(mellow music) >> Voiceover: Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE, here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. WandaJean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. >> Well we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. >> As Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our digital learning ecosystem. So, we have a learning management system, we use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and, you know, all the way around, create efficiencies. >> And how (chuckles). Are the employees willing to go there? Or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? >> Well, I'm a teacher at heart, so what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, "WandaJean, we really want to learn "how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, "there's lots of data." I tell them, you know, "Come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets," and then I want them to tell me the story about their process, and then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming, and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this." So, I want to make sure they're comfortable and, you know, listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process, I'll know how far I can go. >> Now are these kind of next-gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto? Or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and putting them onto? >> I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So, it's knowing where the tools are, and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools, and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business. And how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are, most of the time, digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. So we're definitely no short of tools. But sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out, "How do I get my process "a little more digitized and save myself some time?" >> So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through, in terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually, and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? >> Okay. So, I like to look at things from the triple constraints: Cost, quality, and speed. So, when you think about cost, quality, and speed, you want to take cost out of the process. You want to improve the quality by, you know, creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that, whatever it is, to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list, when it comes to, you know, how are we going to implement this new digital process, Smartsheet is up there. It's the all-in-wonder. I call it the all-in-wonder tool at work, and people say, "Okay, here she comes. "She's going to talk about Smartsheet." That's because, I always say, "Smartsheet does a thousand things." That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about a thousand things. I only want to tell you about the things that, you know, you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, "Look what else I found." So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together, and I say, "But did you see this?" And so, this whole, you know, Santa Claus is comin' to town (all laugh) That's kind of what it feels like. >> So, how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that, A, you know, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in you know, kind of how the teams form, and what's kind of the collaborative workgroup as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? >> I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So, what information is going into this process, what do I need to do with it, and then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff, from a process perspective? So I like that. The @mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those @mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments. And you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But, if you do this @mention, I've noticed that people, when they're using the app, you know, the @mention comes through. Even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, "Oh, somebody's talking to me here." And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So, another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So, a lot of meetings, "'Kay, give me the status, what's the status." Well we can certainly just automate those reports, and make it exactly what, you know, the executive or the leader wanted to know, from a high-level perspective. And so, we don't have to have as many meetings. >> I love it though. That collaboration means cutting out collaboration. >> Mm-hmm. >> That is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is, understanding the upstream and the downstream. Because we heard on the main stage, and we are hearing a lot today, about how it's providing much more visibility. And leaders are able to see the big picture, and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees, for the people who are several notches below, to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? >> Absolutely. So, inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team, and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and, you know, we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need, and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I looked at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great. But when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So, if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, "Oh, automation, it's coming, "and a robot's going to take over my job!" It's not that it's going to do, I have lots to do. But having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me, and 4,000 of them, and everybody might want something from WandaJean. So, I have a intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me, and I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones, and which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, "You know, what have you done for me lately?" And so, all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing, and I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more learning requests, and this many people wanted to learn about a tool, and, so I would have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. >> That's really interesting, right? 'Cause then you go from, the classic paradigm is there's data, right, which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight-up inbound form, to actually get a whole lot of information on what's going on in that community, and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. >> Yes, well we create job requisitions and we hire people for roles. You know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It will be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done, versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So, sometimes it looks really different, like, "Wait a minute, I think I need some more money." (Rebecca laughs) "'Cause I didn't get hired for this." >> Right, right, right, I've done so much more. >> Yes. >> Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization, and the ways in which the Smartsheet is helping break down those silos. >> Okay. So I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you that I believe that silo is an acronym for Secrets in the Learning Organization. And when you have those secrets, and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company cost, quality, speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes. And