SAP cloud platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE with our ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017 down in Orlando. Really exciting day today, day two, 'cause we got to see Hasso Plattner. Got up and gave his keynote. Joined by George Gilbert. George, great to see you. I know you've known Hasso for years and years and years. Impressions of the kfeynote. God, there is so much stuff that we can dig into. I'm looking forward to it. >> Hasso almost never disappoints, 'cause he's just got %a richness of history and of vision that goes all the way back to the beginning. He was probably the technical visionary from the very beginning. He was the guy who took them from the first super integrated mainframe ERP package all the way to the client server age with R3, and now beyond into sort of in-memory, cloud ready, and with machine learning and iOT baked in. >> But he really speaks like a developer. You can really tell that he likes the technology, he understands the technology, he's kind of a no-BS guy. Some of the Q&A afterwards, people were trying to trip him up and challenge him on stuff. And he would either say, "I don't know," or, "I don't believe that," or, "Here's our impression." Really you could tell he's a humble guy, smart guy, and really has a grasp of what the heck is going on here. Let's jump into it. So many themes we could talk about. But the one that started out early in the conversation was, he literally said, "We need to get as quickly "to the cloud as possible." This is coming from a guy who built the company based on on prem ERP heavy lifting. And even he said today, 2017, "We need to get to the cloud as quickly as possible." >> I think there are a few things going on behind there, when you unpack it. One is, they did start building for the cloud in the early 2000's. It was meant to be a product for the mid-market. In fact, actually its first objective wasn't to be cloud-ready. The first objective was to be highly configurable so that you could bend it to the needs of many customers without customizing it, because typically with the customizations, it made it very difficult to upgrade. In making it configurable first and cloud-read second, they kind of accomplished neither. But they learned a lot. So they started on this next version, which was, okay, we're going to take an in-memory database which we're building from the ground up, 'cause Oracle wasn't building it at the time, and then we're going to build SAP ERP from scratch on top of this new database, 'cause database was so high performance that they didn't have to sepyarate analytics from transactions the way traditionally you do, you had to do in all applications. So they could simplify the app. Then, in simplifying it, they could make it easier to run in the cloud. And now, just like Oracle, just like Microsoft, they now build cloud first and on-prem second, because by building it cloud first, it sort of simplifies the assumptions that you have to make. >> Right, and he talked quite a bit about so much effort now is around integration connectors, to get stuff in and out of this thing. And that's a big focus, he said. It's not that we're ignoring it, it's just a big, hard, hairy problem that we're attacking. >> Yeah, and this is interesting and there's a lot of history behind this. Oracle, in the 90s, up until about the late 90s, their greatest success was in their industry-specific applications, where they took different modules from different vendors and stitched them together. That was how they built, like, a special solution for a consumer package goods company. But it turned out that that wasn't really workable because the different modules for the different vendors6 upgraded at different rates. So there was no way coherently to integrate them and tie them together. And SAP had said that all along. They were, like, this wasn't going to work. Fast forward to the last five-plus years, SAP started buying products from a bunch of different vendors, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, Hybris. So you're, like, "Aren't they doing the same thing "Oracle did 10 year, 15 years before?" But no, and this is what Hasso was talking about today, which was, once those apps are in the cloud, you only have to build the integration points once. It's not like when it's on every customer's data center, you have to build integrations that work for every version that every customer has. So I think that's what he was talking about. You put it all in the cloud, you integrate it once. >> Another thing that he talked, he really, he spoke in tweets. (mumbles) goes to buy Twitter feed, I was basically, like, bang, bang, bang as he was talking. He talked about databases, and databases in the cloud. Nobody cares, right? It's a classic theme we hear over and over. "We presume it works. "We just want it to work." You know, it should just work. Nobody really cares what the underlying database is. >> But he was, in those cases, referring to these purchased apps, Concur, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Hybris. He was, like, "Some of them work on SQLServer, "some of 'em work on Oracle. "But you know what? "Until we get around to upgrading them to HANA, "it doesn't matter because you, the customer, "don't know that." If they were on prem and you had to support all those different databases, it might be a different story. But he's, like, "We'd rather give you the functionality "that's baked into them now "and get around to upgrading the databases later." >> Another thing that came up, and he actually reference the conversation with Michael Dell from yesterday's keynote, about the evolution of compute horsepower. You know, you had CPUs and CPUs kind of topped out. Then you had multicore CPUs. Now we have GPUs that he said you can put 10s or 100s of 1,000s on the