hello and welcome to this cube conversation this is part of our continuing coverage of kubecon cloud nativecon north america 2021 i have a very special guest with us uh from a technology company that on any given day at any given moment has any number of 31 million discrete users coming in looking for a specific item or two out of 22 23 24 million who knows how many items that could be shipped from 15 16 17 000 different locations around the globe and we've got one of the key folks responsible for managing what some of us in tech would refer to by the technical term a nightmare uh gary white from wayfair welcome hey thanks for having me yeah so tell us about wayfair what is wayfair we're all going to pretend like none of us have heard of wayfair before despite billions of dollars in advertising what is wayfair what do you get what do you what do you guys do before we get into the technology and how it actually works yeah uh that's a great question wayfair it uh exists to be the destination for all things home helping everybody and create a feeling of being at home uh so that's like our primary goal from the um overall business objective specifically in the technology uh part of the company we strive to make development of tools that make the shopping process easier uh carrying one of the widest like spaces of items means that we have to have incredible resiliency in our data and access to that data and then we try to build world-class development tools to compete with uh talent market um that is some of the biggest firms in the world okay so so just so we're clear because i want to make sure you came to the right to the right place this isn't furniture con this is cloud native con and you're not an you're not an artisan crafter of bespoke end tables right so you you craft a very different thing which is the uh which is the technical infrastructure behind this tell us about your relationship with uh with cloud native technologies in the open source world oh sure absolutely so my experience at wayfair has mostly consisted of um exposing the release engineering process and making the process of developing tools easier i think most companies invest about or a lot of companies invest a significant amount of their engineering talent into being able to create a platform for their developers to work on top of uh that's the team that i'm a part of where we create a platform for our developers and a large part of how we do that is leveraging technology that comes out of the cncf so we'll be talking about uh automation tools um things that you may run in kubernetes to do batch jobs things that you may run in kubernetes to run uh regular microservices and applications and then ways to automate the building of those applications and the packaging of it so that it can ship to production reliably and so you guys you guys aren't just you know when we go back several decades there were customers and there were vendors and those lines are really blurred in the open source community they have been for a long time but i mean you're you're actually working not only to develop solutions for wayfarer but you're working hand in hand with other people to develop solutions that get propagated across industry tell us about some of those projects that that you're involved with with the open source community or at least where wayfarer is absolutely so uh wayfair has made an investment in the open source community specifically notably with the tremor project you can go to tremor.rs and i'm actually speaking about it at cubecon that's where the topic comes from tremor is a early stage and uh event processing system where you can give it a lot of data for it to be able to ingest and then spit out downstream to other systems you may want to send events and notifications out to multiple systems based on what you see you may want to throttle the amount of data that you have coming in and that was a big topic that i also mentioned at the cloud native con uh and at tremorcon where you can deal with this really massive volume that we have to do at the scale that we exist as a as a business and just um filter it so that it doesn't overwhelm everything downstream in observability's sake well you know that tremor must be cool if it has its own con right yeah that's very cool you know you've arrived when you've had a con eventually i'm i'm i'm working toward dave khan we we'd make it dave and gary khan if we need to but oh absolutely so can you can you take those concepts of events and and data flow and and kind of up level that in terms of the kinds of things that are happening between customers and wayfair on a moment-by-moment basis so so give me an example of like you know what what is an event sure yeah so events if you're familiar with the open telemetry or observability framework you might call them signals where you have something happen on your infrastructure that's processed in a way that you would want to record so you might have a log that you need to be able to trace through later in case there's something happens or you just want to be able to comb your logs you may have uh metrics that you're sending in like how many requests you've gotten or how many bytes you've been processing in your service uh you may have baggage that you associate with that data um so yeah all of these different kinds of signals as defined in the open telemetry spec are things that we support in tremor and we supported before the hotel