the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rockstars for the company. So, putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is, when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints, and you know, "Why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this?" Where, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. We can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we could have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without Smartsheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So, I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? (laughter) But if Bob gets pulled into that Smartsheet, it shrinks the world, and it makes our big giant company just that much smaller, and people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. >> Love to get your take on re-skilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're currently doing re-skilling in terms of tools to execute different, you're training people to probably be more collaborative by using these tools and that different types of process. So important that re-skilling happens in the future, as all the jobs change. Just, you know, are people up for this? Are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that there're different ways to get work done than maybe our tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back, saying, you know, "That's not the way we did it 20 years ago!" >> Exactly, you do have that, you do have that. But, you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company. We are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally but I think globally. So that just means, if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of, and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales, and that it's applicable. You know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So, create the fix, and then celebrate that socially, and show someone else, you can do it too. >> Rebecca: You can replicate this. >> You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see when you were larger, you know? You want to see the before and the after, and make sure that, you know, and when people see that, like, "It's possible? "I don't have to be, like, this superstar coder?" When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing, what our employees do. >> So, as a Digital Learning Evangelist, I mean, I don't know, how many are there of you in the world? And is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understanding? I mean, what is it like, and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? >> Well, in other companies, of course, our social networks, LinkedIn and those professional communities that I'm a part of, Smartsheet has a user group community, we can share there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer. And we have a Smartsheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. And you have people coming there and saying, "Has anybody ever done this?" When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing, and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that, you know, I found out that Starbucks actually used Smartsheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a Smartsheet forum out to their baristas, "Are you okay? "Can you make some coffee?" And, you know-- (laughter) >> Can you make the coffee. >> "And, oh by the way, take good pictures of the damage, "so we can submit it to our insurance." So, that's something that our company can use. And I'll take that back to our team, and say, "Guess what Starbucks did with this?" And, "Guess what PayPal did with this?" I sent PayPal's Smartsheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not just that they were impressed. It's that, over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, "We're going to create an integrated marketing calendar, "and we're going to use Smartsheet." That just made me feel so rewarded, that, you know, somebody is listening. You're not just talking! (Rebecca laughs) There are some converts! >> Great. Well, WandaJean, a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Please come back again. >> Yes, I will! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Fricks, stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (minimal techno tone) (mellow music)

>> Man: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's the Cube. (music) Covering VMworld 2019. (music) Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome, indeed, here to the cube and our coverage of VMworld 2019. We are in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. They're open, they're back in business and so is VMware. And we're watching the folks stream out from this morning's keynote session, Pat Gelsinger hosting that session. And it was an impressive setup to say the least. Thousands packing that ballroom downstairs for a plethora of announcements, all from Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Walls, Justin Warren joins us. We haven't been together for a while, it's good to see you.- It's been a little while, yeah. >> How've you been? >> I've been well, I've been well. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I'm surprised they brought us back together after the last time. >> I don't believe... let's not talk about that incident. >> I thought it went so well, we just end on a high note. But it is a pleasure to be with Justin, we'll be with him throughout the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, our coverage here. We're joined right now by two guests, Paul Savill, whose the SVP of Network and Technology Solutions at CenturyLink and Omar Sunna who is the Director of Digital Products at GE Health care. And gentlemen thanks for being with us, it's good to have you here on the Cube. >> Thank you John. >> First off, let's just, gimme, your both, your take just on VMWorld 2019. What you're looking for, what you're expecting, and kind of the early vibe that you have going on. Paul, why don't you take that first? >> Sure, one of the things I've really been impressed with is how VMware is expanding, the kind of open nature of it's relationships, it's developing it's ecosystem, really broadening it out, it's making a number of acquisitions to enable new capabilities. And we're really excited about that. CenturyLink and VMware have been partners for, I think, around 12, 15 years. As we've been building out our own cloud services and so it's a very exciting time to see all this technology coming together in the way that it is. >> I love with the way you put it too, acquisitions. Pat made a little comment about that, it's like, "I can't wait to find out who I'm "going to buy next." >> Yes. >> And they've been, certainly been in a full speed ahead modefor the past year, year and a half. Omar, you're take, early. >> Yeah, man, I think I look at it from a health care solutioning perspective and it's exciting to see this level of technology and kind of the building out of the ecosystem and what could it enable for health care consumers. Especially with the big focus around privacy and and data management. I think some of their, and security, some of their latest acquisitions could actually help grow that ecosystem and offer more options especially to the health care industry. >> All right, well now let's talk about your portfolio at work then, a little bit, at GE Healthcare. Obviously health systems, health care's a huge user you know, these days, well it's kind of simplifying it a bit, but just talk about what you're concerns are, what your attention