board at one time. Basically he's smart guy, he's down the road a few steps from delivering today's product, saying that, you know, we're basically living in a era of unlimited free compute and kind of asymptotically approaching. But that's where we are. And how does that really change the way that we look now at new application development. I thought that was a pretty interesting thing. >> And sort of big advances in software architecture come from when you have a big change in the relative cost of compute memory, network storage. So as you were saying, cost of compute is approaching zero. But the same time, the cost of memory relative to storage is coming way down. So not only do you have these really beefy clusters with lots of compute, but you also have lots of memory. He was talking about something like putting 16 terabytes of memory in a server and putting 64 servers in a cluster, and all of a sudden, I can't do that math, being that I was a humanities major, but all of a sudden, you're talking about huge databases where you can crunch through this stuff very, very fast because it's all, you have lots of processors running in parallel and you have lots of memory. >> It's pretty interesting. He made an interesting statement. He used a sailor reference. He said, "You know, we are through the big waves "and now we're in the smooth water," and really saying that all this heavy lifting and now that this cloud architecture is here and we have this phenomenal compute and store technology, that he can kind of take a breath and really refresh a look out into the future as to, how do we build modern apps that have intelligence with basically unlimited resources, and how does that change the way that we go forward? I thought that was an interesting point of view, especially 'cause he has been at it for decades. >> You know, I think he was probably looking back to some of the arrows he had in his back from having done an in-memory database essentially before anyone else did for mission critical apps. I think when he's saying we're out of the choppy water and into the smooth water, because we now have the hardware that lets us run essentially these very resource-intensive databases and the apps on 'em, so that we no longer have to worry, are we overtaxing the infrastructure? Is it too expensive to outfit the hardware for a customer? So his, when he talks about rethinking the apps, he, like, "We don't have to have separate analytical systems "from the transaction systems. "And not only that. "We can simplify because we don't have to have" what he's calling aggregates. In other words, we don't have to, we don't, let's say, take an order and all the line items in an order, and then pre-aggregate all the orders. It's, like, we do that on the fly. And that simplifies things a lot. Then, not only that. Because we have all this memory, we can do, like, machine learning very inexpensively. >> A whole another chapter in his keynote was about modern software design. A lot of really interesting things, especially in the context of SAP, which was a big, monolithic application, hard to learn, hard to understand, hard to manage. I remember a start, that were were (mumbles) using is a core V to C commerce engine. And to add 16 colors of shirts times 10 neck sizes and 10 sleeve sizes was just a nightmare. You're not going to have some merchant that works at Macy's to put that into the system. But he talked about intelligent design, which is pretty interesting. We're hearing that more and more in a lot of work done over at Stanford, intelligent design. He's talking about no manuals. He's, like, "If I can't figure it out, "I need to understand." He talked about intelligent applications that continue to learn as the applications get more data. And specifically, the fact that machines don't get bored testing 100s or 1,000s or even millions of scenarios and grinding through those things to get the intelligence to start to learn about what's going on. So a very different kind of an application, both development, delivery approach, than what we think of historically as R3. >> Yeah, like the design thinking was, they have this new UI called Fiori. I mean, if you go back 10, 15 years, let's say, when they started, 15 years, when they started trying to put browser-based user interfaces on what was a client server system, they had 10s and 10s of 1,000s of forms-based screens. They had to convert them one by one to work in a browser. I think what he's saying now is, they can mock up these prototypes in a simple tool and they can essentially recreate the UI. It's not going to be the exact same forms, but they can recreate the UI to the entire system so that it's much more accessible. On the machine learning front, he was talking about one example was, like, matching up invoices that you going to have to pay. So that you going to train the system with all these invoices. It learns how to essentially do the OCR, recognize the text. And it gets smarter to the point where it can do 95% of it without-- >> Human interaction. >> Yeah, human inter-. >> You know, it's interesting, we were at Service Now last week, as well. And they are using AI to do relatively mundane tasks that people don't want to do, that machines are good at, things like categorization and assignment and things that are relatively straightforward processes but very time-consuming and again, if you can get to a 70% solution, 80% solution, 90% solution, to free people up to do other things on the stuff that's relatively routine. Right, if the invoice matches the anticipated bill in the system, pay it. Does somebody really have to look at it? So I thought that was really interesting. Something I want to dig in with you, he talked a lot about data, where the data lives, data gravity. He even said that he fought against data warehousing in the 