>>Hey guys. Welcome back to the Cubes coverage of Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Ferer. John, we're seeing this world where companies are saying if we can't automate it, we need to, The automation market is transforming. There's been a lot of buzz about that. A lot of technical chops here at Ansible Fest. >>Yeah, I mean, we've got a great guest here coming on Cuba alumni, Dean Newman, future room. He travels every event he's got. He's got his nose to the grindstone ear to the ground. Great analysis. I mean, we're gonna get into why it's important. How does Ansible fit into the big picture? It's really gonna be a great segment. The >>Board do it well, John just did my job for me about, I'll introduce him again. Daniel Newman, one of our alumni is Back Principal Analyst at Future and Research. Great to have you back on the cube. >>Yeah, it's good to join you. Excited to be back in Chicago. I don't know if you guys knew this, but for 40 years, this was my hometown. Now I don't necessarily brag about that anymore. I'm, I live in Austin now. I'm a proud Texan, but I did grow up here actually out in the west suburbs. I got off the plane, I felt the cold air, and I almost turned around and said, Does this thing go back? Yeah. Cause I'm, I've, I've grown thin skin. It did not take me long. I, I like the warm, Come on, >>I'm the saying, I'm from California and I got off the plane Monday. I went, Whoa, I need a coat. And I was in Miami a week ago and it was 85. >>Oh goodness. >>Crazy. So you just flew in. Talk about what's going on, your take on, on Ansible. We've talked a lot with the community, with partners, with customers, a lot of momentum. The flywheel of the community is going around and round and round. What are some of your perspectives that you see? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's you know, I'm gonna take a quick step back. We're entering an era where companies are gonna have to figure out how to do more with less. Okay? We've got exponential data growth, we've got more architectural complexity than ever before. Companies are trying to discern how to deal with many different environments. And just at a macro level, Red Hat is one of the companies that is almost certainly gonna be part of this multi-cloud hybrid cloud era. So that should initially give a lot of confidence to the buying group that are looking at how to automate their environments. You're automating workflows, but really with, with Ansible, we're focused on automating it, automating the network. So as companies are kind of dig out, we're entering this recessionary period, Okay, we're gonna call it what it is. The first thing that they're gonna look at is how do we tech our way out of it? >>I had a wonderful one-on-one conversation with ServiceNow ceo, Bill McDermott, and we saw ServiceNow was in focus this morning in the initial opening session. This is the integration, right? Ansible integrating with ServiceNow. What we need to see is infrastructure automation, layers and applications working in concert to basically enable enterprises to be up and running all the time. Let's first fix the problems that are most common. Let's, let's automate 'em, let's script them. And then at some point, let's have them self resolving, which we saw at the end with Project Wisdom. So as I see it, automation is that layer that enterprises, boards, technologists, all can agree upon are basically here's something that can make our business more efficient, more profitable, and it's gonna deal with this short term downturn in a way that tech is actually gonna be the answer. Just like Bill and I said, let's tech our way out of it. >>If you look at the Red Hat being bought by ibm, you see Project Wisdom Project, not a product, it's a project. Project Wisdom is the confluence of research and practitioners kind of coming together with ai. So bringing AI power to the Ansible is interesting. Red Hat, Linux, Rel OpenShift, I mean, Red Hat's kind of position, isn't it? Kind of be in that right spot where a puck might be coming maybe. I mean, what do you think? >>Yeah, as analysts, we're really good at predicting the, the recent past. It's a joke I always like to make, but Red Hat's been building toward the future. I think for some time. Project Wisdom, first of all, I was very encouraged with it. One of the things that many people in the market probably have commented on is how close is IBM in Red Hat? Now, again, it's a $34 billion acquisition that was made, but boy, the cultures of these two companies couldn't be more different. And of course, Red Hat kind of carries this, this sort of middle ground layer where they provide a lot of value in services to companies that maybe don't use IBM at, at, for the public cloud especially. This was a great indication of how you can take the power of IBM's research, which of course has some of the world's most prolific data scientists, engineers, building things for the future. >>You know, you see things like yesterday they launched a, you know, an AI solution. You know, they're building chips, semiconductors, and technologies that are gonna power the future. They're building quantum. Long story short, they have these really brilliant technologists here that could be adding value to Red Hat. And I don't know that the, the world has fully been able to appreciate that. So when, when they got on stage and they kind of say, Here's how IBM is gonna help power the next generation, I was immediately very encouraged by the fact that the two companies are starting to show signs of how they can collaborate to offer value to their customers. Because of course, as John kind of started off with, his question is, they've kind of been where the puck is going. Open source, Linux hybrid cloud, This is the future. In the future. Every company's multi-cloud. And I said in a one-on-one meeting this morning, every company is going to probably have workloads on every cloud, especially large enterprises. >>Yeah. And I think that the secret's gonna be how do you make that evolve? And one of the things that's coming out of the industry over the years, and looking back as historians, we would say, gotta have standards. Well, with cloud, now people standards might slow things down. So you're gonna start to figure out how does the community and the developers are thinking it'll be the canary in the coal mine. And I'd love to get your reaction on that, because we got Cuban next week. You're seeing people kind of align and try to win the developers, which, you know, I always laugh cuz like, you don't wanna win, you want, you want them on your team, but you don't wanna win them. It's like a, it's like, so developers will decide, >>Well, I, I think what's happening is there are multiple forces that are driving product adoption. And John, getting the developers to support the utilization and adoption of any sort of stack goes a long way. We've seen how sticky it can be, how sticky it is with many of the public cloud pro providers, how sticky it is with certain applications. And it's gonna be sticky here in these interim layers like open source automation. And Red Hat does have a very compelling developer ecosystem. I mean, if you sat in the keynote this morning, I said, you know, if you're not a developer, some of this stuff would've been fairly difficult to understand. But as a developer you saw them laughing at jokes because, you know, what was it the whole part about, you know, it didn't actually, the ping wasn't a success, right? And everybody started laughing and you know, I, I was sitting next to someone who wasn't technical and, and you know, she kinda goes, What, what was so funny? >>I'm like, well, he said it worked. Do you see that? It said zero data trans or whatever that was. So, but if I may just really quickly, one, one other thing I did wanna say about Project Wisdom, John, that the low code and no code to the full stack developer is a continuum that every technology company is gonna have to think deeply about as we go to the future. Because the people that tend to know the process that needs to be automated tend to not be able to code it. And so we've seen every automation company on the planet sort of figuring out and how to address this low code, no code environment. I think the power of this partnership between IBM Research and Red Hat is that they have an incredibly deep bench of capabilities to do things like, like self-training. Okay, you've got so much data, such significant size models and accuracy is a problem, but we need systems that can self teach. They need to be able self-teach, self learn, self-heal so that we can actually get to the crux of what automation is supposed to do for us. And that's supposed to take the mundane out and enable those humans that know how to code to work on the really difficult and hard stuff because the automation's not gonna replace any of that stuff anytime soon. >>So where do you think looking at, at the partnership and the evolution of it between IBM research and Red Hat, and you're saying, you know, they're, they're, they're finally getting this synergy together. How is it gonna affect the future of automation and how is it poised to give them a competitive advantage in the market? >>Yeah, I think the future or the, the competitive space is that, that is, is ecosystems and integration. So yesterday you heard, you know, Red Hat Ansible focusing on a partnership with aws. You know, this week I was at Oracle Cloud world and they're talking about running their database in aws. And, and so I'm kind of going around to get to the answer to your question, but I think collaboration is sort of the future of growth and innovation. You need multiple companies working towards the same goal to put gobs of resources, that's the technical term, gobs of resources towards doing really hard things. And so Ansible has been very successful in automating and securing and focusing on very certain specific workloads that need to be automated, but we need more and there's gonna be more data created. The proliferation, especially the edge. So you saw all this stuff about Rockwell, How do you really automate the edge at scale? You need large models that are able to look and consume a ton of data that are gonna be continuously learning, and then eventually they're gonna be able to deliver value to these companies at scale. IBM plus Red Hat have really great resources to drive this kind of automation. Having said that, I see those partnerships with aws, with Microsoft, with ibm, with ServiceNow. It's not one player coming to the table. It's a lot of players. They >>Gotta be Switzerland. I mean they have the Switzerland. I mean, but the thing about the Amazon deal is like that marketplace integration essentially puts Ansible once a client's in on, on marketplace and you get the central on the same bill. I mean, that's gonna be a money maker for Ansible. I >>Couldn't agree more, John. I think being part of these public cloud marketplaces is gonna be so critical and having Ansible land and of course AWS largest public cloud by volume, largest marketplace today. And my opinion is that partnership will be extensible to the other public clouds over time. That just makes sense. And so you start, you know, I think we've learned this, John, you've done enough of these interviews that, you know, you start with the biggest, with the highest distribution and probability rates, which in this case right now is aws, but it'll land on in Azure, it'll land in Google and it'll continue to, to grow. And that kind of adoption, streamlining make it consumption more consumable. That's >>Always, I think, Red Hat and Ansible, you nailed it on that whole point about multicloud, because what happens then is why would I want to alienate a marketplace audience to use my product when it could span multiple environments, right? So you saw, you heard that Stephanie yesterday talk about they, they didn't say multiple clouds, multiple environments. And I think that is where I think I see this layer coming in because some companies just have to work on all clouds. That's the way it has to be. Why wouldn't you? >>Yeah. Well every, every company will probably end up with some workloads in every cloud. I just think that is the fate. Whether it's how we consume our SaaS, which a lot of people don't think about, but it always tends to be running on another hyperscale public cloud. Most companies tend to be consuming some workloads from every cloud. It's not always direct. So they might have a single control plane that they tend to lead the way with, but that is only gonna continue to change. And every public cloud company seems to be working on figuring out what their niche is. What is the one thing that sort of drives whether, you know, it is, you know, traditional, we know the commoditization of traditional storage network compute. So now you're seeing things like ai, things like automation, things like the edge collaboration tools, software being put into the, to the forefront because it's a different consumption model, it's a different margin and economic model. And then of course it gives competitive advantages. And we've seen that, you know, I came back from Google Cloud next and at Google Cloud next, you know, you can see they're leaning into the data AI cloud. I mean, that is their focus, like data ai. This is how we get people to come in and start using Google, who in most cases, they're probably using AWS or Microsoft today. >>It's a great specialty cloud right there. That's a big use case. I can run data on Google and run something on aws. >>And then of course you've got all kinds of, and this is a little off topic, but you got sovereignty, compliance, regulatory that tends to drive different clouds over, you know, global clouds like Tencent and Alibaba. You know, if your workloads are in China, >>Well, this comes back down at least to the whole complexity issue. I mean, it has to get complex before it gets easier. And I think that's what we're seeing companies opportunities like Ansible to be like, Okay, tame, tame the complexity. >>Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, look, when I was watching the demonstrations today, my take is there's so many kind of simple, repeatable and mundane tasks in everyday life that enterprises need to, to automate. Do that first, you know? Then the second thing is working on how do you create self-healing, self-teaching, self-learning, You know, and, and I realize I'm a little broken of a broken record at this, but these are those first things to fix. You know, I know we want to jump to the future where we automate every task and we have multi-term conversational AI that is booking our calendars and driving our cars for us. But in the first place, we just need to say, Hey, the network's down. Like, let's make sure that we can quickly get access back to that network again. Let's make sure that we're able to reach our different zones and locations. Let's make sure that robotic arm is continually doing the thing it's supposed to be doing on the schedule that it's been committed to. That's first. And then we can get to some of these really intensive deep metaverse state of automation that we talk about. Self-learning, data replication, synthetic data. I'm just gonna throw terms around. So I sound super smart. >>In your customer conversations though, from an looking at the automation journey, are you finding most of them, or some percentage is, is wanting to go directly into those really complex projects rather than starting with the basics? >>I don't know that you're, you're finding that the customers want to do that? I think it's the architecture that often ends up being a problem is we as, as the vendor side, will tend to talk about the most complex problems that they're able to solve before companies have really started solving the, the immediate problems that are before them. You know, it's, we talk about, you know, the metaphor of the cloud is a great one, but we talk about the cloud, like it's ubiquitous. Yeah. But less than 30% of our workloads are in the public cloud. Automation is still in very early days and in many industries it's fairly nascent. And doing things like self-healing networks is still something that hasn't even been able to be deployed on an enterprise-wide basis, let alone at the industrial layer. Maybe at the company's on manufacturing PLAs or in oil fields. Like these are places that have difficult to reach infrastructure that needs to be running all the time. We need to build systems and leverage the power of automation to keep that stuff up and running. That's, that's just business value, which by the way is what makes the world go running. Yeah. Awesome. >>A lot of customers and users are struggling to find what's the value in automating certain process, What's the ROI in it? How do you help them get there so that they understand how to start, but truly to make it a journey that is a success. >>ROI tends to be a little bit nebulous. It's one of those things I think a lot of analysts do. Things like TCO analysis Yeah. Is an ROI analysis. I think the businesses actually tend to know what the ROI is gonna be because they can basically look at something like, you know, when you have an msa, here's the downtime, right? Business can typically tell you, you know, I guarantee you Amazon could say, Look for every second of downtime, this is how much commerce it costs us. Yeah. A company can generally say, if it was, you know, we had the energy, the windmills company, like they could say every minute that windmill isn't running, we're creating, you know, X amount less energy. So there's a, there's a time value proposition that companies can determine. Now the question is, is about the deployment. You know, we, I've seen it more nascent, like cybersecurity can tend to be nascent. >>Like what does a breach cost us? Well there's, you know, specific costs of actually getting the breach cured or paying for the cybersecurity services. And then there's the actual, you know, ephemeral costs of brand damage and of risks and customer, you know, negative customer sentiment that potentially comes out of it. With automation, I think it's actually pretty well understood. They can look at, hey, if we can do this many more cycles, if we can keep our uptime at this rate, if we can reduce specific workforce, and I'm always