is, and kind of the things that are keeping you up at night, these days, in terms of health care and what you're doing in the IT space. >> You know, I mean, I think the, you know when we look at our customer environment globally, you know, we tend to kind of summarize some of the key challenges for our customers around three pillars. Access, so being able to provide access to all the patients that need it, regardless of location. With aging population in a lot of developed countries, with also a lot of people having the means to receive more proactive health care, it is challenging the health systems to be able to provide adequate access to patients. Capacity, providing capacity when the resources, including the human capital resources, that health systems have. So how do you free up your specialists to make sure that they're able to provide the right level of patients who need it, patient care for the patients that need it. As well as clinical efficacy. How do we help with software applications, with technology, to help reduce the variation of care, and improve patient outcomes, regardless where the patient is receiving care, within the rural community or with advanced academic medical centers. So we try to kind of think of our solution technologies as helping our customers solve for access, capacity, and clinical efficacy. >> Yeah, so a lot of health care, it's kind of a retail setup in that there's lots of hospitals and other allied health professionals who have lots of different locations that they need to provide heath care for them and that technology needs to live where the patients are and where the doctors are. So it was interesting to see, in the key note, earlier this morning, talking about edge and different kinds of edge as well. We've got thin, medium, and thick edge, according to VMware. So how do you see that rise of edge computing effecting the way that you deal with health care. >> Yeah, I mean tremendous, actually, opportunity for us. And GE is working on capitalizing on the technology, on edge technology, to allow us to bring in AI application right to, where kind of within the customer network. And that is, that's helping us solve for a lot of concerns around private security as well as moving large data sets to the cloud to process, to be able to get benefit out of algorithm and additional applications. So that's actually an exciting area. And agree with you, I mean we're seeing more and more large distributed health care networks emorph, in the U.S. we've definitely seen huge merger and acquisition movement that we continue to see, and consolidation. And then we also see that globally. With regional delivery networks coming up and being able to have software applications live within this distributed network and provide information for the right clinician at the right time is a big initiative for us. And for us this makes a huge difference in the way our providers are able to deliver care for their patients. >> This seems like an ideal opportunity for the folks at CenturyLink to help you with that. >> Abso-- (nervous laughter) >> Yeah, that's right, I mean CenturyLink really, to that point, sees this landscape evolving rapidly. And we even have a phrase internally we use that, "The network is the data center." We believe that in the future, compute is going to be distributed so widely, in such a broad geography and dropped in places where it's most efficient to run it and where it's most efficient to connect it with network, that really, the data centers we think about it today, becomes this very widely distributed platform that is connected together with high performance networking solutions. And that's part of what we're working with GE Healthcare on. >> I'm old enough to remember when "The network is the computer" was the slogan that we're all following now, and it seems that's actually coming true now. Where we have this idea of it, it's not just cloud, and it's not just data centers, and it's not just edge, it's actually a combination of all of them. And you need to be able to deal with that technology wherever it needs to live. Which is, I think, is a positive change from what we were talking about a few years ago, where it seemed to be, we had to make one choice. Now the choice is you actually need a bit of everything. >> Right. >> Tell me about your decision, or at least in terms of on-prem, off-prem, and health care, I would assume, extremely sensitive, obviously, to security concerns and management and certain policies about who can access what, where, when and how, whatever. How are you going about making that decision in this new multi-cloud environment, this hybrid-cloud environment, when people are making migrations, you know, with their businesses, and they're going off-prem. But you, I would assume, have to be a lot more sensitive, or more sensitive to other factors than, perhaps, other businesses have to be. >> Yeah, we definitely do. There is, you know, with regulations, you know, and, for example in Europe, GDPR, there's in country regulations around where data resides. All of that kind of plays a factor in customer adoption of technologies and where they're comfortable. We've talked a lot of CIOs in the health care sector and a lot of them say, "Hey, listen we're on a journey, "we're used to hugging our servers, "we're used to controlling it, and technology has evolved. "But, in terms of our policies, ability to accept liability "of data breaches and what technology providers are willing "to sign up for. "All of that plays a roll in that journey." Like Justin had mentioned, it is actually a, in developing an ecosystem, where you have combination of on-prem and off-prem, is a lot of where health care health systems are investing their money. So we're seeing certain data that resides on-prem that is mission critical versus more historic data can go into cloud technology, cloud storage technology and others. But, there's no doubt that we're at an inflection point, we're seeing a lot more health systems sign up to cloud based SAS applications. Invest in private cloud hosting service, invest in also public cloud hosting services. And all of that actually will create, as a software provider, all that could actually help us create more opportunities and more solutioning for our customers. I love listening to some of the cloud computing power that would allow us to develop newer applications. So it's actually exciting, it's a journey with our customers, you know, we're choosing to kind of be alongside of our customers and help them. Doing a lot of education. And being able to have a relationship with CenturyLink, be able to see the advances and availability of resources that CenturyLink makes available for us as well as other partners that we have help us really make sure that we're able to build the right level of technology meeting the health care customer needs. >> So Paul, fill in the gaps a little bit about where CenturyLink is in trying to solve this, I wouldn't say dilemma, but it certainly is a puzzle of some sort, right, as decisions are made about what's going to be off loaded, what's not, how are we going to access, what do we allow. How do you see CenturyLink's role when you have a customer like Omar, like GE Healthcare, coming to you with their unique needs, and addressing those? >> Sure, well, as unique as GE Healthcare is in the health care industry, there are some common characteristics about how we are seeing enterprise customers look at these situations. And one of them is that placing compute on the premise itself, that, that is