project really made it a form it was something we did out of necessity and similar products that you might find are like log stash and elastic in that whole stack okay so if so if uh if i'm looking for something for my home office uh although you can see i've got tons of garbage already in my home office um what what happens to me as a customer if all of what you just described goes wrong what happens to my experience that's a great question so as we're talking about tremor if something were to go wrong it shouldn't impact the experience of the service itself because tremor is designed to not create any load on your service as you are executing it you have the option to run it as a standalone server where you give it the resources that it needs by itself uh if that turns out to be too much of a burden for the application and you need to do a sidecar kind of model where you actually deploy it alongside your application directly in the same pod or sometimes even in the same container as a different process it's lightweight enough that you can do that which is part of the reason why we like it and why we built it is that we found that many of the other solutions for processing these signals just simply took up too much compute to be competitive with what we were able to create ourselves how and how long have you been with wayfair uh i've been with wayfair for almost three years uh three years in october or it is october so three years hooray hey hey happy happy anniversary yeah so obviously you couldn't have predicted the you know the the massive shift in all of our lives um and maybe you didn't completely fully appreciate just how well prepared wayfare was for this crazy shift in all of our lives when you entered in um i'm not gonna let you pretend uh that uh that you know that you knew and that your your iq is 20 points higher than it actually is because you decided to go to a place that was actually prepared but what what is share with us what that has been like i mean what is it like to be somewhere where the sky appeared to be falling and then all of a sudden the demands went through the roof what was that like that was a extremely chaotic but ultimately uh successful time for the company obviously um it's shown definitely in what you can find um in our stock and how we've been doing with technology that we did very well during the pandemic we were able to use the technology that we already had and be effective in adopting some more of the cncf portfolio and some more of like cloud native practices to make the um to make our infrastructure run better than it ever did at a time where we were in a crunch to be able to do better than we ever um had as a business and i believe that those two things are related the or this is my personal philosophy for sure that i believe that the adoption of these cloud native practices uh especially being pushed from the platform team that i work on were instrumental in being able to create an environment where developers can deliver value more reliably where then the experience of shopping at wayfair becomes dramatically better and can handle the scale that you see when everybody decides to start shopping everybody decides to start furnishing their home office i was going to make a joke that i bet that at least one of those things behind you was from wakefield you could be right although although some of the things over my shoulder are very strange movie prop type items so but uh but you would be you would be guessing correctly i was very very excited to talk to you um from uh from a technology standpoint because again you guys were prepared for this you you can't respond uh in a way quickly enough that doesn't crush you unless you've prepared and you've got a framework that draws upon cloud native technologies just just as you as you outlined um so against that backdrop what are you seeing in uh from a technology standpoint in retail in general are you are you plugged into that much think of think of legacy uh furniture outlets trying to pivot into the world of cloud native native take your take your wayfarer hat off you know your partisan hat in terms of competition off for a moment and and talk to me about you know if you're advising a fill in the blank legacy retail store that's just dying right now that wanted to have an online presence from a technical standpoint how would you advise them what would you steer them in the direction of i would definitely say that um just in time engineering has actually served wayfarer extremely well where we're not over engineering the solutions and using the big fancy tools until we know that we need them so i think that when we see businesses or we see anybody any organization that decides to adopt everything first and then see whether or not it scales up they don't see the results that they wanted because they're not using something that's appropriate for the size of the problem that they're trying to solve so for example if if an experience that i can share from what we went through uh i was part of and i've spoken and have some posts about um like being able to scale up just the automation infrastructure for wayfair where we were using a solution that worked pretty well but we didn't think about what was going to happen when it grew and we didn't react when it actually did grow and so by instead reassessing okay we're a different size company now we have different size needs for automation and different flexibility