very careful about this because I don't believe automation is about replacement or displacement, but I do think it is about up-leveling and it is about helping people work on things that are complex problems that machines can't solve. I mean, said that if you don't need to put as many bodies on something that can be immediately returned to the organization's bottom line, or those resources can be used for something more innovative. So all those things are pretty well understood. Getting the automation to full deployment at scale, though, I think what often, it's not that roi, it's the timeline that gets misunderstood. Like all it projects, they tend to take longer. And even when things are made really easy, like with what Project Wisdom is trying to do, semantically enable through low code, no code and the ability to get more accuracy, it just never tends to happen quite as fast. So, but that's not an automation problem, That's just the crux of it. >>Okay. What are some of the, the next things on your plate? You're quite a, a busy guy. We, you, you were at Google, you were at Oracle, you're here today. What are some of the next things that we can expect from Daniel Newman? >>Oh boy, I moved Really, I do move really quickly and thank you for that. Well, I'm very excited. I'm taking a couple of work personal days. I don't know if you're a fan, but F1 is this weekend. I'm the US Grand Prix. Oh, you're gonna Austin. So I will be, I live in Austin. Oh. So I will be in Austin. I will be at the Grand Prix. It is work because it, you know, I'm going with a number of our clients that have, have sponsorships there. So I'll be spending time figuring out how the data that comes off of these really fun cars is meaningfully gonna change the world. I'll actually be talking to Splunk CEO at the, at the race on Saturday morning. But yeah, I got a lot of great things. I got a, a conversation coming up with the CEO of Twilio next week. We got a huge week of earnings ahead and so I do a lot of work on that. So I'll be on Bloomberg next week with Emily Chang talking about Microsoft and Google. Love talking to Emily, but just as much love being here on, on the queue with you >>Guys. Well we like to hear that. Who you're rooting for F one's your favorite driver. I, >>I, I like Lando. Do you? I'm Norris. I know it's not necessarily a fan favorite, but I'm a bit of a McLaren guy. I mean obviously I have clients with Oracle and Red Bull with Ball Common Ferrari. I've got Cly Splunk and so I have clients in all. So I'm cheering for all of 'em. And on Sunday I'm actually gonna be in the Williams Paddock. So I don't, I don't know if that's gonna gimme me a chance to really root for anything, but I'm always, always a big fan of the underdog. So maybe Latifi. >>There you go. And the data that comes off the how many central unbeliev, the car, it's crazy's. Such a scientific sport. Believable. >>We could have Christian, I was with Christian Horner yesterday, the team principal from Reside. Oh yeah, yeah. He was at the Oracle event and we did a q and a with him and with the CMO of, it's so much fun. F1 has been unbelievable to watch the momentum and what a great, you know, transitional conversation to to, to CX and automation of experiences for fans as the fan has grown by hundreds of percent. But just to circle back full way, I was very encouraged with what I saw today. Red Hat, Ansible, IBM Strong partnership. I like what they're doing in their expanded ecosystem. And automation, by the way, is gonna be one of the most robust investment areas over the next few years, even as other parts of tech continue to struggle that in cyber security. >>You heard it here. First guys, investment in automation and cyber security straight from two analysts. I got to sit between. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be back after a short break. SO'S stick around.

The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>I Ready, Dave Ante with David Nicholson. We're back at UI Path forward. Five. We're getting ready for the big guns to come in, the two co CEOs, but we have a really special analyst panel now. We're excited to have Daniel Newman here. He's the Principal analyst at Future and Research. And Andy Dai, who's the Vice president and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for making some time to come on the queue. >>Glad to be here. Always >>Good. So, >>Andy, you're deep into ai. You and I have been talking about having you come to our maor office. I'm, I'm really excited that we're able to meet here. What have you seen at the show so far? What are your big takeaways? You know, day one and a half? >>Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm d AI because my last name has AI and I >>Already talk about, >>So, but, but all jokes aside, there are a lot of good things I heard from the conference, right? I mean, one is the last two years because of the pandemic, the growth has been phenomenal for, for a lot of those robotic automation intelligent automation companies, right? So because the low hanging through position making processes have been already taken care of where they going to find the next growth spot, right? That was the question I was looking answers to. And they have some inverse, one good acquisition. They had intelligent document processing, but more importantly they're trying to move from detrimental rules based RPA automation into AI based, more probabilistic subjective decision making areas. That's a huge market, tons of money involved in it, but it's going to be a harder problem to solve. Love to see the execut. >>Well, it's also a big pivot for the, for the company. It started out as sort of a a point product and now is moving to, to platform. But to end of the macro is not in UI pass favor. It's not really in any, you know, tech company's favor, but especially, you know, a company that's going into a transition transitioning to go to market cetera. What are you seeing, what's your take on the macro? I mean, I know you follow the financial markets very closely. There's a lot of negative sentiment right now. Are you as negative as the sentiment? >>Well, the, the broad sentiment comes with some pretty good historical data, right? We've had probably one of the worst market years in multiple decades. And of course we're coming into a situation where all the, the factors are really not in our favor. You've got in interest rates climbing, you've got wildly high inflation, you've had a, you know, helicopters dumping money on the economy for a period of time. And we're, we're gonna get into this great reset is what I keep talking about. But, you know, I had the opportunity to talk to Bill McDermott recently on one of my shows and Bill's CEO of ServiceNow, in case anybody there doesn't know, but >>Former, >>Yeah, really well spoken guy. But you know, him and I kind of went back and forth and we came up with this kind of concept that we were gonna have to tech our way out of what's about to come. You can almost be certain recession is gonna come. But for companies like UiPath, I actually think there's a tremendous opportunity because the bottom line is companies are gonna be looking at their bottom line. A year ago it was all about growth a deal, like the Adobe Figma deal would've been, been lauded, people would've been excited. Now everybody's looking at going, how are they paying that price? Everybody's discounting the future growth. They're looking at the situation, say, what's gonna happen next? Well, bottom line is now they're looking at that. How profitable are we? Are you making money? Are you growing that bottom line? Are you creating earnings? We're >>Gonna come in >>Era, we're gonna come into an era where companies are gonna say, you know what? People are expensive. The inflationary cost of hiring is expensive. You know, what's less expensive? Investing in the cloud, investing in ai, investing in workflow and automation and things that actually enable businesses to expand, keep costs somewhat contained fixed costs, and scale their businesses and get themselves in a good position for when the economy turns to return to >>Grow. So since prior to the pandemic cloud containers, m l and RPA slash automation have been the big four that from a spending data standpoint have been above the line above all kind of the rest in terms of spending momentum up until last quarter, AI and RPA slash automation declined. So my question is, are those two areas discretionary or more discretionary than other technology investments you heard? >>Well, I, I think we're in a, a period where companies are, I won't say they've stopped spending, but you listened to Mark Benioff, you talked about the elongated sales cycle, right? I think companies right now are being very reflective and they're doing a lot of introspection. They're looking at their business and saying, We hired a lot of people. We hired really fast. Do we need to cut? Do we need to freeze? We've made investments in technology, are we getting a return on 'em? We all know that the analytics, whether it's you know, digital adoption platforms or just analytics in the business, say, What is all this money we've been spending doing for us and how productive are we? But I will tell you universally, the companies are looking at workflow automations that enable things. Whether that's onboarding customers, whether that's delivering experiences, whether that's, you know, full, you know, price to quote technologies, automate, automate, automate. By doing that, they're gonna bring down the cost, they're gonna control themselves as best as possible in a tough macro. And then when they come out of it, these processes are gonna be beneficiary in a, in a growth environment even more so, >>Andy UiPath rocketed to a leadership position, largely due to the, the product and the simplicity of the product relative to the competition. And then as you well know, they expanded into, you know, platform. So how do you see the competitive environment? A UI path is again focusing on that platform play Automation Anywhere couldn't get to public market. They had turnover at the go to market level. Chris Riley joined a lot of, lot of hope left Microsoft joined into the fray, obviously is having an impact that you're certainly seeing spending momentum around Microsoft. Then SAP service Now Salesforce, every software company the planet thinks they should get every dollar spent on software. You know, they, they see UI pass momentum and they say, Hey, we can, we can take some of that off the table. How do you see the competitive environment right now? >>So first of all, in in my mind, UI path is slightly better because of a couple of reasons. One, as you said, it's ease of use. >>They're able to customize it variable to what they want. So that's a real easy development advantage. And then the, when you develop the bots and equal, it takes on an average anywhere between two to maybe six weeks, generally speaking, in some industries regulated government might take more so that it's faster, quicker, easier than others in a sense. So people love using that. The second advantage of what they have in my mind is that not only they are available as a managed SA solution on, on cloud, on Azure Cloud, but also they have this version that you can install, maintain, manage any way you want, whether it's a public cloud or, or your own data center and so on so forth. That's not available with almost, not all of them have it, Few have it, but not all of the competitors have it. So they have an advantage there as well. Where it could become useful would be one of the areas that they haven't even expanded is the government. >>Government is the what, >>Sorry? The government. Yeah, related solutions, right? Defense, government, all of those areas when you go, which haven't even started for various reasons. For example, they're worried about laying off people, worried about cost, worried about automating things. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome. But once you overcome that, if you want to go there, nobody's going to use, or most of them will be very of using something on the cloud. So they have a solution for version variation of that. So they are set up to come to that next level. I mean, I don't know if you guys were at the keynote, the CEO talked about how their plans to go from 1 billion to 5 billion in ar. So they're set up to capture the market. But again, as you said, every big software company saw their momentum, they want to get into it, they want to compete with them. So >>Well, to get to 5 billion, they've gotta accelerate growth. I mean, if you do 20% cer over the next, you know, through the end of the decade, they don't quite get there. So they're gonna have to, you know, they lowered their forecast out of the high 20 or mid twenties to 18%. They're gonna have to accelerate that. And we've seen that before. We see it in cloud where cloud, you know, accelerates growth even though you got the lower large numbers. Go ahead Dave. >>Yeah, so Daniel, then how do we, how do we think of this market? How do we measure the TAM for total addressable market for automation? I mean, you know, what's that? What's that metric that shows how unautomated are we, how inefficient are we? Is there a, is there a 5% efficiency that can be gained? Is there a 40% efficiency that can be gained? Because if you're talking about, you know, how much much of the market can UI path capture, first of all, how big is the market? And then is UI path poised to take advantage of that compared to the actual purveyors of the software that people are interacting with? I'm interacting with an E R p, an ER P system that has built into it the ability to automate processes. Then why do I need 'EM UI path? So first, how do you evaluate TAM? Second, how do you evaluate whether UI Path is gonna have a chance in this market where RPAs built into the applications that we actually use? Yeah, >>I think that TAM is evolving, and I don't have it in front of me right now, but what I'll tell you about the TAM is there's sort of the legacy RPA tam and then there's what I would sort of evolve to call the IPA and workflow automation tam that is being addressed by many of these software companies that you asked in the competitive equation. In the, in the, in the question, what we're seeing is a world where companies are gonna say, if we can automate it, we will automate it. That's, it's actually non-negotiable. Now, the process in the ability to a arrive at automation at scale has long been a battle front within the nor every organization. We've been able to automate things for a long time. Why has it more been done? It's the same thing with analytics. There's been numerous studies in analytics that have basically shown companies that have been able to embrace, adopt, and implement analytics, have significantly better performances, better performances on revenue growth, better performances and operational cost management, better performances with customer experience. >>Guess what? Not everybody, every company can get to this. Now there's a couple of things behind this and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to close my answer out cause I'm getting a little long winded here. But the first thing is automation is a cultural challenge in most organizations. We've done endless research on companies digitally transforming and automating their business. And what we've found is largely the technology are somewhat comparable. Meaning, you know, I, I've heard what he is saying about some of the advantages of partnership with Microsoft, very compelling. But you know what, all these companies that have automation offerings, whether it's you know, through a Salesforce, Microsoft, whether it's a specialized rpa like an Automation Anywhere or a UI path, their solutions can be deployed and successful. The company's ability to take the investment, implement it successfully and get buy in across the organization tends to always be the hurdle. An old CIO stat, 50% of IT projects fail. That stat is still almost accurate today. It's not 50% of technology is bad, but those failures are because the culture doesn't get behind it. And automation's a tricky one because there's a lot of people that feel on the outside rather than the inside of an automation transformation. >>So, Andy, so how do you think about the, to Dave's question, the SAPs the service nows trying to, you know, at least take some red crumbs off the table. They, they're gonna, they're gonna create these automation stove pipes, but in Automation Anywhere or, or UI path is a horizontal play, are they not? And so how do you think about that progression? Well, so >>First of all, all of this other companies, when they, they, whether it's a build, acquire, what have you, these guys already have what, five, seven years on them. So it's gonna be difficult for them to catch up with the Center of Excellence knowledge on the use cases, what they got to catch up with them. That's gonna be a lot of catch up. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft Power Automate has been there for a while, right? They're supposedly doing well as well, but they still choose to partner with the UiPath as well to get them to the next level. So there's going to be competition coming from all areas, but it's, it's about, you know, highlights. >>So, so who is the competition? Is it Microsoft chipping away an individual productivity? Is it a service now? Who's got a platform play? Is it themselves just being able to execute >>All plus also, but I think the, the most, I wouldn't say competition, but it's more people are not aware of what areas need to be automated, right? For example, one of the things I was talking about with a couple of customers is, so they have a automation hub where you can put the, the process and and task that need to be automated and then you prioritize and start working on it. And, and almost all of them that I speak to, they keep saying that most of the process and task identification that they need to do for automation, it's manual right now. So, which means it's limited, you have to go and execute it. When people find out and tell you that's what need to be fixed, you try to go and fix that. But imagine if there is a way, I mean the have solutions they're showcasing now if it becomes popular, if you're able to identify tasks that are very inefficient or or process that's very inefficient, automatically score them up saying that, you know what, this is what is going to be ROI and you execute on it. That's going to be huge. So >>I think ts right, there's no shortage of, of a market. I would, I would agree with you Rob Sland this morning talked about the progression. He sort of compared it to e R P of the early days. I sort of have a love hate with E R P cuz of the complexity of the implementation and the, and the cost. However, first of all, a couple points and I love to get your thoughts for you. If you went back, I know 25 years, you, you wouldn't have been able to pick SAP out of a lineup and say that's gonna be the leader in E R P and they ended up, you know, doing really, really well. But the more interesting angle is if you could have figured out the customers that were implementing e r p in, in a really high quality fashion, those are the companies that really did well. You buy their stocks, they really took off cuz they were killing their other industry competitors. So, fast forward to automation. Will automation live up to its hype and your opinion, will it be as transformative and will the, the practitioners of automation see the same type of uplift in their markets, in their market caps, in their competitiveness as did sort of the early adopters and the excellent adopters of brp? What are your thoughts? Well, >>I think it's an interesting comparison. Maybe answer it slightly different way. I think the future is that automation is a non-negotiable in every enterprise organization. I think if you're a large organization, we have absolutely filled our, our organizations with waste too much overhead, too much expense, too much technical debt and automation is an answer. This is the way we want to interact, right? We want a chat bot that actually gives us good answers that can answer on a Tuesday at 11:00 PM at night when we want to know if the right dog food, you know, and I'm saying that, you know, that's what we want. That's the outcome we want. And businesses have to be driven by the outcome. Here's what I'm not sure about, Dave, is we have an era where over the last three to five years, a lot of products have become companies and a lot of 'EM products became companies ended up in public markets. >>And so the RPA space is one of those areas that got this explosive amount of growth. And you look at it and there's two ways. Is this horizontally a business rpa or is this going to be something that's gonna be a target of those Microsofts and those SAPs and say, Look, we need hyper automation to be deeply integrated at the E R P crm, hcm SCM level. We're gonna build by this or we're gonna build this. And you're already hearing it in the partnerships, but this is how I think the story ends. I I think either the companies like UiPath get much bigger, they get much more rounded in their, in their offerings. Or you're gonna have a large company like a Microsoft come in and say, you know what? Buy it rather >>Than build can they can, they can, can this company, maybe not so much here, but can a company like Automation Anywhere stay acquisition? Well, >>I use the, I use the Service now as an, as a parallel because they're a company that I thought would always end up inside of a bigger company and now you're like, I think they're too big. I think they've they've dropped >>That, that chart. Yeah, they're acquisition proof. I would agree. But these guys aren't yet Nora's automation. They work for >>A while and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes getting bit bought is good, but what I mean is it's gonna be core and these big companies know it cuz they're all talking >>About, but as independent analysts, we want to see independent companies. >>I wanna see the right thing. >>It just makes it fun. >>The right thing >>Customers. Yeah, but you know, okay, Oracle buy more customers, more >>Customers. >>I'm kidding. Yeah, I guess it's the right thing. It just makes it more fun when you have really good independent competitors that >>We >>Absolutely so, and, and spend way more on r and d than these big companies who spend a lot more on stock buyback. But I know you gotta go. Thanks so much for spending some time, making time for Cube Andy. Great to see you. Good to see as well. All right, we are wrapping up day one, Dave Blan and Dave Nicholson live. You can hear the action behind us, forward in five on the Cube, right back.

>>it's mhm Okay, we're here in the cube unpacking the HPD Green Lake announcements, Daniel neumann series Principal analyst and founder of your um research Damn. You're good to see you again, >>Dave always going to jump jump on with you. It's good to have a minute sit down. So >>what's your favorite announcement from from Green Lake? What do you, what do you make of what they announced today? >>Well, I love the opportunity for the company to position itself up against a growth monster like snowflake. I mean looking at the ability to handle the breath of the data at scale and offer a data service that can compete in that space. That's exactly the kind of narrative that I think the markets, the outside world is going to want to hear from HP is how you're not just competing with your traditional, the doubles, the Ciscos, the IBM, you're going after the, the mega growth cloud players and data services. And for me that's really attractive because I've been really on top of hb saying, hey, you're doing a lot of the right things, but people have to feel and see the growth. >>To me this is a major move toward the tam expansion strategy. It's kind of the job of every Ceo right, is to expand the tam. And I'm interested to see how HP e plays this and communicates this because, you know, traditionally it's a hardware company, uh moving into data management Data services. That's an enormous market. We'll talk about how important data is but the data management is just huge. And to do it in a cloud like fashion, how do you see that as potentially expanding the total available market for HP? >>Well, first, let's just almost walking back a second, Dave HP is a cloud player. Okay. And that's the story that it is trying to get out there. It is not a hardware player that's tinkering in software. Hp has done software, this isn't its first go. But if you want to be a cloud player, you look at the big hyper scale as you look at the AWS, as you look at the google, you look at as the google built, not just on hardware, it's built that big C and I've had this conversation before, all the things that make up the cloud, it's the hardware, it's the software, it's the services, the platform, you got to put all these things together. And if HP wants to be a public cloud experience, taking advantage of where we're moving with hybrid and offering it private, it has to have that same subset of services. Look at the investment, whether it's been a W S or google or Azure in data services, HP has to be in this space. So, seeing this come to fruition, in my opinion, is directionally the right path, getting it to be well received, winning the right customers and showing the growth from these investments is going to be the next important phase. >>Do you see that as a service model as being more margin friendly for HP and and if so why? Well, I think >>universally we found there's two major improvements that moving to the as a service. One is, it does over time create expanded operational margin. It's just economies of scale. You can utilize every resource more efficiently. Of course there are Capex expenses, You've seen the amount that hyper skeletons have had to spend to expand their their footprints globally. So there is some Capex upfront but that also on the back end creates the depreciation and different bottom line profit creators. At the same time though, as a service is huge for the multiples and evaluation, which by the way is one of the things that has been a real in focus point for H. P. E. Is how does it up that that number, You know, you look at the snowflakes, not even profitable but getting huge. You know, um, you know, huge multiples on revenue. And then you see even the other hyper scale is all getting bigger plays on revenue and on E. P. S. Most of it has to do with the fact that recurring revenue is beloved by investors, but it's also really sticky and creates a ton of stability within the company for the culture of the business to say, hey, we have customers, they're going to stay with us. They're not going anywhere. They're subscribed to our services. They're buying into what we're doing and by the way, net revenue expansion as you get them sticky, you layer in new services. We've seen how this has worked across the board with public cloud, with software with SAS, can HP do it as well? And of course it's been something they're doing, but it's something we need to watch really closely and I think it's an opportunity that the company needs to lean into it. And I think they will, >>you mentioned snowflake a couple times, there's a there's a, there's a discussion in the industry, it was sort of prompted by martin casado and sarah wang about repatriation and particularly as it relates to software, saas companies uh that the the the cloud bill is so high at some point, they're giving away margin, so they're going to have to come back on prem, I'm not sure that to date that has applied to the general audience of customer, although there's a lot of debate as well between the expensive cloud, obviously, you know, egress charges. So it's hard sometimes to squint through that when you think about HP E bringing Green Lake to market at scale bringing repeatable processes, driving automation, etcetera. How do you think that that cloud repatriation argument, which frankly, I haven't seen a huge cloud repatriation in in the macro, but how do you think that will play out over time, Do you feel like the on prem play can be as cost effective or more cost effective or maybe you feel like it is already today? >>Well, I also listen to the injuries and Horowitz uh, repatriation narrative as well. I think there are economies of scale with cloud that companies have to look at closely. But I also think that has a lot to do with why hybrid has been sort of the story of the day. That's why hyper sailors are going on prem or, and that's why I'm primes are moving to the cloud is because it's always going to be some, you know, some group of different placements of workloads to ultimately get to that optimized result. And so, you know, when you look at, you know, sort of what you asked in my opinion, you know, ultimately it's all about the efficiency of your organization trying to accomplish what your business is. And will there be some repatriation of workloads possibly. But there will be a very important hybrid mix. And I think we're gonna continue to see that trend and I think that's exactly where everyone's going in. Hp is going as well. >>All right, then we've got to leave it there. Thanks so much for your insights, appreciate it. We're gonna definitely have you back you and I are going to do some cool stuff together. So we'll talk next time. Thanks all right, and thank you for watching, this is Dave Volonte for the keeps coverage of H P E Green Lakes announcement, keep it right there. Mm

>> from New York City. It's the cue covering automation anywhere. Imagine, brought to you by automation anywhere you >> were in midtown Manhattan, at the automation anywhere. Imagine Crawford's twenty nineteen really psyched to be here. Fifteen hundred people talking about our P A. But really, the Rp story is much more than just robotic process. Automation is really a new way to work, which we hear about all over the place and really reimagining what this technology can do. We're excited to have our next guest. She's Shelly Kramer, an analyst and partner for feature research. Shelley, great to see you. >> Great to see you, too. And you got it. >> I got a right. >> You got it. >> Well, you're a very busy lady. Got all kinds of stuff going on, which is what we like. So first off, just kind of Have you been here before? General impressions of the show. >> This is my first, Uh, this is my first, uh, automation anywhere event. And so it's exciting. I write a lot about our PPA and about the future of work and work force transformation. So it's great to be >> here. Yeah. And you just wrote not a super uplifting article linked in about, you know, employee dissatisfaction and some of the issues with employee retention. We talked before. We turn the cameras on about things like calling him human resource is, you know, and human capital there, they're people. And I thought my here really touched on it. Well, in the keynote today that this is not a rip and replace technology for people. This is a tool to help us do our jobs better, just like our laptops and our mobile phones and our application. So are you excited about the opportunity? See, it is this transformative. >> I do see this transformative. And I think that before you talk about what we talked about, the technology that we have to talk about people and Simpson and I'm pulling this out of my memory banks. So on average, about eighty two percent of employees within any organization are disengaged. OK, eighty two percent. >> So the ping pong tables and the tables are not doing it. >> And so when you think about it and engaged workforce are people who wake up in the morning or whatever it is, they go to work and who are excited about what they're doing excited about their company. They're working for love, the culture that they're working within. I love all those things that they're doing. And so when you realize that eighty two percent of people are disengaged, that's problematic. Right then, you're talking about the toughest talent acquisition markets that we've had in a really long time. So we're all fighting for top talent, not just top tech talent but any kind of talent. And so focusing on how we can make the workforce better and create better cultures and put systems and processes in place that can make people do their jobs more efficiently, more productively and actually like them. That's to me. That's the beginning of where we get to this technology piece and what our P a Khun Dio How? Aye aye plays a role in there and how you can. How employees can partner you think of technology as a partner, as opposed to worrying about technology replacing them. So I think it's an exciting time in the workforce, and when you think about it that way, it makes a lot of sense. >> Do you think the difference in kind of the expectations that people have when they Goto work to be engaged as a function of the millennials who are looking for something that's more mission lead. Is it a function of just the competition? It's so robust that before people could get away with having, you know, maybe a less compelling work experience. What do you think is driving? The changer hasn't changed, and maybe now we're just paying more attention to it. >> You know, I think it's changed in a little bit. I think that you and I are old enough that when we were coming of age and we were working our way up the corporate ladder, you know, you kind of sold a little bit of your soul to the company store. No matter. I mean, I gripped in advertising, right, and, you know, I work crazy hours, and I loved it. But I never questioned that there were dues that I had to pay, and that's what you think. And I think that people don't necessarily expect the world on a platter. But I think especially the more skilled you are, whether it's a knowledge of tack or whatever it is in today's market, I think that ueno and again it could be someone my age. It could be someone that's twenty five. It could be someone that's forty. I can find something else. So minute, this isn't doing it for me, right? I can go find something else right now. That said, there are also people who are punching a clock. You know what I'm saying? And I don't mean ship workers. Necessarily. As much as I need to pay the mortgage, I need to get my kid's bed. You know, I don't love this job. Maybe it's a path to something. One of my daughters works for an insurance company. She has a very non glamorous job. She doesn't love it, but she knows she has to do it for X amount of time before she can be considered for this different promotion. And she is watching the clock on literally. I'm getting to that milestone and asking for her promotion. And if that doesn't happen, she'LL leave. So so I think that when you can, people don't feel like they need to be stuck, right? So I think that way. As a CZ leaders and his executives in the workforce, I think you always have to be mindful about what the work environment that you're creating is and focus on. How do we keep how do we get people? And how do we build the value props that we used when we entice them to say yes to our offer? How do we get them to stay? >> S o many things there, But But, you know, what things you just mentioned is is I don't think they accept it like we did. Maybe when we're coming up, which is, you know, you hire somebody and you hire them for the act tributes that they're bringing in the organization than it used to be. Then you give him the employee rulebook and you basically squash, you know, kind of all the individual creativity and ingenuity and enthusiasm, which is why you hired him in the first place. And we don't see that as much anymore. But at the same token, you know, not everyone's worried about robots taken their job at the same time. There's so many unfulfilled Rex out there. And as you said, it's the most competitive labor market out there. How our employers supposed to kind of square that circle because they need to bring the automation they want to keep the people happy. It's a hyper competitive market, and they need mission. But, you know, we gotta pay the bills and get the products out. >> I think that So I think that we can never forget that people that work for our companies need to pay the bills too. Right? So when you can give them something that they could be excited about, Tio dio that helps. Right? But it just kind of like I'm thinking back Teo, uh, presentation and I can't remember his name. But the V p of product did a presentation about today on a loan mortgage loan application. Okay, that has to be like one of the most boring things, right? If you're in that mortgage