90s and lost. A lot of real passionate conversation about where is data and how should apps interact with data, and he's really against this data replication and a data lake and moving this stuff all around, but having it kind of central. Want to just get your thoughts on that history. What do you think he means now, and where's that going? >> It's a great question. There's a lot of history behind that. Not everyone would remember, but there was an article in Fortune Magazine in the late 90s, where it described him getting up in a small conference of software CEOs, enterprise software CEOs, and he said basically, "We're going to grind you into dust, "because everything comes in our system integrated. "And if you leave it up to the customer "to try and stitch all this stuff together, "it's going to be a nightmare." And that was back when everyone was thinking, "One company can't do it all." And the reality was, that was the point in time where we really had given go past go, collect $200, to every best-of-breed little software vendor. It did prove out over the next decade that the fewer integration points there were, that it meant much lower cost of ownership for the customer. Not only lower cost of ownership, but better business process integration, 'cause you had the (mumbles) integration. I bring this up because, well, actually, I was there when he said it. (laughs) But I bring it up because he's essentially saying the same thing now, which is, "We'll put all the machine learning technology, "the building blocks, in SAP. "If you need any contextual data, "bring it into our system. "You don't want to take our data out "and put it into all these other machine learning programs "'cause there's security issues, "there's, again, the breakdown "in the business process integration." He did acknowledge that with data warehouses, if you have 100s of other sources, yes, you may need a external data warehouse. But I think that he's going to find with machine learning the greatest value with the data that you use in machine learning is when you're always adding richer and richer contextual data. That contextual data means you're getting it from other sources. I don't think he's going to win this battle in terms of keeping most of it within SAP. >> It kind of bring up this other intersection that he talked about. In now delivering SAP as a cloud application, he said, "Now we have to learn how to run our application, "not our customers," a very different way of looking at the world. The other thing that piggybacks off of what you just said is, we've seen this trend towards configuration, not customization. It used to be probably, back in the days, if you had the big SI's, they loved customization, 'cause it's a huge project, multi-years. I used to talk to one of our center partners, like, "How do you manage a multi-year SAP project "when most the people that started it "probably aren't even there the day you finish it?" But he had a specific quote I wanted to call out now, what you just said, is that he said, "Only our customers have the data, "the desire, and the domain knowledge "to make the most out of it." So it's a really interesting recognition that yes, you want customers to have this configuration option. But we keep hearing more and more, it's config, not-- >> Both: Customization. >> For upgrades and all these other things, which now when you go to a cloud-based application, that becomes significant. You don't want customizations, 'cause that's just complicates everything. >> You can't. I don't know if he said this today. I guess he must have said it today. But basically, when you're in the cloud, I forgot the terminology for the different instances. But when you're in, like, the SAP cloud, you can only configure. There's essentially a set of greater constraints on you. When you go to the other end of the spectrum, let's say you run it in your own data center, you can customize it. But when you're running it, essentially sharing the infrastructure, you're constrained. You're much more constrained. And they build it for that environment first. >> Right. But at the same time, they've got the data. Again, this has come up with other SAS companies that we've talked to, is hopefully, their out of the box business process covers 90% of the basics. I think there's been a realization on the business analyst side that we think we're special, but really most of the time, order to cash is order to cash. So if you got to tweak your own internal process to match best-of-breed, do it. You're much better off than trying to shape that computing system to fill your little corner cases. >> It's funny that you mention that, because what happened in the 90s was that by far the biggest influencers in the purchase decision and the overall lifecycle of the app were the big system integrators. They could typically collect $10 in implementation and change management fees for every dollar of license that went to the software vendors. So they had a huge incentive to tell the customer, "Well, you really should customize this "around your particular needs," because they made all the money off that. >> Right, right. Another huge theme. Again, it was such a great keynote. We watch a lot of keynotes, and I have a very high bar for what I consider a great keynote. This was a great keynote by a smart guy who knows his stuff and got history. But another theme was just really about AI. He talked a little bit, which I thought was great. Nobody talks about the fact that airplanes have been flying themselves for a very long time. So it is coming. I think he even said, maybe this is the age of AI. But there always have to be some humans involved. It's not a complete hand-over of control. But it is coming, and it's coming very, very quickly. >> I actually thought that they were a little further behind than might