(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto at our CUBE headquarters. We're here with John Del Santo, Senior Managing Director at Accenture for a Cube Conversation. John, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, John. Great to be here. >> So we just talked before we came on camera about Accenture and all the stuff you guys are doing. You guys are in the cloud heavily. We've been following, you guys have probably one of the most comprehensive analytics teams out there. And global SI market and just, the world's changing. So it's pretty fun. I'm looking forward to this conversation. So I got to ask you first, before we get started. I want to jump in with a ton of questions. What is your role at Accenture? You're in the Bay Area. Take a minute to explain what you do for Accenture and what's your territory. >> I've got the best job at Accenture. So, Accenture's got close to half a million people right now and my job is, I'm responsible for our business on the West Coast, across all of our industries, et cetera. I've been here 32 years, so I've seen a lot of things happen in the Bay Area. And I now have the responsibility of making sure that we're doing great work for our clients. And we're doing great work in the community. And then we're providing great opportunities to the thousands of people that work for us here in the Bay Area and across the West Coast. So it's a lot of fun. >> Obviously, West Coast is booming. And for tech it's been a hotbed. And obviously the industry's across the board now is global. I got to ask you because, you know, you've been around multiple waves of innovation. And Accenture's been, had their hands in enabling a lot of value creation for clients. You guys have a great reputation. There's a lot of smart people. But the waves are always kind of different in their own way, but sometimes it's the same. What's different about the way we're living now? Because you can almost look back and see the major inflection points. Obviously the PC revolution, client server, interoperability, networking stacks went standard. Then you saw the Internet come. Now you've got Web 2.0. And now you got the whole global, you got things like cryptocurrency and blockchain. You have multiple clouds. You have a whole new game-changing dynamic going on with IT infrastructure combined with opensource at a whole 'nother level. So how is this wave different? Is it like the, how would you compare? >> Well, I think all the technologies that have waved through my career, at least, have been real enablers for the business model that the companies had at the time, and that they evolved. What we see now is epic disruption, right? So, the waves now are, we have digital native companies that are just disrupting the heck out of the industry or the company that we're trying to help. And so it's now about pulling all of those technologies together, and really figuring out a new business model for a client. Figuring out a new distribution channel, a new product that's maybe natively digital. And so it's very, very different, I feel, then it was five, 10, 15, 20 years ago, through some of the other waves. >> Talk about the things going on in the Bay Area before we get more in the global themes, because I think the Bay Area is always kind of a leading indicator. I call it a bellwether. Some cool things happened. You've got things like the Golden State Warriors got a stadium that's being built. I'm watching the World Series with the Red Sox, and you see Amazon stat cast, you're seeing overlays, you're seeing rosserial. All these things are changing the work and play. The Bay Area's got a lot of leading indicators. What are some of the projects that you've been involved in? What's happening now that you think is worth noting, that's exciting, that piques your interest? >> Yeah, I mean, we work across every industry, and we do a ton of work in tech, but I actually find some of the more interesting projects are the ones we're doing for healthcare companies in the Bay Area, some of the utilities in the Bay Area, some of the big resource companies, some of the financial services institutions, 'cause, like I said before, all of those industries have disruption coming or have been disrupted, and so we're doing some work right now around patient services in healthcare and in pharma that is really interesting. It's meant to change the experience that a patient has, that you and I have when we interact with our healthcare providers or, you know, the whole industry. And so those kinds of projects are real interesting cause a lot of these industries are old and sort of have a big legacy estate and model that they need to transform from. So they need to move fast, and we kind of describe it as a wise pivot. They sort of need to move, but they need to make sure they're moving at the right time. They can't hurt their existing business, but they got to pivot to the next business model, and that's happening in lots of places. And you're right, I think it is happening a lot in the Bay Area and the West Coast as sort of a bellwether. >> I want to get your thoughts on some of the moments that are going on in tech. You mentioned prior, before we came on camera, you worked for Apple in the old days. Tim Cook was just recently tweeting yesterday, and that tweet's going around, privacy. He was at this big GDPR conference. The role of regulatory now is changing some of the West Coast dynamics. Used to be kind of fast and loose West Coast, innovate, and then it gets operationalized globally with tech, tech trends. What's the tech enablers now that you see that are involved that actually have to deal with regulatory, and is regulatory an opportunity? You're mentioning utilities, finance, those are two areas you can jump out and say okay, we see something there. Privacy is another one. So you have a perfect storm with tech and regulatory frameworks. How has that impacted your job in the West Coast? >> Well, I mean, GDBR, we live with everyday. And clearly we're doing a ton of work in Europe. And I think that's one of the advantages Accenture has of being a big global company, and being able to take lessons learned from other parts of the world that are likely to come to the United States, et cetera, so, but I think the combination of tech and regulatory are going to be merging together here pretty quickly, especially when you talk about AI and data privacy, and that sort of thing. But it's definitely been an evolution. Great to hear Tim's point of view on what Apple thinks. And it's been really fun in my life to see Apple in the 80s when I worked there. They were a client of mine in the 80s. I worked with NEXT Computing in the 90s. And then obviously they're a big partner of ours now, so it's been a really interesting evolution. >> What are some of the growth accomplishments you guys have in the Bay Area? Obviously there's been growth here for you guys. Obviously, we've been seeing it. >> Well, I think the amount of tech-driven disruption, or digital transformation, we call it, is growing like crazy. So, you know, 20 years ago we were doing a lot of eCommerce work. We kind of shied away from doing Y2K work and a lot of our competitors saw that as a big opportunity. We didn't think it was a lot of value for our clients, fixing the old systems. And so we pivoted to eCommerce in a very