loan processing, do this. Do this. Do this villain this spreadsheet love about, By the way, I hate creating spreadsheets. I just want to look at a finished one. But anyway, it was so cool to just look at this, and I shot a video of it, shared it on Twitter. If you want to see what I'm talking about, but which is so cool that you can do this and do this and do this and you know you create this process. And in no time the technology has done all the work and all the calculations, and you've got a recommendation approved, not approved. And so if you're in the mortgage loan business, way to think about that leased, the way that I think to think about it is, doesn't mean that your job is going to go away. It's just like my daughter doing that not very exciting job that she's doing. If automation could fuel some of the mundane, repeatable, banal tasks so that she could focus on the other part of the equation where it's more interesting and more exciting, I think then that's really the value equation there. But I think as I think, what businesses have todo is be transparent and very honest with their employees and tell them, you know, this is our This is why we're doing this. This is what our means, and this is how it's going to add value. It we're not doing this to necessarily replace humans. This is so that we can make this work better, efficient more, you know. And I think that you know, I'll step back and say for a personal example. We went through a process last year where we evaluated all of our business processes, and we looked at how much time our employees were spending sweet track time doing certain tasks. And then we were realizing, you know, the value there. We were actually paying too much in terms of the time, investment or tasks that didn't make sense to. Then we set out integrating automation into our processes, and it was it was a big project, right? And people were kind of worried, you know, and they were kind of worried about it. But one of the things that way told them early on with, like, This is not so that we don't have work for you. This is so that we can make what it is you're doing more efficient and you could do things you like better, >> right? Right. >> And so and that has happened and way didn't lose any of our team. And a lot of those task that they were doing are now automated. They're doing stuff that they like more. So I think that I think that's really the challenge for businesses. Two is the messaging right and then involving your teams in the process, appointment of any kind of >> technology. I think it's just the soul crushing. You know, expression is so it's so valid for for these types of activities. And I think again may hear had a great stat. Four percent of US jobs required a medium level of creativity, which you know people want to get out from under that. But if we can define it as a tool and is a thinking like personal digital assistants, my body will. That used to be just my palm three was my p d. A. Right wow how no. One No one was threatened by the Palm taking the job away. So I think you know, you're right. If we can put it in the context of it's just another tool that's just gonna help you get your job done. That's a very different way to frame the problem versus kind of just ripping replace narrative, which we hear kind of over and over again. >> Well, and I think it also goes beyond Jeff. It's goes beyond, and I think that employees at every level have to understand this. It goes beyond just helping you get your job done. It really is about, you know, cos that survived today and tomorrow are the companies who transformed. And, you know, we talk a lot about digital transformation. And you know, I'm out there on the front lines all day, every day, and I can promise you there are many, many companies who are far from really understanding and embracing this and understanding what it takes from a technology standpoint and the value, that data ad and how to use that data and and the impact that that has on customer experience and all that sort of thing. So So I think it's really is about much more than this will make your jobs suck less >> right, right, Right. >> I think it's about this is how our company stay successful. This is how you helped make your job in the role you play within our organization, what you want it to be, right? And I think that you could probably telling, you know, I've been marketing because I'm always thinking about you know how I know how you spend something and I don't mean in a spin like a PR way, but I think we all have to step back and think about it in terms of the whole equation. And there are a whole lot of companies that don't exist anymore, right? You know whether you're talking about the financial services sector and you know and every business everywhere is being disrupted. I told this story. I was I was talking with me here earlier this morning and I was telling him a story about how my husband, I just bought a new car and we expected to get a loan for that car from our community. It's not a community from our our local bank local. Our local bank has been recently purchased by a bigger bank in the last couple of years, but we run all of our corporate money. I mean, everything that we've ever done is here in this way. You know your spell. ITA loan application. No problem. Give us an interest rate. No problem. But they made every part. My husband I vote travel a lot for business, and they're every part of the process required us to be somewhere together to have an official closing. To do this, to do that and it was just like way could never purchased this car because they were making it so difficult for us. So we enter death talking with the car dealer who said I'm not God. We can fix you up, financed it through their banking partner, which is a huge national bank approved in five minutes. Loan documents in five minutes. Hey, come on out. You sign this tomorrow? He consigned this when he gets, you know. And when I talked to my bank after the transaction, they said, Here's the deal. I wanted to do business with you. But when you make it difficult for a customer to give you their money, they're not gonna hesitate to give somebody else there money, Right? So So I think the banking industry is one example of the these processes that air so cumbersome that in some ways can be automated, but it just it doesn't make sense. And customers today you and I are impatient people as our people younger than we are way. No, there has to be a better way. An analogy could give us a better >> win it right, And, you know, they could use different data sets. And I mean, I've bought himself recently, and you just push the button on the phone and it takes a minute. The wheel spins and then your approved right and you're done if you're done, and it's it's a completely different experience. But the part about the digital transformation I want to follow because it came up today where a lot of times people are the integration point between these systems very similar to the example you just used and you can't digitally transform. If all these automated systems ultimately have the bottleneck through some person to take this piece Veda and stick it over there, right? So it's it's absolutely critical to get those people out of the way, right? So as you look forward twenty nineteen, what are some of the big trends beyond our P A and kind of personal digital assistants not called palm, uh, that you're seeing and that you're excited about? >> Well, I think that, you know, it's hard not to be excited about our p A. Just simply because of, you know, it's predicted to be a one point nine billion this year and to almost double by twenty twenty one. I mean, it makes sense that companies like automation anywhere doubling down on that right. It also makes sense that gigantic companies like IBM and Jo Lloyd and you know why. I mean, you >> know, hearing for >> all here, right? There's a reason for that, right? Because IBM customers want this and Microsoft's customers want this. So So I think that in general I think that technology is fueling our world. Our personal lives are business world, and I think that probably one of the biggest things that I pay attention to to that we pay attention to is that technology alone isn't the answer. It's the partnership of human beings and their skill sets and capabilities and data and automation and artificial intelligence and all those things. So I think that I think that it's an incredibly exciting time. It's kind of like, you know, you you go back to the video that we saw this morning in the bit about the Internet, and I don't know if you remember this. I don't know, probably. I don't know how much older I am than you, but, you know, I remember that Internet machine and wow, this is like I could send an email, you know? And then when you think about right how and those comments, You know that Matt Lauer and Katie Couric we're making it like that weren't down comments we didn't didn't know, right? Know the impact Internet could have would have, you know. And so I think the same is true of this kind of technology today. This this next generation of technology. So there's not just one thing I'm interested. I'm interested in Element. >> Gotta keep learning right because way have a hard time with were very linear and everything is growing exponentially. So you got a got to be willing. Teo learned the next thing because it's right around the corner, >> and I think that's so key. That's that's a great rap. I think that people who are happiest today are people who actually love change and who love learning. And I would say I would posit that most that those air not inherently things that people trades that people possess. I'm lucky because I do. You see what I'm saying? I think it's >> an interesting question, whether that's inherent. If there's just people that liked the learning, our curious all the time, and that and then they got to stick in the muds and Candice stick in the muds, change your attitude and become learners again. >> Maybe they won't. I mean, you know, I think that they're I do think that there are are people who are wired to like change and two are curious and who loved learning. And I think there are a whole bunch of people who are not. And I would I truly believe that for success in today's world and moving forward for young people and not so young people, you better get there if that's not your deal, because I don't think that I did it. And I have stumbled across conversations of people having like, you know, that's not gonna happen, you know? So I don't have to worry about it because I'm gonna be outta here by then. Or and you know what? There are a whole bunch of people that have that mindset, and that's a okay, but especially for young people making their way, >> they okay mindset. But it's not the fact that that's the problem. It's it's happening now. I mean, the future is here, and it's happening at a faster pace. Well, Shelley, we could go on and on and on, but we're going to leave it there. And I appreciate you taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Absolutely. My pleasure. >> All right. She Shelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Where? Automation anywhere. Imagine in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Once a staid and boring business dominated by IBM, Oracle, and at the time newcomer Microsoft, along with a handful of wannabes, the database business has exploded in the past decade and has become a staple of financial excellence, customer experience, analytic advantage, competitive strategy, growth initiatives, visualizations, not to mention compliance, security, privacy and dozens of other important use cases and initiatives. And on the vendor's side of the house, we've seen the rapid ascendancy of cloud databases. Most notably from Snowflake, whose massive raises leading up to its IPO in late 2020 sparked a spate of interest and VC investment in the separation of compute and storage and all that elastic resource stuff in the cloud. The company joined AWS, Azure and Google to popularize cloud databases, which have become a linchpin of competitive strategies for technology suppliers. And if I get you to put your data in my database and in my cloud, and I keep innovating, I'm going to build a moat and achieve a hugely attractive lifetime customer value in a really amazing marginal economics dynamic that is going to fund my future. And I'll be able to sell other adjacent services, not just compute and storage, but machine learning and inference and training and all kinds of stuff, dozens of lucrative cloud offerings. Meanwhile, the database leader, Oracle has invested massive amounts of money to maintain its lead. It's building on its position as the king of mission critical workloads and making typical Oracle like claims against the competition. Most were recently just yesterday with another announcement around MySQL HeatWave. An extension of MySQL that is compatible with on-premises MySQLs and is setting new standards in price performance. We're seeing a dramatic divergence in strategies across the database spectrum. On the far left, we see Amazon with more than a dozen database offerings each with its own API and primitives. AWS is taking a right tool for the right job approach, often building on open source platforms and creating services that it offers to customers to solve very specific problems for developers. And on the other side of the line, we see Oracle, which is taking the Swiss Army Knife approach, converging database functionality, enabling analytic and transactional workloads to run in the same data store, eliminating the need to ETL, at the same time adding capabilities into its platform like automation and machine learning. Welcome to this database Power Panel. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm so excited to bring together some of the most respected industry analyst in the community. Today we're going to assess what's happening in the market. We're going to dig into the competitive landscape and explore the future of database and database platforms and decode what it means to customers. Let me take a moment to welcome our guest analyst today. Matt Kimball is a vice president and principal analysts at Moor Insights and Strategy, Matt. He knows products, he knows industry, he's got real world IT expertise, and he's got all the angles 25 plus years of experience in all kinds of great background. Matt, welcome. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Holgar Mueller, friend of theCUBE, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research in depth knowledge on applications, application development, knows developers. He's worked at SAP and Oracle. And then Bob Evans is Chief Content Officer and co-founder of the Acceleration Economy, founder and principle of Cloud Wars. Covers all kinds of industry topics and great insights. He's got awesome videos, these three minute hits. If you haven't seen 'em, checking them out, knows cloud companies, his Cloud Wars minutes are fantastic. And then of course, Marc Staimer is the founder of Dragon Slayer Research. A frequent contributor and guest analyst at Wikibon. He's got a wide ranging knowledge across IT products, knows technology really well, can go deep. And then of course, Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Director Research Director at Futurum Research, great all around product trends knowledge. Can take, you know, technical dives and really understands competitive angles, knows Redshift, Snowflake, and many others. Gents, thanks so much for taking the time to join us in theCube today. It's great to have you on, good to see you. >> Good to be here, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, let's start with an around the horn and briefly, if each of you would describe, you know, anything I missed in your areas of expertise and then you answer the following question, how would you describe the state of the database, state of platform market today? Matt Kimball, please start. >> Oh, I hate going first, but that it's okay. How would I describe the world today? I would just in one sentence, I would say, I'm glad I'm not in IT anymore, right? So, you know, it is a complex and dangerous world out there. And I don't envy IT folks I'd have to support, you know, these modernization and transformation efforts that are going on within the enterprise. It used to be, you mentioned it, Dave, you would argue about IBM versus Oracle versus this newcomer in the database space called Microsoft. And don't forget Sybase back in the day, but you know, now it's not just, which SQL vendor am I going to go with? It's all of these different, divergent data types that have to be taken, they have to be merged together, synthesized. And somehow I have to do that cleanly and use this to drive strategic decisions for my business. That is not easy. So, you know, you have to look at it from the perspective of the business user. It's great for them because as a DevOps person, or as an analyst, I have so much flexibility and I have this thing called the cloud now where I can go get services immediately. As an IT person or a DBA, I am calling up prevention hotlines 24 hours a day, because I don't know how I'm going to be able to support the business. And as an Oracle or as an Oracle or a Microsoft or some of the cloud providers and cloud databases out there, I'm licking my chops because, you know, my market is expanding and expanding every day. >> Great, thank you for that, Matt. Holgar, how do you see the world these days? You always have a good perspective on things, share with us. >> Well, I think it's the best time to be in IT, I'm not sure what Matt is talking about. (laughing) It's easier than ever, right? The direction is going to cloud. Kubernetes has won, Google has the best AI for now, right? So things are easier than ever before. You made commitments for five plus years on hardware, networking and so on premise, and I got gray hair about worrying it was the wrong decision. No, just kidding. But you kind of both sides, just to be controversial, make it interesting, right. So yeah, no, I think the interesting thing specifically with databases, right? We have this big suite versus best of breed, right? Obviously innovation, like you mentioned with Snowflake and others happening in the cloud, the cloud vendors server, where