expected, considering that it's been years now that people in software have seen this coming. But they have in the dozens of applications or functions right now that are machine learning enabled. But if you look out at their roadmap, where they get to predictive accounting, customer behavior segmentation, profile completeness for in sales, solution recommenders, model training infrastructure for the base software foundation, they have a pretty rich roadmap. But I guess I would have thought it'd be a little farther along. But then Oracle isn't really any farther along. (mumbles) has done some work for HR. For whatever reason, I think that enterprise application vendors, I think they found this challenging for two reasons. On the technical side, machine learning is very different from the traditional analytics they did, which was really essentially OLAP, you know, business intelligence. This requires the data scientists and the white lab coats and instead of backward-looking business intelligence this forward-looking predictive analytics. The other thing is, I think you sell this stuff differently, which is, when it was business intelligence, you're basically selling reporting on what happened to department heads or function leaders, whereas when you're selling predictive capabilities, it's a little more transformative and you're not selling efficiency, which is what these applications have always, that's been their value preposition. You're selling transformational outcomes, which is a different sort of selling motion. >> It's funny, I heard a funny quote the other day. We used to look backwards for the sample of the data. (laughs thinly) Now we're in real time with-- >> Both: All the data. >> Very different situation-- >> And forward-looking. >> And forward-looking as well, with the predictive. >> That's a great quote, yeah. >> Again, he touched on so many things. But one of the things he brought up is Tesla. He actually said he has two Teslas, or he has a second Tesla. And there was question and answer afterwards really about the Tesla, not as the technology platform. And he poked fun at Germans. He said Germans have problems with simplicity. He referenced, I presume, a Mercedes or a Porsche, you know, the perfectly ergonomically placed buttons and switches. He goes, "You sit in a Tesla "and it just all comes up on the touch screen. "And if you want to do an update overnight, "they update your software, "and now you have the newer version of the car," versus the Mercedes, where it takes 'em three years to redesign the buttons and switches. I thought that was interesting. Then one of the Q&A people said, "But what about the buying experience? "If you (mumbles) ever bought a Tesla, "it's a very different experience "than buying a car." How does that really apply to selling software? It was pretty interesting. He said we're not there yet. But he has clearly grasped on, it's a new world and it's a new way to interact with the customers, kind of like his no manuals comment, that Tesla is defining a new way to buy a car, experience a car, upgrade a car. >> Operate it. >> At the same time, he got the crazy mode, fanatical mode, like, ludicrous mode, so that he could stop and tell the Porsche guys that you're falling behind further every single day. So I thought, really interesting, bringing that kind of consumer play and kind of a cutting edge automotive example into what was historically pretty stodgy enterprise software space. >> You know, it's funny, I listened when you're saying that. That was almost like the day one objective from SalesForce, which was, we want an enterprise app like Sebol, but we want an eBay-like, or Yahoo-like experience. And that did change the experience for buying it and for operating it. I think that was almost 20 years ago, where that was Marc Benioff's objective and he's saying it's easier to do that for CRM, but it's now time to bring that to ERP. >> The other thing he brought in which I was happy, being a Bay Area resident, is the Sharks. Because he's a part owner of San Josey Sharks, obviously it's SAP Center now, also known as the Shark Tank. It used to be owned by another technology company. But he made just a funny thing. "I like hockey, so I should like SAP," and he was talking about the analysis of how often the logos come up on the telecast et cetera. But the thing that struck me is, he said the analysis is actually now faster than the game. Pretty interesting way to think about this data in flow, in that the analysis coming out of the game that feeds Vegas, it feeds all these stat lines, it feeds fantasy, it feeds all this stuff, it feeds the advertising purchase and the ROI on my logo, is it in the corner, is it on the ice, is it in the middle, is actually moving faster than the hockey game. And hockey is a pretty fast game. Very different world in which we live, even on the mar-tech side. >> That was an example of one of the machine learning-type apps, because I think in their case, they were using, I think, Google image recognition technology to parse out essentially all the logos and see what type of impact your brand made relative to your purchase. >> I mean, I could go on and on. I've so many notes. Again, I live tweeted a lot of it, you know, he's just such a humble guy. He's a smart guy. He comes at it with a technology background, but he said we're a little bit slower than we'd like, he talked about some things taking longer than he thought they would. But he also now sees around the corner, that we are very quickly going to be in this age of infinite compute, and we are already in an age of, no one's reading manuals. Just seemed very kind of customer-centric, we're no longer the super-smart Germans that, "We'll do it our way or the highway, "and you will adapt your process to us," but really customer-centric point of