aggressive way. And I would say now that's evolved even further, where more than close to 2/3 of our business here on the West Coast is what we call the new, which is clouds, security, digital analytics. And I really think it gets down to, we were talking a little bit earlier, about the data. And so we have more data scientists than we've ever had. We're probably hiring one or two every day out here on the West Coast. And it's about the data. Data is driving our consulting business. It's driving our technology business. It's driving what we're doing with AI, obviously, and things like that, so. The transformation's been pretty tremendous. >> So take a minute to explain the difference (mumbles), data, you mentioned a lot of things, you got data in there, you got cloud, and you mentioned earlier you got kind of cloud first companies, got born in the cloud, born in AI, AI first, data first, these new companies that are essentially disrupting incumbents, also your clients, that are kind of born before the cloud. And they got to transform. Is digital transformation one of those things or both of those things? How does digital transformation translate to the clients that you guys work with? >> Well, every client has a unique set of needs depending on where they came from. We do a lot of work with the digital natives. We do a lot of work with the unicorns out here on the West Coast. And their needs are different. You know, they need to learn how to scale globally. They need help in the back office. They need help sort of maturing their business model. We do a lot of work with legacy financial services companies, healthcare companies, that sort of thing. They need to figure out how to sort of, you know, pivot to digital products or digital interactions with their customers. We have a very large business now in Accenture Interactive around helping to find customer experiences for clients. And we think our mission is sort of help our clients really redefine that relationship with their customer, their supplier, their supply chain, and the experience is a key part of that. Given expectations means a lot. >> We have a lot of CUBE Conversations around IT transformation as well. And I had a CIO, big time firm, we won't say the name cause it'll out em, but he said, "We've been outsourcing IT for so many years, but now we got to build the core competency internally because now it's a competitive advantage." And they have to ramp up pretty quickly. Cloud helps them there, and they need partners that can help them move the needle on the top line. That this is not just cost control and operational scale or whether it's horizontally scalable scale-out or whatnot. Top line revenue. This is where the bread and butter of the companies are. >> Right. >> So how are you guys engaging with the clients? Give some examples of how you're helping them with the digital transition to drive their business, how do you engage them? Do you do the standard sales calls engagements? You bring them to a technology center? As the world starts to change, how do you guys help those clients meet those top lines? >> Well, a perfect client for us, you know, we're really good at helping clients cut costs and get really efficient and be good with their peers on cost structure. We love a client where they want us to help em with that and they want to pivot the savings to the new part. The way, one of the things that triggered a thought when you mentioned that was we like to bring our clients into our innovation hubs, so we've had labs here on the West Coast for a long time. We now have 10 innovation hubs in the U.S. We have a very large one in San Francisco now, and so we'll bring a client into our innovation hub and really roll up our sleeves with the client and over a week or two weeks or three period of time, we really brainstorm on envisioning their future for their company, build a minimal viable product if we have to out of our rapid prototyping capability and really envision what the target and state of their business could be, of their product could be or their customer interaction and we'll model it. Rather than sort of do a study, do another study, do a PowerPoint presentation, it's let's roll up our sleeves and figure out how to really pivot your business to the new and then take it from there. >> And they come to your location Absolutely. >> For an extended period of time? >> Yeah, so we'll have, any given day we'll have at least two different clients in our location doing either a couple a day workshop, a multi-week workshop, and it's co-creation. It's us collaborating with our client to figure out a solution. A good example is we had one of our large clients from the West Coast in there recently and we were trying to figure out how to use drone technology to drive analytics in, you know, over a geography to provide better data for them to minimize risk. And we've got a number of co-creation projects now going on with them to figure out how do we take that into a solution that not only helps their business but maybe it is a commercially available system. >> Yeah, our Wikibon research team brings us all the time with IOT and security you're starting to see companies leverage their existing assets, which is physical as well as digital and then figure out a model that makes them work together because these new use cases are springing up. So what if some of those use cases that you guys see happening, because you mentioned drones, cause that's an IOT device, right, essentially. There's all these new scenarios that are emerging and the speed is critical. It's not like, you can't do a study. There's no time to do a study. There's no time to do these things. You got to get some feet on the ground. You got to have product in market, you got to iterate. This is devops culture. >> Right. >> What is an example? >> So we did a project for a big ag company and not actually a West Coast based company but they came to our labs to look at it. And basically what we did was, we covered an area that's basically the size of Delaware in terms of drone video and we were able to drive analytics from that and ten times faster figure out for them where the forest was weak and where it wasn't. where they ought to worry about vegetation, where they might have disease issues or other risks that were facing them. And those analytics we were able to drive a lot faster and so rather than manually going around this huge square mile set of geography, they were able to sort of do it through technology a lot faster. >> Yeah, just a side note. I was talking to Paul Daugherty and interviewed him. We were celebrating, covering the celebration, your 30th anniversary of your labs. And one of the interviews I did was a wacky idea which made total sense, was during like a car accident or scene where there's been a car accident, they send drones in first and they map out the forensics- >> Sure. >> First. And you think, okay, who would have thought of that? I mean, these are new things that are happening that are changing the game on the road because they'll open up faster. They get the data that they need. They don't have to spend all that physical time laying things out. This is not just a one-off, this is like in every industry. Is there an industry that's hotter than another for you guys? (mumbles) oil and gas, utilities, financial services