to save of their databases. And then we have one of the few survivors of the old guard as Evans likes to call them is Oracle who's doing well, both their traditional database. And now, which is really interesting, remarkable from that because Oracle it was always the power of one, have one database, add more to it, make it what I call the universal database. And now this new HeatWave offering is coming and MySQL open source side. So they're getting the second (indistinct) right? So it's interesting that older players, traditional players who still are in the market are diversifying their offerings. Something we don't see so much from the traditional tools from Oracle on the Microsoft side or the IBM side these days. >> Great, thank you Holgar. Bob Evans, you've covered this business for a while. You've worked at, you know, a number of different outlets and companies and you cover the competition, how do you see things? >> Dave, you know, the other angle to look at this from is from the customer side, right? You got now CEOs who are any sort of business across all sorts of industries, and they understand that their future success is going to be dependent on their ability to become a digital company, to understand data, to use it the right way. So as you outline Dave, I think in your intro there, it is a fantastic time to be in the database business. And I think we've got a lot of new buyers and influencers coming in. They don't know all this history about IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and you know, whoever else. So I think they're going to take a long, hard look, Dave, at some of these results and who is able to help these companies not serve up the best technology, but who's going to be able to help their business move into the digital future. So it's a fascinating time now from every perspective. >> Great points, Bob. I mean, digital transformation has gone from buzzword to imperative. Mr. Staimer, how do you see things? >> I see things a little bit differently than my peers here in that I see the database market being segmented. There's all the different kinds of databases that people are looking at for different kinds of data, and then there is databases in the cloud. And so database as cloud service, I view very differently than databases because the traditional way of implementing a database is changing and it's changing rapidly. So one of the premises that you stated earlier on was that you viewed Oracle as a database company. I don't view Oracle as a database company anymore. I view Oracle as a cloud company that happens to have a significant expertise and specialty in databases, and they still sell database software in the traditional way, but ultimately they're a cloud company. So database cloud services from my point of view is a very distinct market from databases. >> Okay, well, you gave us some good meat on the bone to talk about that. Last but not least-- >> Dave did Marc, just say Oracle's a cloud company? >> Yeah. (laughing) Take away the database, it would be interesting to have that discussion, but let's let Ron jump in here. Ron, give us your take. >> That's a great segue. I think it's truly the era of the cloud database, that's something that's rising. And the key trends that come with it include for example, elastic scaling. That is the ability to scale on demand, to right size workloads according to customer requirements. And also I think it's going to increase the prioritization for high availability. That is the player who can provide the highest availability is going to have, I think, a great deal of success in this emerging market. And also I anticipate that there will be more consolidation across platforms in order to enable cost savings for customers, and that's something that's always going to be important. And I think we'll see more of that over the horizon. And then finally security, security will be more important than ever. We've seen a spike (indistinct), we certainly have seen geopolitical originated cybersecurity concerns. And as a result, I see database security becoming all the more important. >> Great, thank you. Okay, let me share some data with you guys. I'm going to throw this at you and see what you think. We have this awesome data partner called Enterprise Technology Research, ETR. They do these quarterly surveys and each period with dozens of industry segments, they track clients spending, customer spending. And this is the database, data warehouse sector okay so it's taxonomy, so it's not perfect, but it's a big kind of chunk. They essentially ask customers within a category and buy a specific vendor, you're spending more or less on the platform? And then they subtract the lesses from the mores and they derive a metric called net score. It's like NPS, it's a measure of spending velocity. It's more complicated and granular than that, but that's the basis and that's the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is what they call market share, it's not like IDC market share, it's just pervasiveness in the data set. And so there are a couple of things that stand out here and that we can use as reference point. The first is the momentum of Snowflake. They've been off the charts for many, many, for over two years now, anything above that dotted red line, that 40%, is considered by ETR to be highly elevated and Snowflake's even way above that. And I think it's probably not sustainable. We're going to see in the next April survey, next month from those guys, when it comes out. And then you see AWS and Microsoft, they're really pervasive on the horizontal axis and highly elevated, Google falls behind them. And then you got a number of well funded players. You got Cockroach Labs, Mongo, Redis, MariaDB, which of course is a fork on MySQL started almost as protest at Oracle when they acquired Sun and they got MySQL and you can see the number of others. Now Oracle who's the leading database player, despite what Marc Staimer says, we know, (laughs) and they're a cloud player (laughing) who happens to be a leading database player. They dominate in the mission critical space, we know that they're the king of that sector, but you can see here that they're kind of legacy, right? They've been around a long time, they get a big install base. So they don't have the spending momentum on the vertical axis. Now remember this is, just really this doesn't capture spending levels, so that understates Oracle but nonetheless. So it's not a complete picture like SAP for instance is not in here, no Hana. I think people are actually buying it, but it doesn't show up here, (laughs) but it does give an indication of momentum and presence. So Bob Evans, I'm going to start with you. You've commented on many of these companies, you know, what does this data tell you? >> Yeah, you know, Dave, I think all these compilations of things like that are interesting, and that folks at ETR do some good work, but I think as you said, it's a snapshot sort of a two-dimensional thing of a rapidly changing, three dimensional world. You know, the incidents at which some of these companies are mentioned versus the volume that happens. I think it's, you know, with Oracle and I'm not going to declare my religious affiliation, either as cloud company or database company, you know, they're all of those things and more, and I think some of our old language of how we classify companies is just not relevant anymore. But I want to ask too something in here, the autonomous database from Oracle, nobody else has done that. So either Oracle is crazy, they've tried out a technology that nobody other than them is interested in, or they're onto something that nobody else can match. So to me, Dave, within Oracle, trying to identify how they're doing there, I would watch autonomous database growth too, because right, it's either going to be a big plan and it breaks through, or it's going to be caught behind. And the Snowflake phenomenon as you mentioned, that is a rare, rare bird who comes up and can grow 100% at a billion dollar revenue level like that. So now they've had a chance to come in, scare the crap out of everybody, rock the market with something totally new, the data cloud. Will the bigger companies be able to catch up and offer a compelling alternative, or is Snowflake going to continue to be this outlier. It's a fascinating time. >> Really, interesting points there. Holgar, I want to ask you, I mean, I've talked to certainly I'm sure you guys have too, the founders of Snowflake that came out of Oracle and they actually, they don't apologize. They say, "Hey, we not going to do all that complicated stuff that Oracle does, we were trying to keep it real simple." But at the same time, you know, they don't do sophisticated workload management. They don't do complex joints. They're kind of relying on the ecosystems. So when you look at the data like this and the various momentums, and we talked about the diverging strategies, what does this say to you? >> Well, it is a great point. And I think Snowflake is an example how the cloud can turbo charge a well understood concept in this case, the data warehouse, right? You move that and you find steroids and you see like for some players who've been big in data warehouse, like Sentara Data, as an example, here in San Diego, what could have been for them right in that part. The interesting thing, the problem though is the cloud hides a lot of complexity too, which you can scale really well as you attract lots of customers to go there. And you don't have to build things like what Bob said, right? One of the fascinating things, right, nobody's answering Oracle on the autonomous database. I don't think is that they cannot, they just have different priorities or the database is not such a priority. I would dare to say that it's for IBM and Microsoft right now at the moment. And the cloud vendors, you just hide that right through scripts and through scale because you support thousands of customers and you can deal with a little more complexity, right? It's not against them. Whereas if you have to run it yourself, very different story, right? You want to have the autonomous parts, you want to have the powerful tools to do things. >> Thank you. And so Matt, I want to go to you, you've set up front, you know, it's just complicated if you're in IT, it's a complicated situation and you've been on the customer side. And if you're a buyer, it's obviously, it's like Holgar said, "Cloud's supposed to make this stuff easier, but the simpler it gets the more complicated gets." So where do you place your bets? Or I guess more importantly, how do you decide where to place your bets? >> Yeah, it's a good question. And to what Bob and Holgar said, you know, the around autonomous database, I think, you know, part of, as I, you know, play kind of armchair psychologist, if you will, corporate psychologists, I look at what Oracle is doing and, you know, databases where they've made their mark and it's kind of, that's their strong position, right? So it makes sense if you're making an entry into this cloud and you really want to kind of build momentum, you go with what you're good at, right? So that's kind of the strength of Oracle. Let's put a lot of focus on that. They do a lot more than database, don't get me wrong, but you know, I'm going to short my strength and then kind of pivot from there. With regards to, you know, what IT looks at and what I would look at you know as an IT director or somebody who is, you know, trying to consume services from these different cloud providers. First and foremost, I go with what I know, right? Let's not forget IT is a conservative group. And when we look at, you know, all the different permutations of database types out there, SQL, NoSQL, all the different types of NoSQL, those are largely being deployed by business users that are looking for agility or businesses that are looking for agility. You know, the reason why MongoDB is so popular is because of DevOps, right? It's a great platform to develop on and that's where it kind of gained its traction. But as an IT person, I want to go with what I know, where my muscle memory is, and that's my first position. And so as I evaluate different cloud service providers and cloud databases, I look for, you know, what I know and what I've invested in and where my muscle memory is. Is there enough there and do I have enough belief that that company or that service is going to be able to take me to, you know, where I see my organization in five years from a data management perspective, from a business perspective, are they going to be there? And if they are, then I'm a little bit more willing to make that investment, but it is, you know, if I'm kind of going in this blind or if I'm cloud native, you know, that's where the Snowflakes of the world become very attractive to me. >> Thank you. So Marc, I asked Andy Jackson in theCube one time, you have all these, you know, data stores and different APIs and primitives and you know, very granular, what's the strategy there? And he said, "Hey, that allows us as the market changes, it allows us to be more flexible. If we start building abstractions layers, it's harder for us." I think also it was not a good time to market advantage, but let me ask you, I described earlier on that spectrum from AWS to Oracle. We just saw yesterday, Oracle announced, I think the third major enhancement in like 15 months to MySQL HeatWave, what do you make of that announcement? How do you think it impacts the competitive landscape, particularly as it relates to, you know, converging transaction and analytics, eliminating ELT, I know you have some thoughts on this. >> So let me back up for a second and defend my cloud statement about Oracle for a moment. (laughing) AWS did a great job in developing the cloud market in general and everything in the cloud market. I mean, I give them lots of kudos on that. And a lot of what they did is they took open source software and they rent it to people who use their cloud. So I give 'em lots of credit, they dominate the market. Oracle was late to the cloud market. In fact, they actually poo-pooed it initially, if you look at some of Larry Ellison's statements, they said, "Oh, it's never going to take off." And then they did 180 turn, and they said, "Oh, we're going to embrace the cloud." And they really have, but when you're late to a market, you've got to be compelling. And this ties into the announcement yesterday, but let's deal with this compelling. To be compelling from a user point of view, you got to be twice as fast, offer twice as much functionality, at half the cost. That's generally what compelling is that you're going to capture market share from the leaders who established the market. It's very difficult to capture market share in a new market for yourself. And you're right. I mean, Bob was correct on this and Holgar and Matt in which you look at Oracle, and they did a great job of leveraging their database to move into this market, give 'em lots of kudos for that too. But yesterday they announced, as you said, the third innovation release and the pace is just amazing of what they're doing on these releases on HeatWave that ties together initially MySQL with an integrated builtin analytics engine, so a data warehouse built in. And then they added automation with autopilot, and now they've added machine learning to it, and it's all in the same service. It's not something you can buy and put on your premise unless you buy their cloud customers stuff. But generally it's a cloud offering, so it's compellingly better as far as the integration. You don't buy multiple services, you buy one and it's lower cost than any of the other services, but more importantly, it's faster, which again, give 'em credit for, they have more integration of a product. They can tie things together in a way that nobody else does. There's no additional services, ETL services like Glue and AWS. So from that perspective, they're getting better performance, fewer services, lower cost. Hmm, they're aiming at the compelling side again. So from a customer point of view it's compelling. Matt, you wanted to say something there. >> Yeah, I want to kind of, on what you just said there Marc, and this is something I've found really interesting, you know. The traditional way that you look at software and, you know, purchasing software and IT is, you look at either best of breed solutions and you have to work on the backend to integrate them all and make them all work well. And generally, you know, the big hit against the, you know, we have one integrated offering is that, you lose capability or you lose depth of features, right. And to what you were saying, you know, that's the thing I found interesting about what Oracle is doing is they're building in depth as they kind of, you know, build that service. It's not like you're losing a lot of capabilities, because you're going to one integrated service versus having to use A versus B versus C, and I love that idea. >> You're right. Yeah, not only you're not losing, but you're gaining functionality that you can't get by integrating a lot of these. I mean, I can take Snowflake and integrate it in with machine learning, but I also have to integrate in with a transactional database. So I've got to have connectors between all of this, which means I'm adding time. And what it comes down to at the end of the day is expertise, effort, time, and cost. And so what I see the difference from the Oracle announcements is they're aiming at reducing all of that by increasing performance as well. Correct me if I'm wrong on that but that's what I saw at the announcement yesterday. >> You know, Marc, one thing though Marc, it's funny you say that because I started out saying, you know, I'm glad I'm not 19 anymore. And the reason is because of exactly what you said, it's almost like there's a pseudo level of witchcraft that's required to support the modern data environment right in the enterprise. And I need simpler faster, better. That's what I need, you know, I am no longer wearing pocket protectors. I have turned from, you know, break, fix kind of person, to you know, business consultant. And I need that point and click simplicity, but I can't sacrifice, you know, a depth of features of functionality on the backend as I play that consultancy role. >> So, Ron, I want to bring in Ron, you