generally the most expensive real estate that an enterprise has when it has to go in the hospital, when it has to go at the retail store location. And a lot of enterprises today are doubling the amount of compute and storage that they're having at their premise locations every year because the volume is just growing so much. That's becoming a problem, because you don't want your, you don't want your hospital becoming a bigger and bigger data center, so to speak, right? And so the way that we're approaching the problem and working with this, is in VMware was actually, you know, expressing a very similar viewpoint about the edge and about how the thick edge and the thin edge, and the thin edge of the customer premise is where you want to have the lightest load, but you want to have the most critical applications that are sitting there, you want to have the information that you have to protect the most in a most guarded way that's most important for your operations there. But from there you can more efficiently run things from a distance backing out going all the way back to the public cloud core, if you connect it with high performance networking from end to end. And so what CenturyLink has been doing is putting together these solutions that make that balance of trade, so to speak, between the cost of compute, the cost of where you have to put it, to where it best can be housed, what kind of latency performance that it needs to have to meet it to the performance specification, all the way back to the public cloud design and how to tie it in to the public cloud. And that's where we've been building our competency and the solutions we've been putting together for customers. >> You mentioned the need for high performance networks in there so I've got to ask you about 5G. From what I know about 5G it looks like the kind of situation you have with health care, where you've got lots of mobile tablet devices, you've got lots of other actual equipment IoT devices in a health care situation. That seems like an ideal use case for 5G. Is that what hot 5G is actually for, is the hype real? >> Well, 5G is certainly going to transform the world in terms of it's ability to provide wireless high bandwidth connectivity and low latency connectivity to devices. But, edge compute is not about 5G. You can have edge compute without 5G. In fact, it's a bit of a myth that edge compute can't arrive until 5G comes, because edge compute is something that is available to do today. And, in fact, CenturyLink is deploying edge compute solutions with, by basically building fiber into enterprise locations and then housing compute at different areas of the network at the point that's most optimal for the solution. And there are a variety of wireless solutions that can be used in that campus environment other than 5G to connect wireless devices back securely and safely to that edge compute that sits there. >> But it seems like it still should be, or at least looks like it could be a game changer in what it's going to allow in terms of, I guess, advancing edge computing. >> Right? I mean, you're still going to provide new capabilities and new reach and new functionalities that don't currently exist. >> I take Paul's point, though, because there are other technologies like Wi-Fi 6, for example, which is, it's basically the same thing as 5G, it just uses a different radio communications mechanism. But, and I also take your point that you can do edge computing today, absolutely. You can put computing into retail situations and you can have, I mean we have tablet devices now. We have laptops. So we kind of have edge computing. We always have, it just now, now it has a name. >> Yes, that's correct. >> So, tell me before we let you go, Catalyst Award winner from CenturyLink and VMware, Paul, first off let's talk about how you assess that, what's the determination, the criteria, for that and then I'm going to let crow a little bit Omar, about receiving that award. But tell us about the Catalyst Award first. >> Yes, well we call it the Catalyst Award because, when you think about it, a catalyst is something that excites a chemical process. Technically that is the definition of catalyst. But catalyst, in the way we view it, is something that we wanted to recognize a person or a company, that we felt like was really driving innovation, that was really solving a problem and working, also collaboratively together with VMware and CenturyLink in solving some of these problems. So we looked at GE Healthcare and really felt like, in a place where certainly we have seen such great advances in health care administration and building to save people's lives. Oddly, medical errors is becoming an increasing amount of now the problems in terms of death rates. Because, while we have so many ways to solve problems, so many ways to address it, that portion of what's causing deaths is actually on the rise. And so GE Healthcare is taking the technology that they're deploying and helping to solve that problem, that's why we wanted to recognize Omar and the company today. >> An honor for you I would assume you're all pretty proud of that. >> Yeah, absolutely, and thank you, and, yeah, I mean it's was really fantastic to be recognized by our partners. And a great testimony to the team at GE Healthcare. And our team wakes up in the morning and our mission is to improve lives in the moment that matters. A lot of our technology is used in mission critical and the way we're able to deliver that to our customers relies heavily on our ability to leverage advances in technology and be able to improve our ability to deliver our different applications for our customers. So this, actually been fantastic, the relationship has been tremendous for us. Where we have hosted our solutions in CenturyLink, the level of support that we have received have really enabled us to deliver important application for our customers and meet their SLAs and meet their clinical use cases and the needs of software uptime. So that has been tremendous for us. >> Well congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Well then thanks for your time, both of you. And enjoy the show, enjoy San Francisco, we've got good weather this week. >> That's right, yeah. >> So get out and enjoy that, thank you Paul and Omar. Back with more on the Cube, you're watching our coverage here live in San Francisco in VMWorld 2019. (music)

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 22, brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. >> Valencia, Spain, a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Towns along with Paul Gillon, Senior Editor Enterprise Architecture for Silicon Angle. Welcome Paul. >> Thank you Keith, pleasure to work with you. >> We're going to have some amazing people this week. I think I saw stat this morning, 65% of the attendees, 7,500 folks. First time KubeCon attendees, is this your first conference? >> It is my first KubeCon and it is amazing to see how many people are here and to think of just a couple of years ago, three years ago, we were still talking about, what the Cloud was, what the Cloud was going to do and how we were going to integrate multiple Clouds. And now we have this whole new framework for computing that is just rifled out of nowhere. And as we can see by the number of people who are here this has become the dominant trend in Enterprise Architecture right now how to adopt Kubernetes and containers, build microservices based applications, and really get to that transparent Cloud that has been so elusive. >> It has been elusive. And we