is kind of the big ones. What are some of the hot areas that you guys see the most activity on, on this kind of new way of taking existing industries and transforming them? >> I don't know if I could pinpoint an industry, I really don't. I mean, because I see what we're trying to do with anti-money laundering and banking is really moving the ball forward. What we're doing with patient services and pharma in health care is pretty aggressive. Even some of the things that we're doing for some of the states and governments around citizen services to make sure that ... Cause all of us have expectations now on how we want to interact with government and our expectations are not being met in just about every department, right? So we're doing a lot of work with states around how to provide a better experience to citizens. So I don't know if I could pinpoint an actual industry. One of the fun ones that we just, that we're involved with our here in our patch is one of the big gaming companies in Vegas. We are doing a lot of video analytics and technology and again, it's something like 20 times faster being able to detect fraud, being able to figure out what's going on on a gaming table and how to provide rewards quicker to their customers, keep em at the table faster or longer- >> He's got to nice stack of chips. Oh, he's going down. (laughs) Give him a comp through, he's feeling down. Look at his facial expression. I can (mumbles) imagine, I mean, this is the thing. I would agree. I think this every vertical we see is being disrupted. Just mentioned public sectors. Interesting. We were riffing at an Amazon event one time around who decides with the self-driving cars? These towns and cities don't have the budget or the bandwidth to figure out and reimagine the public services that they have, they're offering the citizens. The consumerization of IT hits the public sector. >> For sure. >> And they need help. So again every industry is going on. Okay, well I want to step back and get some time in for analytics because you guys have been investing as a company heavily in analytics in the past 10 years. Past, I think, seven years, you guys have been really, really ramping up the investment on data science, analytics. Give us an update on that. How is that going? How's that changed? And what's the update today? >> Yeah, and it's a good point. I mean, and again, you mentioned those labs being here for 30 years. A lot of our data scientists and big machine learning and big data folks frankly started at the labs here years and years ago and so, we've now got one of the largest analytics capabilities, I think, of any services company globally. We called it applied intelligence. It's a combination of our analytics capability and artificial intelligence, and we basically have an analytics capability that's built into all the different services that we provide. So we think it's, everything's about analytics just about. I mean, clearly you can't do a consulting project unless you've really got a unique analytical point of view and unique data around assessing a client's problem. You really can't really do a project or implement a system without a heavy data influence. So we are adding, frankly, I think every day I'm approving more analytics head count into our team on the West Coast in lots of different practices. And so it disbands industries, it spans all the platform sets, that sort of thing, but we're the largest of most of the big data players. >> I think one of the consistent trends with AI, which is now being the word artificial intelligence, AI, is kind of encapsulated the whole big data world because big data's now AI is the implementation of it. You're seeing everything from fraud. You mentioned anti-money laundering, know your customer, these kind of dynamics. But you get the whole dark web phenomenon going out there with fraud. All kinds of underground economies going on. So AI is a real value driver across all industries around one, understanding what's happening, >> Sure. >> And then how to figure out how to applications development could be smarter. >> Right. >> This is kind of relatively new concept for these scale out applications, which is what businesses do. So how is that going? Any color commentary on the impact of AI specifically around how companies are operationally changing and re-imagining their businesses? >> Well, I think it's very early days for most of our clients, most big companies. I think, we've done some recent surveys that say something like 78% of our clients believe that AI's really, really important and they're not at all prepared to deal with or apply it to their business. So I think it's relatively early days. There's a huge fight for skills, so we're building our team and that sort of thing. We're also classic Accenture. We grow skills pretty well too through both on-the-job training and real training. And so I think we're seeing sort of baby steps with AI. There's a lot of great vended solutions out there that we're able to apply to business problems as well. But I think we're in relatively early days. >> It's almost as if, you know, the old black-box garbage in, garbage out. You have good data, >> Exactly. >> and you got to understand data differently, and I think what I'm seeing is a lot of data architects going on, figuring out how do we take the role of data and put it in a position to be successful. It's kind of like, cause then you use AI and you go, that's great, but what about, oh, we missed this data set. >> Right. >> You'll have fully exposed data sets, so this is all new dynamics. >> So you have to iterate through it and you'll have to (mumble) solutions that'll start and restart. >> All right, so final question for you. Talk about this technology hubs again. So you have the labs, get that. So how many hubs do you have, technology hubs? >> Well, in the U.S., there's 10. But I would say in the West Coast it's really San Francisco and Seattle right now, with San Francisco being our flagship and frankly it's a flagship in the U.S. We've had the 30 year presence of our labs here on the West Coast and we've had design studios on the West Coast. We've had our what we call liquid studios, which is a big rapid prototyping sort of capability. We've had our research, et cetera. We've pulled all of those locations, so our lab started in Palo Alto, went to San Jose and is now in San Francisco. We've pulled all those locations together into what we're calling the innovation hub for the West Coast and it's a five-story marquee building in San Francisco and it's where we bring our clients and we expect to have literally, I think last year we had 200 and something client workshops and co-creation sessions there. This year we think the number's going to go to 400 and so it's really becoming a fabric of all our practices. >> How important is the co-creation, because you have a physical presence here and it's the flagship for the innovation hub and it's an accumulation of a lot of work you guys have done across multiple things you've done. Labs, liquid labs, all that stuff coming together. How important is the co-creation part as a mechanism for fostering collaboration with your clients? Co-creation's certainly hot. Your thoughts on co-creation. >> Great question, and I would tell you Accenture's kind of gone through waves as technology's gone