know, it's funny. So Matt, you mentioned Mongo, I often and say, if Oracle mentions you, you're on the map. We saw them yesterday Ron, (laughing) they hammered RedShifts auto ML, they took swipes at Snowflake, a little bit of BigQuery. What were your thoughts on that? Do you agree with what these guys are saying in terms of HeatWaves capabilities? >> Yes, Dave, I think that's an excellent question. And fundamentally I do agree. And the question is why, and I think it's important to know that all of the Oracle data is backed by the fact that they're using benchmarks. For example, all of the ML and all of the TPC benchmarks, including all the scripts, all the configs and all the detail are posted on GitHub. So anybody can look at these results and they're fully transparent and replicate themselves. If you don't agree with this data, then by all means challenge it. And we have not really seen that in all of the new updates in HeatWave over the last 15 months. And as a result, when it comes to these, you know, fundamentals in looking at the competitive landscape, which I think gives validity to outcomes such as Oracle being able to deliver 4.8 times better price performance than Redshift. As well as for example, 14.4 better price performance than Snowflake, and also 12.9 better price performance than BigQuery. And so that is, you know, looking at the quantitative side of things. But again, I think, you know, to Marc's point and to Matt's point, there are also qualitative aspects that clearly differentiate the Oracle proposition, from my perspective. For example now the MySQL HeatWave ML capabilities are native, they're built in, and they also support things such as completion criteria. And as a result, that enables them to show that hey, when you're using Redshift ML for example, you're having to also use their SageMaker tool and it's running on a meter. And so, you know, nobody really wants to be running on a meter when, you know, executing these incredibly complex tasks. And likewise, when it comes to Snowflake, they have to use a third party capability. They don't have the built in, it's not native. So the user, to the point that he's having to spend more time and it increases complexity to use auto ML capabilities across the Snowflake platform. And also, I think it also applies to other important features such as data sampling, for example, with the HeatWave ML, it's intelligent sampling that's being implemented. Whereas in contrast, we're seeing Redshift using random sampling. And again, Snowflake, you're having to use a third party library in order to achieve the same capabilities. So I think the differentiation is crystal clear. I think it definitely is refreshing. It's showing that this is where true value can be assigned. And if you don't agree with it, by all means challenge the data. >> Yeah, I want to come to the benchmarks in a minute. By the way, you know, the gentleman who's the Oracle's architect, he did a great job on the call yesterday explaining what you have to do. I thought that was quite impressive. But Bob, I know you follow the financials pretty closely and on the earnings call earlier this month, Ellison said that, "We're going to see HeatWave on AWS." And the skeptic in me said, oh, they must not be getting people to come to OCI. And then they, you remember this chart they showed yesterday that showed the growth of HeatWave on OCI. But of course there was no data on there, it was just sort of, you know, lines up and to the right. So what do you guys think of that? (Marc laughs) Does it signal Bob, desperation by Oracle that they can't get traction on OCI, or is it just really a smart tame expansion move? What do you think? >> Yeah, Dave, that's a great question. You know, along the way there, and you know, just inside of that was something that said Ellison said on earnings call that spoke to a different sort of philosophy or mindset, almost Marc, where he said, "We're going to make this multicloud," right? With a lot of their other cloud stuff, if you wanted to use any of Oracle's cloud software, you had to use Oracle's infrastructure, OCI, there was no other way out of it. But this one, but I thought it was a classic Ellison line. He said, "Well, we're making this available on AWS. We're making this available, you know, on Snowflake because we're going after those users. And once they see what can be done here." So he's looking at it, I guess you could say, it's a concession to customers because they want multi-cloud. The other way to look at it, it's a hunting expedition and it's one of those uniquely I think Oracle ways. He said up front, right, he doesn't say, "Well, there's a big market, there's a lot for everybody, we just want on our slice." Said, "No, we are going after Amazon, we're going after Redshift, we're going after Aurora. We're going after these users of Snowflake and so on." And I think it's really fairly refreshing these days to hear somebody say that, because now if I'm a buyer, I can look at that and say, you know, to Marc's point, "Do they measure up, do they crack that threshold ceiling? Or is this just going to be more pain than a few dollars savings is worth?" But you look at those numbers that Ron pointed out and that we all saw in that chart. I've never seen Dave, anything like that. In a substantive market, a new player coming in here, and being able to establish differences that are four, seven, eight, 10, 12 times better than competition. And as new buyers look at that, they're going to say, "What the hell are we doing paying, you know, five times more to get a poor result? What's going on here?" So I think this is going to rattle people and force a harder, closer look at what these alternatives are. >> I wonder if the guy, thank you. Let's just skip ahead of the benchmarks guys, bring up the next slide, let's skip ahead a little bit here, which talks to the benchmarks and the benchmarking if we can. You know, David Floyer, the sort of semiretired, you know, Wikibon analyst said, "Dave, this is going to force Amazon and others, Snowflake," he said, "To rethink actually how they architect databases." And this is kind of a compilation of some of the data that they shared. They went after Redshift mostly, (laughs) but also, you know, as I say, Snowflake, BigQuery. And, like I said, you can always tell which companies are doing well, 'cause Oracle will come after you, but they're on the radar here. (laughing) Holgar should we take this stuff seriously? I mean, or is it, you know, a grain salt? What are your thoughts here? >> I think you have to take it seriously. I mean, that's a great question, great point on that. Because like Ron said, "If there's a flaw in a benchmark, we know this database traditionally, right?" If anybody came up that, everybody will be, "Oh, you put the wrong benchmark, it wasn't audited right, let us do it again," and so on. We don't see this happening, right? So kudos to Oracle to be aggressive, differentiated, and seem to having impeccable benchmarks. But what we really see, I think in my view is that the classic and we can talk about this in 100 years, right? Is the suite versus best of breed, right? And the key question of the suite, because the suite's always slower, right? No matter at which level of the stack, you have the suite, then the best of breed that will come up with something new, use a cloud, put the data warehouse on steroids and so on. The important thing is that you have to assess as a buyer what is the speed of my suite vendor. And that's what you guys mentioned before as well, right? Marc said that and so on, "Like, this is a third release in one year of the HeatWave team, right?" So everybody in the database open source Marc, and there's so many MySQL spinoffs to certain point is put on shine on the speed of (indistinct) team, putting out fundamental changes. And the beauty of that is right, is so inherent to the Oracle value proposition. Larry's vision of building the IBM of the 21st century, right from the Silicon, from the chip all the way across the seven stacks to the click of the user. And that what makes the database what Rob was saying, "Tied to the OCI infrastructure," because designed for that, it runs uniquely better for that, that's why we see the cross connect to Microsoft. HeatWave so it's different, right? Because HeatWave runs on cheap hardware, right? Which is the breadth and butter 886 scale of any cloud provider, right? So Oracle probably needs it to scale OCI in a different category, not the expensive side, but also allow us to do what we said before, the multicloud capability, which ultimately CIOs really want, because data gravity is real, you want to operate where that is. If you have a fast, innovative offering, which gives you more functionality and the R and D speed is really impressive for the space, puts away bad results, then it's a good bet to look at. >> Yeah, so you're saying, that we versus best of breed. I just want to sort of play back then Marc a comment. That suite versus best of breed, there's always been that trade off. If I understand you Holgar you're saying that somehow Oracle has magically cut through that trade off and they're giving you the best of both. >> It's the developing velocity, right? The provision of important features, which matter to buyers of the suite vendor, eclipses the best of breed vendor, then the best of breed vendor is in the hell of a potential job. >> Yeah, go ahead Marc. >> Yeah and I want to add on what Holgar just said there. I mean the worst job in the data center is data movement, moving the data sucks. I don't care who you are, nobody likes it. You never get any kudos for doing it well, and you always get the ah craps, when things go wrong. So it's in- >> In the data center Marc all the time across data centers, across cloud. That's where the bleeding comes. >> It's right, you get beat up all the time. So nobody likes to move data, ever. So what you're looking at with what they announce with HeatWave and what I love about HeatWave is it doesn't matter when you started with it, you get all the additional features they announce it's part of the service, all the time. But they don't have to move any of the data. You want to analyze the data that's in your transactional, MySQL database, it's there. You want to do machine learning models, it's there, there's no data movement. The data movement is the key thing, and they just eliminate that, in so many ways. And the other thing I wanted to talk about is on the benchmarks. As great as those benchmarks are, they're really conservative 'cause they're underestimating the cost of that data movement. The ETLs, the other services, everything's left out. It's just comparing HeatWave, MySQL cloud service with HeatWave versus Redshift, not Redshift and Aurora and Glue, Redshift and Redshift ML and SageMaker, it's just Redshift. >> Yeah, so what you're saying is what Oracle's doing is saying, "Okay, we're going to run MySQL HeatWave benchmarks on analytics against Redshift, and then we're going to run 'em in transaction against Aurora." >> Right. >> But if you really had to look at what you would have to do with the ETL, you'd have to buy two different data stores and all the infrastructure around that, and that goes away so. >> Due to the nature of the competition, they're running narrow best of breed benchmarks. There is no suite level benchmark (Dave laughs) because they created something new. >> Well that's you're the earlier point they're beating best of breed with a suite. So that's, I guess to Floyer's earlier point, "That's going to shake things up." But I want to come back to Bob Evans, 'cause I want to tap your Cloud Wars mojo before we wrap. And line up the horses, you got AWS, you got Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Now they all own their own cloud. Snowflake, Mongo, Couchbase, Redis, Cockroach by the way they're all doing very well. They run in the cloud as do many others. I think you guys all saw the Andreessen, you know, commentary from Sarah Wang and company, to talk about the cost of goods sold impact of cloud. So owning your own cloud has to be an advantage because other guys like Snowflake have to pay cloud vendors and negotiate down versus having the whole enchilada, Safra Catz's dream. Bob, how do you think this is going to impact the market long term? >> Well, Dave, that's a great question about, you know, how this is all going to play out. If I could mention three things, one, Frank Slootman has done a fantastic job with Snowflake. Really good company before he got there, but since he's been there, the growth mindset, the discipline, the rigor and the phenomenon of what Snowflake has done has forced all these bigger companies to really accelerate what they're doing. And again, it's an example of how this intense competition makes all the different cloud vendors better and it provides enormous value to customers. Second thing I wanted to mention here was look at the Adam Selipsky effect at AWS, took over in the middle of May, and in Q2, Q3, Q4, AWS's growth rate accelerated. And in each of those three quotas, they grew faster than Microsoft's cloud, which has not happened in two or three years, so they're closing the gap on Microsoft. The third thing, Dave, in this, you know, incredibly intense competitive nature here, look at Larry Ellison, right? He's got his, you know, the product that for the last two or three years, he said, "It's going to help determine the future of the company, autonomous database." You would think he's the last person in the world who's going to bring in, you know, in some ways another database to think about there, but he has put, you know, his whole effort and energy behind this. The investments Oracle's made, he's riding this horse really hard. So it's not just a technology achievement, but it's also an investment priority for Oracle going forward. And I think it's going to form a lot of how they position themselves to this new breed of buyer with a new type of need and expectations from IT. So I just think the next two or three years are going to be fantastic for people who are lucky enough to get to do the sorts of things that we do. >> You know, it's a great point you made about AWS. Back in 2018 Q3, they were doing about 7.4 billion a quarter and they were growing in the mid forties. They dropped down to like 29% Q4, 2020, I'm looking at the data now. They popped back up last quarter, last reported quarter to 40%, that is 17.8 billion, so they more doubled and they accelerated their growth rate. (laughs) So maybe that pretends, people are concerned about Snowflake right now decelerating growth. You know, maybe that's going to be different. By the way, I think Snowflake has a different strategy, the whole data cloud thing, data sharing. They're not trying to necessarily take Oracle head on, which is going to make this next 10 years, really interesting. All right, we got to go, last question. 30 seconds or less, what can we expect from the future of data platforms? Matt, please start. >> I have to go first again? You're killing me, Dave. (laughing) In the next few years, I think you're going to see the major players continue to meet customers where they are, right. Every organization, every environment is, you know, kind of, we use these words bespoke in Snowflake, pardon the pun, but Snowflakes, right. But you know, they're all opinionated and unique and what's great as an IT person is, you know, there is a service for me regardless of where I am on my journey, in my data management journey. I think you're going to continue to see with regards specifically to Oracle, I think you're going to see the company continue along this path of being all things to all people, if you will, or all organizations without sacrificing, you know, kind of richness of features and sacrificing who they are, right. Look, they are the data kings, right? I mean, they've been a database leader for an awful long time. I don't see that going away any time soon and I love the innovative spirit they've brought in with HeatWave. >> All right, great thank you. Okay, 30 seconds, Holgar go. >> Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that we see is really that trend to autonomous as Oracle calls or self-driving software, right? So the database will have to do more things than just store the data and support the DVA. It will have to show it can wide insights, the whole upside, it will be able to show to one machine learning. We haven't really talked about that. How in just exciting what kind of use case we can get of machine learning running real time on data as it changes, right? So, which is part of the E5 announcement, right? So we'll see more of that self-driving nature in the database space. And because you said we can promote it, right. Check out my report about HeatWave latest release where I post in oracle.com. >> Great, thank you for that. And Bob Evans, please. You're great at quick hits, hit us. >> Dave, thanks. I really enjoyed getting to hear everybody's opinion here today and I think what's going to happen too. I think there's a new generation of buyers, a new set of CXO influencers in here. And I think what Oracle's done with this, MySQL HeatWave, those benchmarks that Ron talked about so eloquently here that is going to become something that forces other companies, not just try to get incrementally better. I think we're going to see a massive new wave of innovation to try to play catch up. So I really take my hat off to Oracle's achievement from going to, push everybody to be better. >> Excellent. Marc Staimer, what do you say? >> Sure, I'm going to leverage off of something Matt said earlier, "Those companies that are going to develop faster, cheaper, simpler products that are going to solve customer problems, IT problems are the ones that are going to succeed, or the ones who are going to grow. The one who are just focused on the technology are going to fall by the wayside." So those who can solve more problems, do it more elegantly and do it for less money are going to do great. So Oracle's going down that path today, Snowflake's going down that path. They're trying to do more integration with third party, but as a result, aiming at that simpler, faster, cheaper mentality is where you're going to continue to see this market go. >> Amen brother Marc. >> Thank you, Ron Westfall, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> Well, thank you. And I'm loving it. I see a wave of innovation across the entire cloud database ecosystem and Oracle is fueling it. We are seeing it, with the native integration of auto ML capabilities, elastic scaling, lower entry price points, et cetera. And this is just going to be great news for buyers, but also developers and increased use of open APIs. And so I think that is really the key takeaways. Just we're going to see a lot of great innovation on the horizon here. >> Guys, fantastic insights, one of the best power panel as I've ever done. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for coming on today. >> Great job, Dave, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld iNspire, brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. And now that the dust has settled on the event, we wanted to have a little postmortem power panel, and I'm really excited to have three great guests here today. Adrian Swinscoe is a customer service and experience advisor and the best-selling author of a couple of books: "How to Wow" and "Punk CX." Adrian great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey Dave. >> And Shelly Kramer's a principal, analyst, and a founding partner at Futurum Research, CUBE alum. Shelly, good to see you. >> Hi, great to see you too. >> And finally, Don Schuerman who is the CTO of Pegasystems and one of the people that was really highlighting the keynotes. Don, thanks for your time, appreciate you coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, let's start with some of the takeaways from the event, and if you don't mind I'm going to set it up. I had some, I had many many notes. But I'll take a cue from Alan's keynote, where he talked about three things: rethinking the customer engagement, that whole experience, that as a service, I'm going to say that certainly the second part of last decade came to the front and center and we think is going to continue in spades. And then new tech, we heard about that. Don we're going to ask you to chime in on that. Modern software, microservices, we've got machine intelligence now. And then I thought there were some really good customer examples. We heard from Siemens, we heard from the CIO and head of digital at Aflac, the Bank of Australia. So, some really good customer examples. But Shelly, let me start with you. What were your big takeaways of PegaWorld iNspire 2020, the virtual edition? >> You know, what I love is a focus, and we have talked a lot about that here at Futurum Research, but what I love is the thinking that what really is important now is to think about rethinking and kind of tearing things apart. Especially when we're in a time, we're in difficult economic times, and so instead of focusing on rebuilding and relaunching as quickly as possible, I think that now's the time to really focus on reexamining what is it that our customers want? How is it that we can best serve them? And really sort of start from ground zero and examine our thinking. And I think that's really at the heart of digital transformation, and I think that both in this virtual event and in some interviews I was lucky enough to do in advance with some of the Pega senior team, that was really a key focus, is really thinking about how we can re-architect things, how we can do things in ways that are more efficient, that impact people more effectively, that impact the bottom line more effectively. And to me that's really exciting. >> So Adrian, CX is obviously your wheelhouse. A lot of the conversation at PegaWorld iNspire was of course about customer experience, customer service. How do you think the content went? What were some of the highlights for you? And maybe, what would you have liked to hear more of? >> Well I think, thanks Dave, I actually really enjoyed it. I actually kind of thought was, first of all I should say that I've been to a bunch of virtual summits and I thought this was one of the best ones I've done in terms of its pace and its interactivity. I love the fact that Don was bouncing around the screen, kind of showing us around the menu and things. I thought that was great. But the things that I thought really stood out for me was this idea of the context around accelerating digital transformation. And that's very contextual, it's almost being forced upon us. But then this idea of also the center-out thinking and the Process Fabric. Because it really reminded me of, and Don you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong here, is taking a systems-thinking approach to delivering the right outcomes for customers. Because it's always struck me that there's a contradiction at the heart of the rhetoric around customer-centricity where people say they want to do the right things by customers but then they force them down this channel-centric or process-centric way of thinking. And so actually I thought it was really refreshing to hear about this center-out and Process Fabric platform that Pega's building. And I thought it's really exciting because it felt like actually we're going to start to take a more systemic look and take to delivering great service and great experience. So I thought that was really great. Those were my big headlines out of the summit. >> So Don, one of the-- >> Adrian I think-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Yeah, I think the whole idea, you know, and Alan referred to center-out as a business architecture, and I think that's really an important concept because this is really about the intersection of that business goal. How do I truly become customer-centric? And then how do I actually make my technology do it? And it's really important for that to work where you put your business logic in the technology. If you continue to do it in the sort of channel-centric way or really data-centric, system-centric way that historically has been the approach, I don't think you can build a sustainable platform for great customer engagement. So I think that idea of a business architecture that you clued in on a little bit is really central to how we've been thinking about this. >> Let's stay on that for a second. But first of all, I just want to mention, you guys did a good job of not just trying to take a physical event and plug in into virtual. So congratulations on that. The virtual clicker toss, and you know, you were having some fun eating your eggs. I mean that was, that's great. And the Dropkick Murphys couldn't be live, but you guys still leveraged that, so well done. One of the better ones that I've seen. But I want to stay on your point there. Alan talked about some of the mistakes that are made, and one of the questions I have for you guys is, what is the state of customer experience today, and why the divergence between great, and good, and pretty crappy? And Alan talked about, well, people try to impose business process top-down, or they try to infuse logic in the database bottom-up. You really got to do that middle-out. So, Don I want to come back to you. Let's explore that a little bit. What do you really mean by middle-out? Where am I putting the actual business logic? >> Yeah, I think this is important, right. And I think that a lot of time we have experiences as customers. And I had one of these recently with a cable provider, where I spent a bunch of time on their website chatting with a chatbot of some kind, that then flipped me over to a human. When the chatbot flipped me to the human, the human didn't know what I was doing with the chatbot. And that human eventually told me I had to call somebody. So I picked up the phone, I made the phone call. And that person didn't know what I was doing on chat with the human or with the chatbot. So every time there's a customer, I'm restarting. I'm reexplaining where I am. And that to me is a direct result of that kind of channel-centric thinking, where all of my business logic ends up embedded in, "Well hey, we're going to build a cool chatbot. "And now we're going to build a cool chat system. "And by the way, "we're going to keep our contact centers running." But I'm not thinking holistically about the customer experience. And that's why we think this center-out approach is so important, because I want to go below the channel. And I want to think about that customer journey. What's the outcome I'm trying to get to? In the case of my interaction, I was just trying to increase my bandwidth so that I could do events like this, right? What's that outcome that I'm trying to get to and how do I get the customer to that outcome in a way that's as efficient for the business and as easy for the customer as possible regardless of what channel they're on. And I think that's a little bit of a new way of thinking. And again, it means thinking not just about the customer goal, but having an opinion, whether you are a business leader or an IT person, about where that logic belongs in your architecture. >> So, Adrian. Don just described the sort of bot and human experience, which mimics a lot of the human experience that we've all touched in the past. So, but the customer journey that Don talked about isn't necessarily one journey. There's multiple journeys. So what's your take on how organizations can do better with that kind of service. >> Well I think you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, actually during the summer I was talking, I was listening to Paul Greenberg talk about the future of customer service. And Paul said something that I think was really straightforward but really insightful. He said, "Look, organizations think about customer journeys "but customers don't think about journeys "in the way that organizations do. "They think discontinuously." So it's like, "I'm going to go to channel one, "and then channel three, and then channel four, "and then channel five, and then back to channel two. "And then back to channel five again." And they expect those conversations to be picked up across those different channels. And so I think what we've got to do is develop, as Don said, build an architecture that is, that works around trying to support the different journeys but allows that flexibility and that adaptability for customers to jump around and to have one of those continuous but disconnected conversations. But it's up to us to try and connect them all, to deliver the service and experience that the customers actually want. >> Now Shelly, a lot of the customer experience actually starts with the employees, and employees don't like when the customer is yelling at them saying, "I just answered all those questions. "Why do I have to answer them again?" So you've, at your firm, you guys have written a lot about this, you've thought a lot about it, you have some data I know you shared on theCUBE one time that 80% of employees are disengaged. And so, that affects the customer experience, doesn't it? >> Yeah it does, you know. And I think that when I'm listening to Don's explanation about his cable company, I'm having flashbacks to what feels like hundreds of my own experiences. And you're just thinking, "This does not have to be this complicated!" You know, ten years ago that same thing that Don just described happened with phone calls. You know, you called one person and they passed you off to somebody else, and they passed you off to somebody else, and you were equally as frustrated as a customer. Now what's happening a lot of times is that we're plugging technology in, like a chat bot, that's supposed to make things better but we're not developing a system and processes throughout our organization, and also change management, what do I want to say, programs within the organization and so we're kind of forgetting all of those things. So what's happening is that we're still having customers having those same experiences that are a decade old, and technology is part of the mix. And it really shouldn't be that way. And so, one thing that I really enjoyed, speaking about employees, was listening to Rich Gilbert from Aflac. And he was talking about when you're moving from legacy processes to new ones, you have to plan for and invest in change management. And we talk about this all the time here at Futurum, you know technology alone is never the answer. It's technology plus people. And so you have to invest in people, you have to invest in their training in order to be able to support and manage change and to drive change. And I think one really important part of that equation is also listening to your employees and getting their feedback, and making them part of the process. Because when they are truly on your front lines, dealing with customers, many times dealing with stressed, upset, frustrated customers, you know, they have a lot of insights. And sometimes we don't bring them into those conversations, certainly early enough in the process to help, to let them help guide us in terms of the solutions and the processes that we put in place. I think that's really important. >> Yeah, a lot of-- >> Shelly, I think-- >> If I may, a lot of the frustration with some employees sometimes is those processes change, and they're unknown going into it. We saw that with COVID, Don. And so, your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the environment employees are working in is changing rapidly. We've got a customer, a large telecommunications company in the UK where their customer service requests are now being handled by about 4,000 employees pulled from their marketing department working distributed because that's the world that we're in. And the thing I was going to say in response to Shelly is, Alan mentioned in his keynote this idea of design thinking. And one of the reasons why I think that's so important is that it's actually about giving the people on the front lines a voice. It's a format for engaging the employees who actually know the day-to-day experiences of the customers, the day-to-day experiences of a customer service agent, and pulling them into the solution. How do we develop the systems, how do we rethink our processing, how does that need to plug into the various channels that we have? And that's why a lot of our focus is not just on the customer service technology, but the underlying low code platform that allows us to build those processes and those chunks of the customer journey. We often refer to them as "microjourneys" that lead to a specific outcome. And if you're using a low code based platform, something that allows anybody to come in and define that process, you can actually pull employees from the front lines and put them directly on your project teams. And all of a sudden you get better engagement but you also get this incredible insight flowing into what you're doing because you're talking to the people who live this day in and day out. >> Well and when you have-- >> So let's stay on this for a second, if we can. Shelly, go ahead please. >> Sure. When you have a chance to talk with those people, to talk with those front line employees who are having an opportunity to work with low code, no code, they get so excited about it and their jobs are completely, the way they think about their jobs and their contribution to the company, and their contribution to the customer, and the customer experience, is just so wonderful to see. And it's such an easy thing to do, so I think that that's really a critical part of the equation as it relates to success with these programs. >> Yeah, staying close to the customer-- >> Can I jump in? >> Yeah, please Adrian. >> Can I jump in on that a little, a second. I think Shelly, you're absolutely right. I think that it's a really simple thing. You talk about engagement. And one of the key parts of engagement, it seems to me, is that, is giving people a voice and making them feel important and feel heard. And so to go and ask for their opinion and to help them get involved and make a difference to the work that they do, the outcomes that their customers receive, and the overall productivity and efficiency, can only have a positive impact. And it's almost like, it feels self-evident that you'd do that but unfortunately it's not very common. >> Right. It does feel self-evident. But we miss on that front a lot. >> So I want to ask, I'm going to come back to, we talked about people process, we'll come back to that. But I want to talk about the tech. You guys announced, the big announcement was the Pega Process Fabric. You talked about that, Don, as a platform for digital platforms. You've got all these cool microservices and dynamic APIs and being able to compose on the fly, so some pretty cool stuff there. I wonder, with the virtual event, you know, with the physical event you've got the hallway traffic, you talk to people and you get face-to-face reactions. Were you able to get your kind of real-time reactions to the announcement? What was that like? Share with us please. >> Yeah, so, we got well over 1,000 questions in during the event and a lot of them were either about Process Fabric or comments about it. So I think people are definitely excited about this. And when you strip away all of the buzzwords around microservices and cloud, et cetera, I think what we're really getting at here is that work is going to be increasingly more distributed. We are living proof of that right now, the four of us all coming here from different studios. But work is going to be distributed for a bunch of reasons. Because people are more distributed, because organizations increasingly are building customer journeys that aren't just inside their walls, but are connected to the partners and their ecosystem. I'm a bank but I may, as part of my mortgage process, connect somebody up to a home insurer. And all of a sudden the home buying process goes beyond my four walls. And then finally, as you get all of these employees engaged with building their low code apps and being citizen developers, you want to let the 1,000 flowers to bloom but you also need a way to connect that all back together. And Process Fabric is about putting the technology in place to allow us to take these distributed bits of work that we need to do and weave them together into experiences that are coherent for a customer and easy for an employee to navigate. Because I think it's going to be really really important that we do that. And even as we take our systems and break them up into microservices, well customers don't interact