are seeing vendors from startups with just a few dozen people, to some of the traditional players we see in the enterprise space with 1000s of employees looking to capture kind of lightning in a bottle so to speak, this elusive concept of multicloud. >> And what we're seeing here is very typical of an early stage conference. I've seen many times over the years where the floor is really dominated by companies, frankly, I've never heard of that. The many of them are only two or three years old, you don't see the big dominant computing players with the presence here that these smaller companies have. That's very typical. We saw that in the PC age, we saw it in the early days of Unix and it's happening again. And what will happen over time is that a lot of these companies will be acquired, there'll be some consolidation. And the nature of this show will change, I think dramatically over the next couple or three years but there is an excitement and an energy in this auditorium today that is really a lot of fun and very reminiscent of other new technologies just as they requested. >> Well, speaking of new technologies, we have Dave Cole, CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. >> That's right. >> Chief Marketing Officer of Spectrum Cloud. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> So let's talk about this big ecosystem, Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> Solve problem? >> Well the dream is... Well, first of all applications are really the lifeblood of a company, whether it's our phone or whether it's a big company trying to connect with its customers about applications. And so the whole idea today is how do I build these applications to build that tight relationship with my customers? And how do I reinvent these applications rapidly in along comes containerization which helps you innovate more quickly? And certainly a dominant technology there is Kubernetes. And the question is, how do you get Kubernetes to help you build applications that can be born anywhere and live anywhere and take advantage of the places that it's running? Because everywhere has pluses and minuses. >> So you know what, the promise of Kubernetes from when I first read about it years ago is, runs on my laptop? >> Yeah. >> I can push it to any Cloud, any platforms. >> That's right, that's right. >> Where's the gap? Where are we in that phase? Like talk to me about scale? Is it that simple? >> Well, that is actually the problem is that today, while the technology is the dominant containerization technology in orchestration technology, it really still takes a power user, it really hasn't been very approachable to the masses. And so was these very expensive highly skilled resources that sit in a dark corner that have focused on Kubernetes, but that now is trying to evolve to make it more accessible to the masses. It's not about sort of hand wiring together, what is a typical 20 layer stack, to really manage Kubernetes and then have your engineers manually can reconfigure it and make sure everything works together. Now it's about how do I create these stacks, make it easy to deploy and manage at scale? So we've gone from sort of DIY Developer Centric to all right, now how do I manage this at scale? >> Now this is a point that is important, I think is often overlooked. This is not just about Kubernetes. This is about a whole stack of Cloud Native Technologies. And you who is going to integrate that all that stuff, piece that stuff together? Obviously, you have a role in that. But in the enterprise, what is the awareness level of how complex this stack is and how difficult it is to assemble? >> We see a recognition of that we've had developers working on Kubernetes and applications, but now when we say, how do we weave it into our production environments? How do we ensure things like scalability and governance? How do we have this sort of interesting mix of innovation, flexibility, but with control? And that's sort of an interesting combination where you want developers to be able to run fast and use the latest tools, but you need to create these guardrails to deploy it at scale. >> So where do the developers fit in that operation stack then? Is Kubernetes an AIOps or an ops task or is it sort of a shared task across the development spectrum? >> Well, I think there's a desire to allow application developers to just focus on the application and have a Kubernetes related technology that ensures that all of the infrastructure and related application services are just there to support them. And because the typical stack from the operating system to the application can be up to 20 different layers, components, you just want all those components to work together, you don't want application developers to worry about those things. And the latest technologies like Spectra Cloud there's others are making that easy application engineers focus on their apps, all of the infrastructure and the services are taken care of. And those apps can then live natively on any environment. >> So help paint this picture for us. I get AKS, EKS, Anthos, all of these distributions OpenShift, the Tanzu, where's Spectra Cloud helping me to kind of cobble together all these different distros, I thought distro was the thing just like Linux has different distros, Randy said different distros. >> That actually is the irony, is that sort of the age of debating the distros largely is over. There are a lot of distros and if you look at them there are largely shades of gray in being different from each other. But the Kubernetes distribution is just one element of like 20 elements that all have to work together. So right now what's happening is that it's not about the distribution it's now how do I again, sorry to repeat myself, but move this into scale? How do I move it into deploy at scale to be able to manage ongoing at scale to be able to innovate at-scale, to allow engineers as I said, use the coolest tools but still have technical guardrails that the enterprise knows, they'll be in control of. >> What does at-scale mean to the enterprise customers you're talking to now? What do they mean when they say that? >> Well, I think it's interesting because we think scale's different because we've all been in the industry and it's frankly, sort of boring old word. But today it means different things, like how do I automate the deployment at-scale? How do I be able to make it really easy to provision resources for applications on any environment, from either a virtualized or bare metal data center, Cloud, or today Edge is really big, where people are trying to push applications out to be closer to the source of the data. And so you want to be able to deploy it-scale, you want to manage at-scale, you want to make it easy to, as I said earlier, allow application developers to build their applications, but ITOps wants the ability to ensure security and governance and all of that. And then finally innovate at-scale. If you look at this show, it's interesting, three years ago when we started Spectra Cloud, there are about 1400 businesses or technologies in the Kubernetes ecosystem, today there's over 1800 and all of these technologies made up of open source and commercial all version in a different rates, it becomes an insurmountable problem, unless you can set those guardrails sort of that balance between flexibility, control, let developers access the technologies. But again, manage it as a part of your normal processes of a scaled operation. >> So Dave, I'm a little challenged here, because I'm hearing two where I typically consider