requirements to be able to use it effectively we need to be able to adopt containers we need to be able to support deployment into kubernetes how can we get there and then continuing to evaluate that even during the process of building and during the process of making that available to the rest of the company i think that if you're starting that process fresh or even if you're in the middle of that process it's important to right size the solution and consider whether or not it it's if your online business isn't mid-tier but it's enterprise then you need to build a system for that if you have an online system that's actually doing not much of your business don't build for the enterprise yet build for the size and then continue to scale it up as you go um another thing that i i just have to plug about the cncf solutions is that they're incredible at being flexible to that scale that if you pick things that go from low to mid tier then you can hand off from mid to high tier and then from high tier into enterprise scale and i think that those things are available in the cncf landscape and it's part of why we're excited to to be part of it ourselves so if you had a magic wand and you could solve one headache that you experience in your daily life from a technology perspective can you can you think of anything that you would uh you would conjure up absolutely uh i i struggle and have struggled pretty much my entire career uh with being able to get like a good picture of the adoption of any given tool within the company and i know that perhaps not every engineer um that works with technology within a big enterprise firm has to think about whether or not their tool is being used a lot um folks may not think about is the person next to me using python or is the next person next to them using java um being able to have that kind of insight into what people use how frequently they're deploying and how much they use it would be an incredible gain for us to be able to make better decisions about the platform of the company yeah yeah and you know you know the uh potentially the irony there is um at the sort of tip of the spear of your business understanding the customer everything about them you possibly can is so important to give them a really really good experience and sometimes enterprises that have that know all sorts of information about me don't know what their developers are doing in a whole list in a holistic fashion uh with a few clicks i can tell you exactly how many orders i've ordered from get from a given online retailer in the last nine years um but uh but i doubt they could tell me a lot about some of their infrastructure so that's that's interesting uh well what else what else can you share with us about wayfair are there any anything that's not super proprietary and secret that you could share that's an interesting data point we were joking beforehand about yeah what is it is it 8 billion in your sales is it red staplers or uh any kind of factoids that people would be surprised about yeah i i think folks um something that's definitely not proprietary because it's literally on github.com uh we just recently started putting a lot more elbow grease into our open source repositories it's becoming hacktoberfest now and we're very excited to be able to have these kind of more polished products things that we expect people to be able to contribute to where not even a year ago it wasn't uncommon to have teams within the company that would open source their project and then they would completely lose track of it and we had like some um we had to create new organizations to actually maintain them over time so i i feel like a really exciting thing that we're doing now is contributing to open source and earnest and actually getting developers time scheduled to be able to dedicate to that effort um i think a lot of the biggest companies that are the most successful uh make time for their developers to be able to contribute back as well as being able to contribute just to the proprietary code that every company has to maintain absolutely because human as human beings we don't want to be toiling in obscurity right and uh you know at what becomes a soul-killing exercise when you can actually get out there and have that sense of community uh which is you know it's central to uh to open source it's a testament to wayfair that they know that it's in their best interest as a as an organization to nurture that kind of talent uh uh within so uh on that on that very positive note uh i'd like to thank you so much for your time gary um and i appreciate the uh the plug for uh for shoes uh over over over your shoulder uh and uh just just wanna say again thanks a lot uh best of luck with your uh with your talk for q con and with that i will sign off thanks for joining this cube conversation with gary white of wayfair in our continuing coverage of kubecon cloud native con north america 2021 i'm dave nicholson thanks for tuning in you