through waves and so we were always an enabler for a client's projects and we did a lot of project work. I think we're in a wave now where we're going to be the innovation partner. We continue to sort of be named the innovation partner or the digital partner for certain clients. And we're going to do that through co-creating with them, and it's not just at their site, et cetera. It's going to be co-creation in our labs where we're taking advantage of the hundreds of data scientists and computer researchers and technical architects that we have in our labs to create something that's new and fresh and purpose-built for their particular business model. So we think co-creation is a huge part of the formula for us being successful with our clients over the next 10 years. And so that's why we've put this infrastructure in place, expect it to expand and to be sold out and that sort of thing. But it's a good way for us to build capability and really, really viable solutions for our clients going forward. >> So it's not just a sales development initiative. It's an operationalized engagement and delivery mechanism for you guys. >> Exactly, exactly. It's not, I mean it has, it self markets but it's not about marketing. It's about, we'll have tours and we'll have a little tourism through our center and so clients'll say, Wait, look at that maker lab. Look what you're doing with that client. I want one of those, right? I need to do that in my business, even though I'm in a different industry. So it's not really a marketing tool per se, it's a way for us to interact and engage with our clients. >> Well, it's a showcase in the sense of where you can showcase what you have and if clients see value, they can go to the next step. It's an accelerated path to outcomes re-imagining businesses. Okay, final question. What have you learned from all this? Because now you guys have a state of the art engagement model, delivery model, around cloud, all these things coming together, perfect storm for what you guys do. As you guys look back and see what you've built and where it's going to go, what are the key learnings that you guys came out of the West Coast team around pulling it all together over the years? What's the key learnings? >> Well, I think that our clientele is just thirsty for innovation and innovation now. It's now about sort of let's envision the future and we'll get to it some other day. It's what can we do right now and what journey, what glide path are we on to change our business? So the pace is just radically different than it used to be. And so it's about changing, rapidly changing, putting real innovation on it, and collaborating with clients in a pace that we've never seen before. I mean, I've been here 32 years and I've just never the pace of change. >> That's great, John. So (mumbles), really appreciate it. We'll get a quick plug in. What's coming up for you guys? What's going on in the West Coast? What's happening? >> Well, we're in event season right now, so we just finished all the ... We're wrapping up Oracle Open World. We just won five awards at Oracle Open World. We just did an acquisition on the West Coast to beef up our Oracle capabilities. We've got ReInvent and we have all kinds of events coming up but it's a, it's been a pretty busy season. >> So cloud and data have certainly helped rise the tide for your business. >> 100%. I mean, cloud is taking Accenture from kind of in the back of the office and put us into the front office over the last 10 years. >> Well, certainly it's awesome, (mumbles), leveling the playing field, allowing companies to scale out very rapidly, bringing a devops culture, new kinds of modern application developments, real value being created, super exciting time. Thanks for coming in and sharing your time. John Del Santo here in theCube for Cube Conversation, senior managing director at Accenture. I'm John Furrier here in theCube studios for Cube Conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of live coverage with theCUBE here at Cisco live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John, for the co-founder of Silicon Angle. Co-host of the theCUBE, with Stu Miniman, analyst on wikibon,com. As well as Cube co-host many events certainly Stu is not a stranger to Cisco. Open-sourced. And overall, the discretion that digital is having on the enterprise. Our next guest is Michael Kay, global technologist of product strategy of theme software. Michael it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey John, hey Stu. >> So, you guys are here with Cisco Veeam, you guys have been a big success story we've coverd on theCUBE many times. You're up Cisco. What's the vibe here, what's going on in the show? >> So back in mid 2017, October 2017, we announced we were going to be on the global price list, and so obviously that this is different from last year in that we're having more conversations, people know what we're doing. For starters, asking how do we protect the network? How do we protect the ASA? Using the firewall and etc. It's very good to have those conversations with the enterprise guys. And they now understand we're able to protect their workload, their data. So, I imagine that it will be exactly the same when we go over to Cisco Live in the US, but this is obviously the first show that we've had where we are talking about availability with Cisco as a joint partner on their global price list. >> One of things that we always see is that with you guys, your logo is everywhere. You've got the big green Veeam. What's the relationship that you guys have with customers? Because you're playing a lot of great spaces. I mean, what's the main relationship in brand promise that Veeam has? >> So I guess from our point of view is that we come from SMB root, if you'd like. But over the years, over that last 10 years, we've developed that scalable product that allows us to protect the larger workload within the enterprise. We also have cloud offerings to enable our service provider partners. So, exactly that, we want to be able to play and protect data in whatever facet that needs to be. So, whether it be cloud, whether it be on-premises, SMB, commercial, enterprise, we want to be able to protect all of those workloads. >> So Michael, one of the things we've been talking about here at the show, you won't just go look at world's agents. It's a big ecosystem and it's been changing. Cisco has got a lot of pieces of big movement software that's happening to cloud and data center. They have dozens of storage relationships and that's where Veeam ties in a lot. Maybe gives a little bit of an overview, kind of the breath and depth of the relationship where you play in relation to UCS, Converged, Hyper Converged, all those pieces. >> Yeah so I guess Converged first. If we look at the majority of the data centers and the customers that we speak to there is still very much, there is a large footprint of Converged infrastructure where that be FlexPod, VersaStack, Pure FlashStack, or Vblock from a DeliMC point of view. And the good thing where we come in is that we have storage integrated in all of them. So, regardless of like, compute, however it brings a nice simplicity model to the customer from that stack. But for us to just slot into that and be able to leverage the storage integrations and to be able to take an efficient snapshot of