conflicting terms. Flexibility, control. >> Yes. >> In order to achieve control, I need complexity, in order to choose flexibility, I need t-shirt, one t-shirt fits all and I get simplicity. How can I get both that just doesn't compute. >> Well, that's the opportunity and the challenge at the same time. So you're right. So developers want choice, good developers want the ability to choose the latest technology so they can innovate rapidly. And yet ITOps, wants to be able to make sure that there are guardrails. And so with some of today's technologies, like Spectra Cloud, it is, you have the ability to get both. We actually worked with dimensional research, and we sponsor an annual state of Kubernetes survey. We found this last summer, that two out of three IT executives said, you could not have both flexibility and control together, but in fact they want it. And so it is this interesting balance, how do I give engineers the ability to get anything they want, but ITOps the ability to establish control. And that's why Kubernetes is really at its next inflection point. Whereas I mentioned, it's not debates about the distro or DIY projects. It's not big incumbents creating siloed Kubernetes solutions, but in fact it's about allowing all these technologies to work together and be able to establish these controls. And that's really where the industry is today. >> Enterprise , enterprise CIOs, do not typically like to take chances. Now we were talking about the growth in the market that you described from 1400, 1800 vendors, most of these companies, very small startups, our enterprises are you seeing them willing to take a leap with these unproven companies? Or are they holding back and waiting for the IBMs, the HPS, the MicrosoftS to come in with the VMwares with whatever they solution they have? >> I think so. I mean, we sell to the global 2000. We had yesterday, as a part of Edge day here at the event, we had GE Healthcare as one of our customers telling their story, and they're a market share leader in medical imaging equipment, X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, and they're starting to treat those as Edge devices. And so here is a very large established company, a leader in their industry, working with people like Spectra Cloud, realizing that Kubernetes is interesting technology. The Edge is an interesting thought but how do I marry the two together? So we are seeing large corporations seeing so much of an opportunity that they're working with the smaller companies, the latest technology. >> So let's talk about the Edge a little, you kind of opened it up there. How should customers think about the Edge versus the Cloud Data Center or even bare metal? >> Actually it's a... Well bare metal is fairly easy is that many people are looking to reduce some of the overhead or inefficiencies of the virtualized environment. But we've had really sort of parallel little white tornadoes, we've had bare metal as infrastructure that's been developing, and then we've had orchestration developing but they haven't really come together very well. Lately, we're finally starting to see that come together. Spectra Cloud contributed to open source a metal as a service technology that finally brings these two worlds together, making bare metal much more approachable to the enterprise. Edge is interesting, because it seems pretty obvious, you want to push your application out closer to your source of data, whether it's AI inferencing, or IoT or anything like that, you don't want to worry about intermittent connectivity or latency or anything like that. But people have wanted to be able to treat the Edge as if it's almost like a Cloud, where all I worry about is the app. So really, the Edge to us is just the next extension in a multi-Cloud sort of motif where I want these Edge devices to require low IT resources, to automate the provisioning, automate the ongoing version management, patch management, really act like a Cloud. And we're seeing this as very popular now. And I just used the GE Healthcare example of that, imagine a CAT scan machine, I'm making this part up in China and that's just an Edge device and it's doing medical imagery which is very intense in terms of data, you want to be able to process it quickly and accurately, as close to the endpoint, the healthcare provider is possible. >> So let's talk about that in some level of details, we think about kind of Edge and these fixed devices such as imaging device, are we putting agents on there, or we looking at something talking back to the Cloud? Where does special Cloud inject and help make that simple, that problem of just having dispersed endpoints all over the world simpler? >> Sure. Well we announced our Edge Kubernetes, Edge solution at a big medical conference called HIMMS, months ago. And what we allow you to do is we allow the application engineers to develop their application, and then you can de you can design this declarative model this cluster API, but beyond Cluster profile which determines which additional application services you need and the Edge device, all the person has to do with the endpoint is plug in the power, plug in the communications, it registers the Edge device, it automates the deployment of the full stack and then it does the ongoing versioning and patch management, sort of a self-driving Edge device running Kubernetes. And we make it just very easy. No IT resources required at the endpoint, no expensive field engineering resources to go to these endpoints twice a year to apply new patches and things like that, all automated. >> But there's so many different types of Edge devices with different capabilities, different operating systems, some have no operating system. I mean that seems, like a much more complex environment, just calling it the Edge is simple, but what you're really talking about is 1000s of different devices, that you have to run your applications on how are you dealing with that? >> So one of the ways is that we're really unbiased. In other words, we're OS and distro agnostic. So we don't want to debate about which distribution you like, we don't want to debate about which OS you want to use. The truth is, you're right. There's different environments and different choices that you'll want to make. And so the key is, how do you incorporate those and also recognize everything beyond those, OS and Kubernetes and all of that and manage that full stack. So that's what we do, is we allow you to choose which tools you want to use and let it be deployed and managed on any environment. >> And who's... >> So... >> I'm sorry Keith, who's responsible for making Kubernetes run on the Edge device. >> We do. We provision the entire stack. I mean, of course the company does using our product, but we provision the entire Kubernetes infrastructure stack, all the application services and the application itself on that device. >> So I would love to dig into like where pods happen and all that. But, provisioning is getting to the point that is a solve problem. Day two. >> Yes. >> Like you just mentioned HIMMS, highly regulated environments. How does Spectra Cloud helping with configuration management, change control, audit, compliance, et cetera, the hard stuff. >> Yep. And one of the things we do, you bring up a good point is we manage the full life cycle from day zero, which is sort of create, deploy, all the way to day two, which is about access control, security, it's about ongoing versioning in a patch management. It's all of that built into the platform. But you're right, like the medical industry