(upbeat music) >> Hi welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host Donald Klein. As digital transformation continues to impact industries, the application workflows employees rely on on a day to day basis are becoming increasingly customized. This trend towards customization is presenting new challenges for the workforce of the future. To talk about that challenge, I'm here today with Gary Mahotra, VP of Product Marketing at WhatFix. >> Hi Don, thanks for having us. >> Glad you're here. So this conversation is kind of following up on an earlier conversation we did with Vara Kumar about some of the challenges for the workplace of the future. >> That's right. >> And of particular interest is you guys have done some new survey work, right, around some of the challenges or the new challenges that we have in the workplace around using applications. So I wanted to kind of have you talk a little bit more about that. But maybe before we do that, why don't you just refresh us and just explain Whatfix does and kind of where they fit in. >> Great, so Whatfix is a digital adoption platform. We provide on-screen guidance, self-help, and automation capabilities to enterprises and employees to really drive up adoption of the features and their applications across all cross application workflows. >> And so the important point there, this is what you call kind of in-application guidance, right? >> That's right, yes. >> All right, great. So you're providing screens that help people navigate these very complex apps that people are using on a kind of day to day basis, right? >> Yes, and the screens can be smart tips, pointers. They can be interactive walk throughs and easy flows. They could be better self-help across applications. They take a variety of forms. >> Okay, got it. Now this is a super hot area, right? You're with a company, you guys have seen fantastic adoption of your solution. I think you were mentioning to me that you guys have an NPS score that's in the 100th percentile, which is sort of unheard of for a software company. So this is a hot area, but we want to understand why it's a hot area. So you guys have been doing some survey work around the the future of the workplace. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about that survey and kind of what are the kind of, some of the things you found? >> Sure. So you know, we surveyed 500 enterprises in North America and we looked across areas, but also focused on the CRM area and what we found is 75% of sales reps in an average enterprise do not regularly use the CRM system and we also found that 90% of these enterprises believe that digital adoption and learning in the workflow technology would increase their employee productivity and increase the employee experience. >> Okay, so let me understand why that number is so high, that 75% of sales reps aren't using their CRM application and then, I mean obviously, CRMs have always been the bugaboo for a lot of reps, right? Filling in the data, as you said, but really in today's world, it's even more of a problem isn't it because these CRM apps are actually being sort of highly customized to the individual kind of workflows of different companies. Is that right? >> Absolutely. So you know, Gartner has the statistics that an average company has 14 different CRM applications or modules that a sales rep is using everyday and these are heavily customized to organizations and sometimes you know, within different business units and geographies, within an organization. Obviously, customers are different globally and products that they're selling are different so the CRM has to be customized and I think you'll add to that the complexity that up to another two, 300 cloud applications that integrate with the CRM in and around ad and then you know, the API, three API world, there's so much across application web flow that it's not easy for an average employee or sales rep to keep up with. >> Got it, okay. So there's kind of two challenges here, right? So the CRM application itself, right, is going to be sort of specific to lots of different workflows, even within business units, right? That's a huge challenge for somebody working in a company to kind of learn all that, right? And now what you're saying is that actually, it's even more complex, right, because you've got a lot of other applications that are integrating in and interfacing, right? >> Gary: Absolutely, absolutely. >> So it's kind of like a cross workflow challenge to be able to understand all this stuff. Is that right? >> Absolutely. And you know, with the movement to the cloud, all of this is rapidly evolving. There used to be a time when product software companies would release new releases once in 18 months. Now it's twice in two weeks, right? And so there's that infusion that, you know, even a sales operation manager or IT manager and learning and developing managers have to keep up with and it's certainly difficult for the average employee to keep up with all this new functionality. >> Great. So APIs in the clouds are kind of driving kind of just increasingly evolving applications that are becoming even just a challenge to kind of keep up with them as they're evolving, kind of let alone kind of learning them end-to-end. Right, yeah. >> Absolutely. >> So this is kind of, what you guys are tackling is really kind of almost a learning and adoption problem. Is that right, more generally? >> That's totally accurate and more specifically, you know, we're enabling learning in the flow of work because there is this whole megatrend of the merger of learning and work together because there's so much that an average employee has to learn. There's so many applications that it is not practical to expect an employee to attend a couple weeks of training. They're going to forget 90% of that within a week and then as their work-life progresses, the statistics from LinkedIn and Deloitte, you know, employees