those virtual machines and push them onto a, maybe Cisco 2600, that modular, scalable server that will both compute and high density storage really gives us a best of both worlds in terms of plugging it into that fabric interconnector. Making is converge backup story or converge available story. >> Yeah so, you mentioned a lot of options out there. Still, most customers, there are more customers that aren't doing some flavor of Converged drive or Converged than are - there is a lot of buzz behind the Hyper Converged piece of it. What are you hearing from customers? You know, you've said there's a lot of kind of CI versus HI that numbers show that out. I mean, there's a lot more solutions out there. It should be in the market a lot longer. But you know, where are the customers? What are some of the decision points and how has your organization held on them? >> So I guess where we are seeing things that are HyperFlex, where we also have storage integration there from a protection point of view. Seeing many of them feed into that main data center. So, we're protecting the data, we're using our replication engine to push data into that larger data center for hot DR or high ability type solution. And I think that's where we're seeing it. But we are also seeing it more HyperFlex or more HCI come into that main data center for some certain verticals from that point of view. >> Okay, so if I could just unpack what you're saying there, you know, mostly HCIs have been kind of the robust, smaller environments where you know, traditional three tier or CI has been there but we're starting to see that. That blurring of the lines between what is there. >> Yeah, people are definitely bringing that HCI, that simplicity, that scalable simplicity model into their main data center as it kind of merges with that converged offering right? So. >> Yeah, the other thing that's very clear, the Veeam show last year when we covered it really customers trying to bake out their cloud strategy. You know, how does that tie into all this discussion here? Cisco is talking a lot about multicloud, that's really the management plain, how do you see that from an availability solution? >> Yeah, okay, so yesterday I sat in the Keynote and reading some of the stuff, we had our sales kick off last week and some of our stuff really resonates with our message as well that's out there. So the whole multicloud, our tagline is around any app, any data, any cloud. So it kind of resonates with what Cisco is saying. And that's obviously a good thing. But, so whether that be the public cloud, whether it's to enable our service providers to leverage the Cisco technology plus Veeam to offer a service out to our existing Veeam customers. The On-Premise's solution. Or whether that'd just be on-premises they sense that we just talked about whether Converged or whether HCI top plate. >> What the big thing you guys learned at your sale's kick-off because we always wonder what goes on in these sale's kick-off. People like cheering, their making their quota, business is good, but they listen to customers. What's the big used cases that you guys are really doing well with Cisco on? I mean that's ultimately the pattern that has kind of emerged. There is always a best product. What's the hot, used case for you guys? >> So I think one of our biggest things is about how do we partner with the likes of Cisco. How do we leverage that relationship to bring more Cisco validated designs, reference architectures, from a technical point of view up. So when the good door, the numbers being rah-rah as you're in the sale's kick-off but ultimately it's about the vision. How do we go forward with that partnership? Being on that price list is really going to help us get into some of those accounts, from that point of view. But also, we've got, from a technical point of view, I know that we've got the design, we've got the model behind this. >> Yeah, when did you guys get onto the price list? Recently? >> Uh, I believe it was October. >> So just recently? >> So really recently. >> Some deals are just going to be flying in. Right? (laughs) >> Hopefully, right. >> What's the biggest challenge that you find with Veeam's customers? Because you guys have certainly done really well. Again, we've covered your success on theCUBE many times with other events, like Vmworld and others. What's the ah ha moment for the customers with Veeam? Is it just the easiest solution? Is it a technical paid point they saw? What's that moment when the customer really gets it? >> So, I think the simplicity, that easy-to-use, easy to deploy, regardless whether you're three, six tier host shop or whether you're a multi 10,000 VM type enterprise estate. It's being able to use that same tool-set to protect all the way through. That's really simple. We really want to keep that user interface really easy to consume, and use, and scale. So that's one of the key areas that I've seen that we're playing in. >> Alright, so it's 2018 now, we've got a looming, headwind that a lot of customers we are concerned about, haven't heard a lot about it at this show, but GDPR, that's definitely something on everybody's mind. Is this another Y2K that's going to slow down ID bind or are there engagements? How does Veeam work with customers? What's it going to do with the landscape of IT this year? >> So we were, we've been looking at GDBR Compliance and our messaging in those has been, we've been really working on how we start mentioning this and marketing this out from a Veeam perspective. So we're not going to keep, we're not going to get anyone GDBR compline. But what we are going to do is help you understand where that data is, how long has it been kept for, where is it kept, where it's stored, et cetera. So update three that we've released just before Christmas it was around location tag in. So if that back-up comes into a certain GO then we want to be able to tag that, and that tag stays with that back-up data wherever it goes. Then we've got Veeam ONE, the monitors and reports against that. So you know whether you've violated GBDR compliance or a violation of where that data should have be located. But it's one of the things that it's not a day that kind of goes back the moment where I'm not speaking to someone about GDPR. And obviously, it's really, it's coming around very fast. May this year, is when it comes into force. >> Are people shaking in their boots? I mean, I'm hearing, like, a lot of people really nervous. I mean it's kind not has been played up. Certainly the press has been covering it but I mean the Y2K problem, you remember those glory days, you know, the millennial, you know that bug never really happened. But GDPR is a freaking, hard-core enforcement. And the penalties are stiff. >> Yeah. >> I mean it's ridiculous. >> That's a big percentage of your gross income. Right, the people that I speak to are definitely aware and concerned that they need to be in this particular state by the time we get to May. It's not about waiting until that date in May. It's about how do we do it now and start understanding it a bit more about our data. Cisco yesterday, on the main stage said, "it's all about data." And absolutely resonates exactly with what we want to do. We want to be able to do more with that but also we need to understand what that data is and how long do we keep them for. Or why we're keeping it? And ask those questions to these new data protection officers, data-- >> Well people are having more data driven strategies and we were commenting yesterday. We didn't kind of, we didn't hear much here about that Cisco not using that data driven. Is it just not a real big data show or not a lot of AI here yet but if you got data driven, you better have data protection, right? I mean, you can't have both. >> They kind of go hand-in-hand, right? And I think that's another thing where we're coming into the fold. Is that we've got features in our tool-set that allows us to spin up that data, in an isolated network. We had to run test against them. Run compliance checks against them. To make sure that, one, the back-up comes up. So, when you're not waiting until that problem hits. So you can bring it up but also test against updates, et cetera. >> Alright, so here is a question for you. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Okay, "Well you know, I really am on-premises, on-prem." Stu, depend on how you want to argue that point. Well Stu and I argued about it yesterday about on-prem versus on-Premises. I'm on-premises, I'm getting my cloud operation. I've got my data protection. But I really got to get into the cloud. I've got some stuff in the cloud now. Cloud is my mision. I'm going to be moving to the cloud in a very big way. How does Veeam help me? >> So, we want to bring the technology that you've been using on-premises, hopefully, maybe Veeam, and we want to take that same, easy-to-use concept, that same UI that you've using and really, hopefully you've seen it as a simplistic approach to your data. We're taking the headache out of the data protection story. But if you are pushing into those public clouds, being able to give you a seamless way-- >> So same dashboard, same-- >> Similar tool-sets, exactly that. And being able to protect that. >> Across multiple clouds as well? Because multicloud is hot. >> Yeah, exactly, we want to be able to be like we are within virtualization. Being able to protect any workload on VMWare, Hyper-V, et cetera. We also want to be able to protect any of those public clouds. From using the same tool-set to be able to protect that same file format that we're backing up to, same fundamentals that we have. >> I want to get your view on Cisco Live here. You're in on Keynote, you go to number shows, you know, this show used to be, it was hard-core networking, it was all networking. CCIEs and everything. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone. They've got developers, got good storage ecosytsems here. How do you look at the audience here compared to say, a VM world or some of the other partner activities that you go to? >> So I think like couple of years ago, they were kind of saying that you need to broaden your knowledge as an IT consultant, IT person, within a company. You have to expand your technologies. You can't just be the networking guy. You can't just be the storage guy. And I think that we're, I don't know if you guys see it, but definitely seeing more broaden people like, again, like I said there, the people that I'm having conversations with at the booth, they're all aware of what we do now. So, they have clearly broaden their knowledge away from that networking. But, also with the likes of the DevNet. So like being able to code, and all of the API driven type stories that we hear. It's also being able to leverage that and push that into whatever that data center needs to be from an automation orchestration point of view. So, and everyone plays a part in that. Whether it's the storage, whether it's the availability, whether it's the compute vendors, whether it's the virtualization. Everyone has a part to play in that, that automation orchestration piece. >> Awesome. Well how has your experience with the show has been as a European flavor year, what's your take away? >> Um, I guess-- >> John: Customer action, good partners? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to your Cisco reps. Kind of seeing it from a Veeam point of view in your region. Understand a bit more about around GDBR. GDBR is coming in. So there is no way of getting around that. Understand what tools can actually help you be more compliant. Also, look at, I've spoken to a number of people around that conversion, HCI piece, and they weren't aware around the integration. So, go away and see if we do fit in that integration piece. Existing customers go away and find out that information, and yeah. >> So what's the difference between an North American customer and an European customer? Do they have little nuances? Do they have regional issues by sovereignty in countries? Is there a buyer behavior from a Veeam customer standpoint? Difference between a customer in North America versus Europe? >> So, I'm mostly over in Europe but the customers that we speak to over in the US, that's the most concerning part around that GDBR piece, there is still, I have that understanding of what GDBR is doing. If they are holding data. Especially these larger enterprises. They are going to be holding data for those European countries. So they need to be compliant that way. And that's the misunderstanding maybe from some of the people. >> So European are more savvier on the compliance side? >> From the people that I have spoken to they know that it affects them because they're in country and holding that data. However, it affects everyone. It's a global compliance if you're holding data from anyone. >> I think in North America they kicked the can down the road. Oh wow, GDBR's upon Europe. Alright, Europeans are very savvy on compliance. That's a huge issue, data drive, data protection. We're here inside theCUBE with Veeam software. I'm John Furrier and Stu Mimiman live from Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Munich, Germany; it's The Cube. Covering IBM; fast-track your data. Brought to you by IBM. (upbeat techno music) >> For you here at the show, generally; and specifically, what are you doing here today? >> There's really three things going on at the show, three high level things. One is we're talking about our new... How we're repositioning our hybrid data management portfolio, specifically some announcements around DB2 in a hybrid environment, and some highly transactional offerings around DB2. We're talking about our unified governance portfolio; so actually delivering a platform for unified governance that allows our clients to interact with governance and data management kind of products in a more streamlined way, and help them actually solve a problem instead of just offering products. The third is really around data science and machine learning. Specifically we're talking about our machine learning hub that we're launching here in Germany. Prior to this we had a machine learning hub in San Francisco, Toronto, one in Asia, and now we're launching one here in Europe. >> Seth, can you describe what this hub is all about? This is a data center where you're hosting machine learning services, or is it something else? >> Yeah, so this is where clients can come and learn how to do data science. They can bring their problems, bring their data to our facilities, learn how to solve a data science problem in a more team oriented way; interacting with data scientists, machine learning engineers, basically, data