with microservices. Customers interact with journeys, with experiences, with the processes you lay out, and making sure we can connect that up together into something that feels easy for the customer and the employee, and gets them to that result they want quickly, that's what the vision of Process Fabric is all about. >> You know, it strikes me, I'm checking my notes here. You guys talked about a couple of examples. One was, I think you talked about the car as sort of a mobility experience, maybe, you know, it makes me wonder with all this AI and autonomous vehicle stuff going on, at what point is owning and driving your own vehicle really going to be not the norm anymore? But you talked about this totally transformed, sorry to use that word, but experience around autos. And certainly financial services is maybe a little bit more near-term. But I wonder Shelly, Futurum, you know, you guys look ahead, how far can we actually go with AI in this realm? >> Well, I think we can go pretty far and I think it'll happen pretty fast. And I think that we're seeing that already in terms of what happened when we had the Coronavirus COVID-19, and of course we're still navigating through that, is that all of a sudden things that we talked about doing, or thought about doing, or planned doing, you know later on in this year or 2021, we had to do all of those things immediately. And so again, it is kind of like ripping the Bandaid off. And we're finding that AI plays a tremendously important role in relieving the workload on the frontline workers, and being able to integrate empathy into decision making. And you know, I go back to, I remember when you all first rolled out the empathy part of your platform, Don, and just watching a demo on that of how you can slide this empathy meter to be warmer, and see in true dollars and cents over time the impact of treating your customers with more empathy, what that delivers to a company. And I think that AI that continues to build and learn and again, what we're having right now, is we're having this gigantic volume of needs, of conversation, of all these transactions that need to happen at once, and great volumes make for better outcomes as it relates to artificial intelligence and how learning can happen more quickly over time. So I think that it's, we're definitely going to see more use of AI more rapidly than we might've seen it before, and I don't think that's going to slow down, at all. Certainly, I mean there's no reason for it to slow down. The benefits are tremendous. The benefits are tremendous, and let me step back and say, following a conversation with Rob Walker on responsible AI, that's a whole different ball of wax. And I think that's something that Pega has really embraced and planted a flag in. So I think that we'll see great things ahead with AI, and I think that we'll see the Pega team really leading as it relates to ethical AI. And I think that's tremendously important as well. >> Well that's the other side of the coin, you know. I asked how far can we go and I guess you're alluding to how far should we go. But Adrian, we also heard about agility and empathy. I mean, I want an empathic service provider. Are agility and empathy related to customer service, and how so? >> Well, David, I think that's a great question. I think that, you talk about agility and talk about empathy, and I think the thing is, what we probably know from our own experience is that being empathetic is sometimes going to be really hard. And it takes time, and it takes practice to actually get better at it. It's almost like a new habit. Some people are naturally better at it than others. But you know, organizationally, I talk about that we need to almost build, almost like an empathetic musculature at an organizational level if we're going to achieve this. And it can be aided by technology, but we, when we develop new muscles it takes time. And sometimes you go through a bit of pain in doing that. So I think that's where the agility comes in, is that we have to test and learn and try new things, be willing to get things wrong and then correct, and then kind of move on. And then learn from these kind of things. And so I think the agility and empathy, it does go hand in hand and it's something that will drive growth and increasing empathetic interactions as we go forward. But I think it's also, just to build on Shelly's point, I think you're absolutely right that Pega has been leading the way in this sort of dimension, in terms of its T-switch and its empathetic advisor. But now the ethical AI testing or the ethical bias testing adds a dimension to that to make sure it's not just about all horsepower, but being able to make sure that you can steer your car. To use your analogy. >> So AI's coming whether we like it or not. Right, Shelly? Go ahead. >> It is. One real quick real world example here is, you know, okay so we have this time when a lot of consumers are furloughed. Out of work. Stressed about finances. And we have a lot of Pega's customers are in the financial services space. Some of the systems that they've established, they've developed over time, the processes they've developed over time is, "Oh, I'm talking with Shelly Kramer and she has a "blah-blah-blah account here. "And this would be a great time to sell her on "this additional service," or whatever. And when you can, so that was our process yesterday. But when you're working with an empathic mindset and you are also needing to be incredibly agile because of current circumstances and situations, your technology, the platform that you're using, can allow you to go, "Okay I'm dealing "with a really stressed customer. "This is not the best time "to offer any additional services." Instead what we need to ask is this series of questions: "How can we help?" Or, "Here are some options." Or whatever. And I think that it's little tweaks like that that can help you in the customer service realm be more agile, be more empathetic, and really deliver an amazing customer experience as a result. And that's the technology. >> If I could just add to that. Alan mentioned in his keynote a specific example, which is Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And they were able, multiple times this year, once during the Australian wildfires and then again in response to the COVID crisis, to completely shift and turn on a dime how they interacted with their customer, and to move from a prioritization of maybe selling things to a prioritization of responding to a customer need. And maybe offering payment deferrals or assistance to a customer. But back to what we were talking about earlier, that agility only happened because they didn't have the logic for that embedded in all their channels. They had it centralized. They had it in a common brain that allowed them to make that change in one place and instantly propagate it to all of the 18 different channels in which they touch their customer. And so, being able to have agility and that empathy, to my mind, is explicitly tied to that concept of a center-out business architecture that Alan was talking about. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And, you know, this leads to discussion about automation, and again, how far can we go, how far should we go? Don, you've been interviewed many many times, like any tech executive, about the impact of AI on jobs. And, you know, the typical response of course is, "No, we want augmentation." But the reality is, machines have always replaced humans it's just, now it's the first time in terms of cognitive function. So it's a little different for us this time around. But it's clear, as I said, AI is coming whether we like it or not. Automation is very clearly on the top of people's minds. So how do you guys see the evolution of automation, the injection of automation into applications, the ubiquity of automations coming in this next decade? Shelly, let's start with you. >> You know, I was thinking you were going to ask Don that question so I'm just listening and listening. (laughing) >> Okay, well we can go with Don, that's-- >> No I'm happy to answer it. It's fine, it just wasn't what I expected. You know, we are really immersed in the automation space. So I very much see the concerns that people on the front line have, that automation is going to replace them. And the reality of it is, if a job that someone does can be automated, it will be automated. It makes sense. It makes good business sense to do that. And I think that what we are looking at from a business agility standpoint, from a business resilience standpoint, from a business survival standpoint, is really how can we deliver most effectively to serve the needs of our customers. Period. And how we can do that quickly and efficiently and without frustration and in a way that is cost effective. All of those things play into what makes a successful business today, as well as what keeps employees, I'm sorry, as well as what keeps customers served, loyal, staying around. I think that we live in a time where customer loyalty is fleeting. And so I think that smart businesses have to look at how do we deepen the relationships that we have with customers? How can we use automation to do that? And the thing about it, you know, I'll go back to the example that Don gave about his cable company that all of us have lived through. It's just like, "Oh my gosh. "There's got to be a better way." So compare that to, and I'm sure all of us can think of an experience where you had to deal with a customer service situation in some way or another, and it was the most awesome thing ever. And you walked away from it and you just went, "Oh my gosh. I know I was talking to a bot here or there." Or, "I know I was doing this, but that solved my problem. "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't wait to buy something from this company again!" You know what I'm saying? And that's really, I think, the role that automation can play. Is that it can really help deepen existing relationships with our customers, and help us serve them better. And it can also help our employees do things that are more interesting and that are more relevant to the business. And I think that that's important too. So, yes, jobs will go. Yes, automation will slide into places where we've done things manually and repetitive processes before, but I think that's a good thing. >> So, we've got to end it shortly here but I'll give you guys each a last opportunity to chime in. And Adrian, I want to start with you. I invoked the T-word before, transformation, a kind of tongue-in-cheek joking because I know it's not your favorite word. But it is the industry's favorite word. Thinking ahead for the future, we've talked about AI, we've talked about automation, people, process and tech. What do you see as the future state of customer experience, this mix of human and machine? What do we have to look forward to? >> So I think that, first of all, let me tackle the transformation thing. I mean, I remember talking about this with Duncan Macdonald who is the CIO across at UPC, which is one of Pega's customers, on my podcast there the other week. And he talked about, he's the cosponsor of a three year digital transformation program. But then he appended the description of that by saying it's a transformation program that will never end. That's the thing that I think about, because actually, if you think about what we're talking about here, we're not transforming to anything in particular, you know. It's not like going from here to there. And actually, the thing that I think we need to start thinking about is, rather than transformation we actually need to think about an evolution. And adopting an evolutionary state. And we talked about being responsive. We talked about being adaptable. We talked about being agile. We talk about testing and learning and all these different sort of things, that's evolutionary, right? It's not transformational, it's evolutionary. If you think about Charles Darwin and the theory of the species, that's an evolutionary process. And there's a quote, as you've mentioned I authored this book called "Punk CX," there's a quote that I use in the book which is taken from a Bad Religion song called "No Control" and it's called, "There is no vestige of a beginning, "and no prospect of an end." And that quote comes from a 1788 book by James Hutton, which was one of the first treaties on geology, and what he found through all these studies was actually, the formation of the earth and its continuous formation, there is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. It's a continuous process. And I think that's what we've got to embrace is that actually change is constant. And as Alan says, you have to build for change and be ready for change. And have the right sort of culture, the right sort of business architecture, the right sort of technology to enable that. Because the world is getting faster and it is getting more competitive. This is probably not the last crisis that we will face. And so, like in most evolutionary things, it wasn't the fittest and the strongest that survived, it was the ones that were most adaptable that survived. And I think that's the kind of thing I want to land on, is actually how, it's the ones that kind of grasp that, grasp that whole concept are the ones that are going to succeed out of this. And, what they will do will be... We can't even imagine what they're going to do right now. >> And, thank you. And Shelly, it's not only responding to, as Adrian was saying, to crisis, but it's also being in a position to very rapidly take advantage of opportunities and that capability is going to be important. You guys are futurists, it's in the name. Your thoughts? >> Well I think that, you know, Adrian's comments were incredibly salient, as always. And I think that-- >> Thank you. >> The thing that this particular crisis that we are navigating through today has in many ways been bad, but in other ways, I think it's been incredibly good. Because it has forced us, in a way that we really haven't had to deal with before, to act quickly, to think quickly, to rethink and to embrace change. Oh, we've got to work from home! Oh, we've got 20 people that need to work from home, we have 20,000 people that need to work from home. What technology do we need? How do we take care of our customers? All of these things we've had to figure out in overdrive. And humans, generally speaking, aren't great at change. But what we are forced to do as a result of this pandemic is change. And rethink everything. And I think that, you know, the point about transformation not being a beginning and an end, we are never, ever, ever done. It is evolutionary and I think that as we look to the future and to one of your comments, we are going faster with more exciting technology solutions out there, with people who are incredibly smart, and so I think that it's exciting and I think that all we are going to see is more and more and more change, and I think it will be a time of great resilience, and we'll see some businesses survive and thrive, and we'll see other businesses not survive. But that's been our norm as well, so I think it's really, I think we have some things to thank this pandemic for. Which is kind of weird, but I also try to be fairly optimistic. But I do, I think we've learned a lot and I think we've seen some really amazing exciting things from businesses who have done this. >> Well thanks for sharing that silver lining, Shelly. And then, Don, I'm going to ask you to bring us to the finish line. And I'm going to close my final question to you, or pose it. You guys had the wrecking ball, and I've certainly observed, when it comes to things like digital transformations, or whatever you want to call it, that there was real complacency, and you showed that cartoon with the wrecking ball saying, "Ehh not in my life, not on my watch. "We're doing fine." Well, this pandemic has clearly changed people's thinking, automation is really top of mind now at executive. So you guys are in a good spot from that standpoint. But your final thoughts, please? >> Yeah, I mean, I want to concur with what Adrian and Shelly said and if I can drop another rock quote in there. This one is from Bob Dylan. And Dylan famously said, "The times they are a changing." But the quote that I keep on my wall is one that he tossed off during an interview where he said, "I accept chaos. "I'm not sure if it accepts me." But I think digital transformation looks a lot less like that butterfly emerging from a cocoon to go off happy to smell the flowers, and looks much more like accepting that we are in a world of constant and unpredictable change. And I think one of the things that the COVID crisis has done is sort of snapped us awake to that world. I was talking to the CIO of a large media company who is one of our customers, and he brought up the fact, you know, like Croom said, "We're all agile now. "I've been talking about five years, "trying to get this company to operate in an agile way, "and all of a sudden we had to do it. "We had no choice, we had to respond, "we had to try new things, we had to fail fast." And my hope is, as we think about what customer engagement and automation and business efficiency looks like in the future, we keep that mindset of trying new things and continuously adapting. Evolving. At the end of the day, our company's brand promise is, "Build for change." And we chose that because we think that that's what organizations, the one thing they can design for. They can design for a future that will continue to change. And if you put the right architecture in place, if you take that center-out mindset, you can support those immediate needs, but set yourself up for a future of continuous change and continuous evolution and adaptation. >> Well guys, I'll quote somebody less famous. Jeff Frick, who said, "The answer to every question "lives somewhere in a CUBE interview." and you guys have given us a lot of answers. I really appreciate your time. I hope that next year at PegaWorld iNspire we can see each other face-to-face and do some live interviews. But really appreciate the insights and all your good work. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante and our coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Be right back, right after this short break. (lighthearted music)