has a lot of regulations. And so you need to be able to make sure that everything works, it's always up to the latest level have the highest level of security. And so all that's built into the platform. It's not just a fire and forget it really is about that full life cycle of deploying, managing on an ongoing basis. >> Well, Dave, I'd love to go into a great deal of detail with you about kind of this day two ops and I think we'll be covering a lot more of that topic, Paul, throughout the week, as we talk about just as we've gotten past, how do I deploy Kubernetes pod, to how do I actually operate IT? >> Absolutely, absolutely. The devil is in the details as they say. >> Well, and also too, you have to recognize that the Edge has some very unique requirements, you want very small form factors, typically, you want low IT resources, it has to be sort of zero touch or low touch because if you're a large food provider with 20,000 store locations, you don't want to send out field engineers two or three times a year to update them. So it really is an interesting beast and we have some exciting technology and people like GE are using that. >> Well, Dave, thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE, you're now KubeCon, you've not been on before? >> I have actually, yes its... But I always enjoy it. >> Great conversation. From Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(calm electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here with two sets with live content, pumping out 120 years over the course of a couple of days, 28 hours of programming from the people making things happen, sharing the news, and the insight. We've got Sandy Carter, worldwide public sector vice president of partners and programs for Amazon web services. Sandy, CUBE alumni, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. >> Great to see you too, John. It's so awesome to be here in person, right? >> The news is coming more and more. We got health care news. We got this news, we got all kinds of certification. We just recently talked on a segment about all the great stuff on certifications, but healthcare is booming, okay? We got talking about delivering the kind of performance that people need in healthcare with data, and you've got delivery, destination is healthcare. Let's talk health care, what's going on? >> Yeah, so we made a couple of really awesome announcements around healthcare today. So if you think about it, one of the big trends in healthcare is digitizing health records, so electronic healthcare records to really help and assist with patient care. So, because that is so big, we launched an initiative for electronic healthcare records, migration assistance. And what that means is that, we have now added technical subject matter experts and industry subject matter experts in the healthcare space who understand EHR, electronic health records, to help us migrate at least 500 ISV applications over to AWS. This is really big news, because so far, most of those applications are running on-premises. So getting them over to the cloud gives them the scalability, gives them the agility, that they need to provide all of us better healthcare. >> Well, one of the big themes is the Epic performance, the database on the cloud. Cloud has given so much agility and has changed the game. I mean, I'm old enough to remember, I mean, we can look back on the shifts in technology. You had that era of healthcare where data and the records were super important. Privacy, lock it down. Don't talk to each other. Are we going to respect the privacy of the individuals? That's all now changed with horizontal scalable data, as Swami pointed out, who's the SVP leader of AI and the data for AWS, whole new paradigm of data architecture. This is disrupting healthcare. >> Yes And you've got the Epic situation. Take us through, why is this important? Why are we talking about Epic? >> Well, so EHR is one of the announcements. And then the second big announcement, is our Epic on AWS announcement. So, you may have covered this back in the August, September timeframe, we announced a new EC2 instance, called the M6I. And Epic, which is one of the leading global healthcare providers in the world, has been migrated to the cloud. And so, they started testing themselves, Epic started testing on the M6I. And so what we saw is a 40% performance improvement. Now that is, that's huge, as well as a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership. So if you're a partner out there, you're going to see, as your application runs on top of Epic, you're going to get that performance gain. And Epic has an amazing ecosystem, John. They have what they call the code travelers. They kind of exist on Epic, cause everybody uses Epic. Those ISBs are now going to get that benefit, and 90% of the current Epic customers. And then, our consulting partners are also going to see the benefit, because of that total cost of ownership reduction of 30%. So imagine you're a consulting partner, you're now going to go into a hospital that's using Epic and tell them that you can reduce their total cost of ownership by 30%. That's amazing! >> Well, first of all, the cost thing is amazing. But also, when you mentioned the instances, what's happening with the graviton and the processors and the performance you're getting in the cloud now, the applications are running faster and lower cost. So, you know, databases, they really want the boast horsepower. So you've got the cloud performance, you've got the lower cost. Why wouldn't anyone want to run it anywhere else? This is what I'm saying on my story I wrote Sunday night. All the modern applications will go to the best performance, even legacy apps. >> That's right, and I think this is so important because you know, you need performance, you need speed. You need to get the rest of this application migrated over. That's why we got the EHR migration initiative. And then if you couple that with our third announcement around authority to operate that now gives you that security and compliance, right? Because if you're a hospital, you can't risk having that patient information exposed. And so we introduced as an authority to operate a program that enables our partners to get HIPAA and high trust authorization faster, cheaper, so that they can move with this new digital trend that's happening all across healthcare. I mean, it is our fastest growing area today, growing at 105%. >> Yeah, it points to examine, it's another one of those areas that is urgent under COVID. It's exploding because of the demand, just on performance. And Swami said it today, also in the keynote, the AI data keynote, governance should be an enabler, not an inhibitor. >> Sandy: That's right. So when you start getting into governance where you can start managing the data in a way that's cool for people to use the data, but protect the privacy, you then can have the modern apps. >> And if I could just add on one thing there, today we talked about, you know, when you go on your digital transformation journey, it requires digital security, especially in healthcare. And so as you have those requirements, you have to be able to, not just get stuff to the cloud, it's got to be secure. And that's why HIPAA and high trust exist today. >> And these fine grain controls now available are amazing. So again, I love the way you guys are going in this direction with AWS. I got to say every year, it's like, wow, again. But I want to get back to this ISV angle because I think this is super important. Again, I teased this out on my post Sunday night, when