engineers, developers, to solve a problem for their business around data science. These previous hubs have been completely booked, so we wanted to launch them in other areas to try and expand the capacity of them. >> You're hosting a round table today, right, on the main tent? >> Yep. >> And you got a customer on, you guys going to be talking about sort of applying practices and financial and other areas. Maybe describe that a little bit. >> We have a customer on from ING, Heinrich, who's the chief architect for ING. ING, IBM, and Horton Works have a consortium, if you would, or a framework that we're doing around Apache Atlas and Ranger, as the kind of open-source operating system for our unified governance platform. So much as IBM has positioned Spark as a unified, kind of open-source operating system for analytics, for a unified governance platform... For a governance platform to be truly unified, you need to be able to integrate metadata. The biggest challenge about connecting your data environments, if you're an enterprise that was not internet born, or cloud born, is that you have proprietary metadata platforms that all want to be the master. When everyone wants to be the master, you can't really get anything done. So what we're doing around Apache Atlas is we are setting up Apache Atlas as kind of a virtual translator, if you would, or a dictionary between all the different proprietary metadata platforms so that you can get a single unified view of your data environment across hybrid clouds, on premise, in the cloud, and across different proprietary vendor platforms. Because it's open-sourced, there are these connectors that can go in and out of the proprietary platforms. >> So Seth, you seem like you're pretty tuned in to the portfolio within the analytics group. How are you spending your time as the Chief Data Officer? How do you balance it between customer visits, maybe talking about some of the products, and then you're sort of day job? >> I actually have three days jobs. My job's actually split into kind of three pieces. The first, my primary mission, is really around transforming IBM's internal business unit, internal business workings, to use data and analytics to run our business. So kind of internal business unit transformation. Part of that business unit transformation is also making sure that we're compliant with regulations like GDBR and other regulations. Another third is really around kind of rethinking our offerings from a CDO perspective. As a CDO, and as you, Dave, I've only been with IBM for seven months. As a former client recently, and as a CDO, what is it that I want to see from IBM's offerings? We kind of hit on it a little bit with the unified governance platform, where I think IBM makes fantastic products. But as a client, if a salesperson shows up to me, I don't want them selling me a product, 'cause if I want an MDM solution, I'll call you up and say, "Hey, I need an MDM solution. "Give me a quote." What I want them showing up is saying, "I have a solution that's going to solve "your governance problem across your portfolio." Or, "I'm going to solve your data science problem." Or, "I'm going to help you master your data, "and manage your data across "all these different environments." So really working with the offering management and the Dev teams to define what are these three or four, kind of business platforms that we want to settle on? We know three of them at least, right? We know that we have a hybrid data management. We have unified governance. We have data science and machine learning, and you could think of the Z franchise as a fourth platform. >> Seth, can you net out how governance relates to data science? 'Cause there is governance of the statistical models, machine learning, and so forth, version control. I mean, in an end to end machine learning pipeline, there's various versions of various artifacts they have to be managed in a structured way. Is your unified governance bundle, or portfolio, does it address those requirements? Or just the data governance? >> Yeah, so the unified governance platform really kind of focuses today on data governance and how good data governance can be an enabler of rapid data science. So if you have your data all pre-governed, it makes it much quicker to get access to data and understand what you can and can't do with data; especially being here in Europe, in the context of the EU GDPR. You need to make sure that your data scientists are doing things that are approved by the user, because basically your data, you have to give explicit consent to allow things to be done with it. But long term vision is that... essentially the output of models is data, right? And how you use and deploy those models also need to be governed. So the long term vision is that we will have a governance platform for all those things, as well. I think it makes more sense for those things to be governed in the data science platform, if you would. And we... >> We often hear separate from GDPR and all that, is something called algorithmic accountability; that more is being discussed in policy circles, in government circles around the world, as strongly related to everything you're describing. Being able to trace the lineage of any algorithmic decision back to the data, the metadata, and so forth, and the machine learning models that might have driven it. Is that where IBM's going with this portfolio? >> I think that's the natural extension of it. We're thinking really in the context of them as two different pieces, but if you solve them both and you connect them together, then you have that problem. But I think you're absolutely right. As we're leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, in general, we need to be able to understand how we got to a decision, and that includes the model, the data, how the data was gathered, how the data was used and processed. So it is that entire pipeline, 'cause it is a pipeline. You're not doing machine learning or AI in a vacuum. You're doing it in the context of the data, and you're doing it in the context about the individuals or the organizations that you're trying to influence with the output of those models. >> I call it Dev ops for data science. >> Seth, in the early Hadoop days, the real headwind was complexity. It still is, by the way. We know that. Companies like IBM are trying to reduce that complexity. Spark helps a little bit So the technology will evolve, we get that. It seems like one of the other big headwinds right now is that most companies don't have a great understanding of how they can take data and monetize it, turn it into value. Most companies, many anyway, make the mistake of, "Well, I don't really want to sell my data," or, "I'm not really a data supplier." And they're kind of thinking about it, maybe not in the right way. But we seem to be entering a next wave here, where people are beginning to understand I can cut costs, I can do predictive maintenance, I can maybe not sell the data, but I can enhance what I'm doing and increase my revenue, maybe my customer retention. They seem to be tuning, more so; largely, I think 'cause of the chief data officer roles, helping them think that through. I wonder if you would give us your point of view on that narrative. >> I think what you're describing is kind of the digital transformation