view, design thinking, talked about sharing their roadmap as far out in advance as possible. I think he specifically, when he got questioned on design thinking, he's, like, "You know, the studies show that a collaborative effort "yields better results. "It's no longer, 'We're the smartest guy in the room "'and we're going to do it this way "'and you're going to adapt.'" So really progressive. >> And he talked about, with Concur, he said their UI is so easy that you really don't need a manual. In fact, if you do, you failed. And I think what he's trying to say is, we're going to take that iterative prototyping capability agile development and extend it to the rest of the ERP family. With their Fiori UI and the tools that build those screens that it'll make that possible. >> You've handled CAP. We don't spend enough investment on design in UI, 'cause it is such an important piece of the puzzle. But George, we're running out of time here. I want to give you the last word. You've been paying attention to SAP for a very long time. Hasso's terrific, but then Hasso gets off the stage and he said, "I don't run the company any more. "I only make recommendations." As you look at SAP, and Bill McDermott was yesterday, are they changing? Are they just stuck in an innovator's dilemma because they just make so much money on their historical business? Or are they really changing? What's your take as they develop, where they are now, and what do you see going forward for SAP? >> Well it's a really good question. I would say, I look at the value of the business processes that they are either augmenting or automating. I hesitate to say automate because, as he said, you still want the pilot in the cockpit. >> Jeff: In proximity to take control. >> Right. And he was, like, "Look, when we do the invoice matching, "it's not like we're going to get 100% right. "We're going to get it," I think he was saying, like, in the labs right now it's, like, 94% right. So we're going to make you more productive, we're not going to eliminate that job. But when you're doing invoice matching, that's not a super high value business process. If you're doing something where you're predicting churn and making a next best offer to a customer, that's a higher value process. Or if you have a multi-touchpoint commerce solution where you can track the customer, whether it's mobile, whether he's coming via chat, whether he's in the store, and you're able to see his history or her history and what's most appropriate given their context at any one moment, that's higher value. And then it's super high value to be able to take that back upstream towards, "Okay, here's where the inventory is. "I have some in this store. "I can't fulfill that clothing item directly from the store, "but I can fulfill it from this one," or, "I have it in another warehouse," when you have that level of awareness and integration, that's high value. >> Yeah, but I want to push back a little bit on you, George, 'cause I do think the invoice ma-, if he can automatically match 94% of the invoices, that is tremendous value. I just think it's so creative when you apply this machine learning to tasks that feel relatively mundane. But if you're speeding your cash flow along, if you get 94% of your invoices done one day faster and you're a multimillion dollar business, what is the direct dollar impact on the bottom line, like, immediately? It's huge. And then you can iterate and move into other processes. I think what's termed a low value transaction is actually a lot higher value than people give it credit. It's just like again, another one we hear about all the time, automation of password reset. Some of these service desks, password reset, I heard a stat, and one of them was 70% of the calls are password reset. So if you could automate password reset, sounds kind of silly and mundane, oh my gosh, it's like 70% of your calls. It's humongous. >> I hear what you're saying. Let me give you another counter example, which was, I think he brought this up. I don't know if it was today or when Michael Dell spoke, which was that Dell's revolution wasn't that they were more efficient than doing what Compaq did. It's that they had a different business model, which was specifically, they got paid before they even procured or assembled the components. >> Or paid for them, right? >> George: Yes, yes. >> They had no inventory carry costs. >> In fact, that meant their working capital, their working capital needs were negative. In fact, the bigger they got, the more money they collected before they had to spend it. That's a different business model. That wasn't automating the invoice matching. That was, we have such good systems that we don't even have to pay for them and then assemble the stuff until after the customer gave us their credit card. >> Right, right, right. >> I think those are the things that new types of applications can make possible. >> Right. Well, we see it time and time again. It's all about scale, it's all about finding inefficiencies, and there's a lot more inefficiencies around than people give credit, as Uber showed with a lot of cars that sit in driveways and Amazon and the public clouds are showing with a lot of inefficient, not used utilization and private data centers. So the themes go on and on, and they're pretty universal. So, exciting keynote. Any last comment before we sign off for today? >> I guess we want to take a close look at Oracle next and see how their roadmap looks like in terms of applying these new technologies, iOT, machine learning, block chain. Because all of these can remake how you build a business. >> All right, that's George Gilbert from Wikibon. I'm Jeff Frick from the CUBE. We are covering ongoing coverage of SAP SAPPHIRE 2017. Thanks for watching, we'll be back with more after this short break. Thanks. (lively music)