are only able to spare 1% of their average work week toward formal learning. So there's no choice other than you know, enabling them throughout their workday, throughout their applications with sort of micro moments of learning, in-the-app learning, like you said. >> That's a fantastic comment there, sort of what do you call it? Micro learning. >> Micro learning moments. >> Micro learning moments. >> In the flow of work. >> That's fantastic, okay. And so that's really what you're saying is the people don't, you know, the old school way was to attend a training class, get up to speed, right, and then sort of use that throughout the year. Well, that doesn't work anymore. >> Doesn't work at all. >> Okay, got it. Right, so then talk to us a little bit about kind of what WhatFix does to kind of do that. So you're providing an application that kind of provides kind of guidance screens, is that right? >> Yeah, so we basically provide three things. The first is what you said, we provide step-by-step guidance, content. So if there's a new user joining the application, they're guided as to where, a tour of the application or what are the key high value things they should be sort of interacting with. The other thing we do is we're providing many elements, or many learning task lists that a user's required to complete and when they do, they're actually clicking through the application. This is not a YouTube video they're watching offline and hopping where to get back into the screen at. This is actually them clicking through the screen. The second thing we provide is you know, better self-help across the enterprise. You know, when they're actually using our self-help widgets, they're able to get personalized, contextualized content based on who they are, where have they clicked before? Which department do they belong to? So they actually get relevant context right there. The third area we provide is what we call automation. So a lot of the processes that sales people and employees will have to do is to click, you know, empty clicks and navigational clicks and a lot of times spent on data entry. So we have a whole automation framework where we just eliminate the manual processes completely and we automate them and then we have bots that you can use for data entry so it's very easy for employees. >> Understood, understood. So then kind of walk us through what the typical kind of adoption cycle for a customer who says okay, you know, yes, we understand our whole kind of, we've gone through a period of digital transformation. We now have a lot of very essential applications that kind of manage our day-to-day workflow inside our company, but the challenge is getting everybody to use them in the right way and kind of populating them with data in the right way. We'd like to look at your solution for helping us kind of get better at that or at least help our employees get better at that. What is the journey that they go through from kind of beginning to end to kind of enable this using your system? >> So great question, Don. So I think the journey that we undertake together with them, is to first understand what the workflows look like across applications, where they're excessively long or manual or nonproductive so we can apply the right, you know, digital adoption platform, widgets or right functionality so we have the maximum impact. So that's sort of the first phase. Second, what we do is we look at, you know, the key workflow areas that their, you know, departments or their functional heads want them to use to have the maximum impact on productivity or the maximum impact on business outcomes and we basically authored our content on top of that. Now the reason it is so fantastic is once you've actually authored some step-by-step guidance, you know, onto say, Salesforce, using our content, that automatically is not only available in the application when you log into Salesforce, but it automatically gets converted into multiple formats. It gets converted into a video, in LMS, a course that you can take, a slideshare, a PDF, an article, and these are automatically sent throughout the enterprise. So even if the sales person is not in Salesforce doing work, they're on their mobile phone, perhaps, you know, interacting with a chat bot or maybe they're taking a LMS course, they have the same in-app content and guidance available throughout. We call it adoption everywhere and then, you know, maybe they're on the road, they see something, they read it. In one click, they can see live and they actually get back into the application to really execute that process. So you know, call it learning by doing. So that's what's so unique about you know, digital adoption platforms and this takes six to eight months. You know how hard it is to recall videos or how to use every aspect of the application. Now it takes you know three to four weeks. >> Interesting, interesting. So in a former life, I was once responsible for developing the user manual for our application which we sold within the enterprise, right? And everything was all written out in text. Well that's almost a bygone era now, isn't it? >> It is because I'm sure things change so fast and you know, not everybody likes to read text. A lot of people are visual learners. They want to see it in video. Some people are kinesthetic learners. They want to actually learn by doing and so that's what visual adoption enables. You don't lose the text, but you don't have