journey. I think the end game, as enterprises go through a digital transformation, the end game is how do I sell services, outcomes, those types of things. How do I sell an outcome to my end user? That's really the end game of a digital transformation in my mind. But before you can get to that, before you transform your business's objectives, there's a couple of intermediary steps that are required for that. The first is what you're describing, is those kind of data transformations. Enterprises need to really get a handle on their data and become data driven, and start then transforming their current business model; so how do I accelerate my current business leveraging data and analytics? I kind of frame that, that's like the data science kind of transformation aspect of the digital journey. Then the next aspect of it is how do I transform my business and change my business objectives? Part of that first step is in fact, how do I optimize my supply chain? How do I optimize my workforce? How do I optimize my goals? How do I get to my current, you know, the things that Wall Street cares about for business; how do I accelerate those, make those faster, make those better, and really put my company out in front? 'Cause really in the grand scheme of things, there's two types of companies today; there's the company that's going to be the disruptor, and there's companies that's going to get disrupted. Most companies want to be the disruptors, and it's a process to do that. >> So the accounting industry doesn't have standards around valuing data as an asset, and many of us feel as though waiting for that is a mistake. You can't wait for that. You've got to figure out on your own. But again, it seems to be somewhat of a headwind because it puts data and data value in this fuzzy category. But there are clearly the data haves and the data have-nots. What are you seeing in that regard? >> I think the first... When I was in my former role, my former company went through an exercise of valuing our data and our decisions. I'm actually doing that same exercise at IBM right now. We're going through IBM, at least in the analytics business unit, the part I'm responsible for, and going to all the leaders and saying, "What decisions are you making?" "Help me understand the decisions that you're making." "Help me understand the data you need "to make those decisions." And that does two things. Number one, it does get to the point of, how can we value the decisions? 'Cause each one of those decisions has a specific value to the company. You can assign a dollar amount to it. But it also helps you change how people in the enterprise think. Because the first time you go through and ask these questions, they talk about the dashboards they want to help them make their preconceived decisions, validated by data. They have a preconceived notion of the decision they want to make. They want the data to back it up. So they want a dashboard to help them do that. So when you come in and start having this conversation, you kind of stop them and say, "Okay, what you're describing is a dashboard. "That's not a decision. "Let's talk about the decision that you want to make, "and let's understand the real value of that decision." So you're doing two things, you're building a portfolio of decisions that then becomes to your point, Jim, about Dev ops for data science. It's your backlog for your data scientists, in the long run. You then connect those decisions to data that's required to make those, and you can extrapolate the data for each decision to the component that each piece of data makes up to it. So you can group your data logically within an enterprise; customer, product, talent, location, things like that, and you can assign a value to those based on decisions they support. >> Jim: So... >> Dave: Go ahead, please. >> As a CDO, following on that, are you also, as part of that exercise, trying to assess the value of not just the data, but of data science as a capability? Or particular data science assets, like machine learning models? In the overall scheme of things, that kind of valuation can then drive IBM's decision to ramp up their internal data science initiatives, or redeploy it, or, give me a... >> That's exactly what happened. As you build this portfolio of decisions, each decision has a value. So I am now assigning a value to the data science models that my team will build. As CDOs, CDOs are a relatively new role in many organizations. When money gets tight, they say, "What's this guy doing?" (Dave laughing) Having a portfolio of decisions that's saying, "Here's real value I'm adding..." So, number one, "Here's the value I can add in the future," and as you check off those boxes, you can kind of go and say, "Here's value I've added. "Here's where I've changed how the company's operating. "Here's where I've generated X billions of dollars "of new revenue, or cost savings, or cost avoidance, "for the enterprise." >> When you went through these exercises at your previous company, and now at IBM, are you using standardized valuation methodologies? Did you kind of develop your own, or come up with a scoring system? How'd you do that? >> I think there's some things around, like net promoter score, where there's pretty good standards on how to assign value to increases in net promoter score, or decreases in net promoter score for certain aspects of your business. In other ways, you need to kind of decide as an enterprise, how do we value our assets? Do we use a three year, five year, ten year MPV? Do we use some other metric? You need to kind of frame it in the reference that your CFO is used to talking about so that it's in the context that the company is used to talking about. Most companies, it's net present value. >> Okay, and you're measuring that on an ongoing basis. >> Seth: Yep. >> And fine tuning as you go along. Seth, we're out of time. Thanks so much for coming back in The Cube. It was great to see you. >> Seth: Yeah, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, good luck this afternoon. >> Seth: Alright. >> Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back. Actually, let me run down the day here for you, just take a second to do that. We're going to end our Cube interviews for the morning, and then we're going to cut over to the main tent. So in about an hour, Rob Thomas is going to kick off the main tent here with a keynote, talking about where data goes next. Hilary Mason's going to be on. There's a session with Dez Blanchfield on data science as a team sport. Then the big session on changing regulations, GDPRs. Seth, you've got some customers that you're going to bring on and talk about these issues. And then, sort of balancing act, the balancing act of hybrid data. Then we're going to come back to The Cube and finish up our Cube interviews for the afternoon. There's also going to be two breakout sessions; one with Hilary Mason, and one on GDPR. You got to go to IBMgo.com and log in and register. It's all free to see those breakout sessions. Everything else is open. You don't even have to register or log in to see that. So keep it right here, everybody. Check out the main tent. Check out siliconangle.com, and of course IBMgo.com for all the action here. Fast track your data. We're live from Munich, Germany; and we'll see you a little later. (upbeat techno music)