I, after my sit down with Adam Selipski was that, if I'm a software vendor, an ISV, an independent software vendor, or a software owner, I want my app to run faster, period, okay? I want my app to make money, which means valued by customers. I don't want my app to be slower and not be seen in front of my customers. So again, ISV is now an opportunity, Epic is a shining example of that, where now as an ISV, I can innovate and not have to do the heavy lifting. This is a huge point. Can you just share some color on this, because this is like, I think kind of the elephant in the room. The ISVs are going to go where the action is. >> That's right, and you know, the Epic ecosystem is such a force. Epic being a global healthcare leader, getting that performance level, all of those codes, they call them code travelers, that exist around Epic. All of those applications can now take advantage of that performance improvement, which for me is a game changer because all that data, I mean, I know that, you know, I was just in an emergency room with my daughter. She had a trouble, we thought she broke her elbow. And, you know, we were sitting there waiting as the person's entering and waiting and entering and waiting. So that performance really makes a difference, right? In your customer satisfaction, in your patient care, all the things that really matter, the business outcome areas, not just the technology side. It's a game changer for healthcare. >> It's the delivery of one, your health, your life. And two, hassle time, avoiding the steps, waiting in the wrong room, going here, waiting for this, getting a test you don't need. >> Sandy: That's right. >> It's a hassle for the customer, but also puts pressure on the supply chain, the operational bandwidth, and with telemedicine around the corner, you know, everything is happening with telemedicine. Why I might not need to go to the hospital if I don't have to, so again, another big wave coming is telemedicine. >> Yeah, that's right, and in fact, we launched that healthcare startup accelerator, where we invited healthcare companies from around the world to come in and get extra support as a brand new partner, as a next gen partner, and that was actually one of the top areas of focus. About 40% of the companies came in around telemedicine. And one of the really interesting partners that came in through that accelerator was a partner named Get lab. They do, you know, surgeon training, which is quite fascinating, and they were doing that and Time named them one of the top, most innovative companies of the year in 2021. And they accredited a lot of their success to the healthcare accelerator that we just launched as well. >> So much action going on. I got to get your thoughts on just in general healthcare, do you find the vibe to be more from the doctors and the service providers? Because they're the ones on the front lines. They're in the foxhole, so to speak. It always seems to me that they always wish things went faster, similar to government workers, right? It's like, I wish there wasn't red tape. I wish it was easier. Why aren't we doing this? That seems to have been like, the culture. And now it's shifting back to, all right, now we're having fun. We're delivering care. We're riding the right wave. >> I agree, you know, these business outcomes make a huge difference, I think. And I think that that transformation that you're talking about, is occurring much faster than anybody anticipated. I predict in 2022, you're going to see this increased focus, not just on telemedicine, patient care overall. Like how do you combine the two together? How are you able to move quicker to provide more diagnostics? So for example, one of our partners, GE Healthcare, was using AI and ML with one of our partner programs and was able to automate the radiology workflow. I mean, just think about radiology, reading X-rays, how fast that can be with AI and ML. It increased the diagnostic accuracy by 30%. I think you're going to see lots more use of technology to speed up diagnosis, to increase that customer, patient care. I think that's really going to be the trend in 2022. And it's great for all of us. >> And computer vision, by the way, with explainable AI, can come in, talk about analyzing x-rays and or film, more and more tech coming in and machine learning is driving a lot of it. >> I completely agree. Machine learning, I would say machine learning and analytics, you know? Now that we've got the data and you know, the data, IDC says that data coming in from IOT sensors increased by four x since COVID, so imagine, you know, there are now robots working in the hospital, gathering your readings of your, you know, how strong you breathe, your temperature, all your vital signs are now coming in from IOT sensors. So you're just seeing this explosion of data and healthcare, which only makes diagnosis and hopefully cures, new vaccines, more possible because now you've got more data to work with, right? That data accuracy is going up. Data sources are going up. It's just a really powerful combination. >> Yeah, healthcare is great. Sandy, it's been an amazing run on the healthcare side. It's continuing to change, in a good way, how care is managed and delivered and dispensed and cost savings. I do want to ask you if you could point out to the audience, just from within the partner base, what's the big trend there? Because obviously they're all engaged, seeing all kinds of new things. Where's the innovation vibe? What are some, what's the pattern in the partners, more software development, more cloud, more AI? What's the, what would you, how would you rank the activities of innovation? >> Yeah, I would say there are five prime drivers today on the technology side, you know. First and foremost right now is IOT, believe it or not. And IOT, because it's driving so much data and you have to have data for the second big trend, which is artificial intelligence and machine learning. So that data is essential for feeding all the modeling that's going on. We're also seeing the edge come to pass really fast, right? A lot of work on outpost. In fact, at the conference, we announced that we just opened an outpost innovation center with WWT and Intel MDC. We already have an innovation center for outpost in Seattle. So we opened one in DC for our partner community as well. So we're seeing a lot of focus on that edge. Containers, as we talked about earlier, 60% of customers want containers. So our partners to be, need to be all over it. And then another huge trend in public sector is blockchain. So if you think about, you know, Panama, El Salvador, Ukraine, they're all moving to Bitcoin. And I just went over to the Wynn hotel cause we're here in Vegas, did you see how many vendors are taking Bitcoin out? It's amazing! And so all of that is built on blockchain. So we also introduced a set of workshops and POCs with our partners around blockchain because we see it happening in states, in countries, and then the countries drive everything else to have to use or leverage that chain for Bitcoin. >> Great trends, the tailwind, the wave is here. It's a big wave, healthcare, public sector, a lot of change. Sandy Carter. Thank you for the great commentary. Great insight, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Nice to see you too, yep. >> It's theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got two sets wall-to-wall coverage, here in person, live event, as well as hybrid, we have the software as well. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (calming electronic music)