to start there. You know, we give you the text based on how do you use the application? >> Interesting. So you're actually providing learning materials. >> Absolutely. >> For future consumption based on how people are using applications today. >> Absolutely, and then anytime you go back, you know, a month or two later, within the application, change the workflow, the process, automatically, all of the learning materials and all of the five or six formats I mentioned, regardless of where they are, is forever linked and automatically gets updated. So you don't have to, you know, worry about, okay, I made this paragraph change. Where are the 100 places I now need to go and change that? So that problem is solved forever. >> Interesting, okay. So let's just talk, you know, as we kind of wrap up here, let's talk a little bit about so the survey found that kind of 75% of you know, reps, particularly with just an application on CRM, right? I'm sure you got similar data for lots of other application categories, but something like CRM is a little problem point for a lot of companies, right? >> Yes. >> So people are, companies are adopting your solution in order to kind of keep the teams updated on how to use the applications, how to make sure that the data's properly populated right and even, you know, drive kind of materials and intelligence from all that usage history, right? >> Gary: Yes. >> So where do you see this going? What's the kind of workflow of future going to look like once solutions like yours have kind of been adopted here? >> Yeah, so I think that's a great question. I think what we see is that you know, the workflow of the future's going to have three things: one, there's going to be more and more applications in the cloud, connected in more and more ways with each other through API's and more and more customized. So you know, a future worker has to be digitally savvy, up to digital kosher and become comfortable navigating in this complex, highly digital world across multiple applications. So that's one. I think the second trend is they're going to have to focus, most employees and companies have the workers and employees focus on the most critical activities and be comfortable with bots and automation doing the routine tasks and the data entry and you got to be comfortable with giving up some work and I think the third thing is you know, these workers and employees have to learn to live with these bots and automation and be willing to accept hyperpersonalized you know, digital guidance and be comfortable acting on it. So when you log into your Salesforce, you may be shown a completely different sale content because you've been with the company for 10 years, you're a rockstar seller and you need a different level of sort of high-end learning versus you know, I may be shown a totally different set of content because I've been clicking and searching a lot on some topics. I'm a new sales rep or employee and I've not met my quota. And that's surely the future and I think companies and enterprises, you know, who are comfortable with that, you know, will succeed and we're certainly there to help with that journey. >> Wow, so it's interesting. So hyperpersonalization of application content. >> Absolutely. >> Is kind of the new trend that's going to be happening which presents a whole kind of learning and adoption problem in it of itself, is that right? >> Well, it does, but it also solves the problem because if you're presented content that's not contextual to who you are, how long you've been at the company, what you've been looking for, most likely, you're going to get distracted and not adopt the application or not do what you would do. But if you do get that, then your adoption really goes up the roof, you're really happy. You got the, it's like the application understood what you were trying to do and guided you in doing it and that's your best buddy, right? It's actually going to solve the problem. >> Okay, fantastic. So love that story. Like what you're talking, understanding what the challenges are for workplace of the future. So on that, I think we're going to close out here now and I'd like to thank everybody for joining us for this Cube Conversation. I'm Donald Klein and we'll see you next time here on the show. >> Gary: Thank you, Don. (upbeat music)

>>live from Washington, D. C. >>It's the Cube >>covering Bumi World 19. Do you buy movie? >>Hey, welcome back to the Cube. We've got candy. That's right. I am Lisa Martin in Washington, D. C. At booming World 19 with John Ferrier and John and I are excited to be talking next with a chief technology officer of candy dot com. Gary, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you for having me great to be here. >>So tell our audience about candy dot com Guinea all that you want dot com cool stuff. >>It is cool stuff. It is the endless. I'll just like going to the supermarket and never runs. Oh, it's absolutely perfect. That's actually how we started knowing that there was so much candy out there that people wanted in the lines just weren't long enough to put him in, no matter where you checked out, and we started off being the online candy store, which was a foot in the door, but it was a very small opening at that time. >>One of the things you said when I met you today whilst eating candy that you guys brought thank you very much for that was very appropriate. Um, was that candy? Is recession proof? >>It is. It's it's ah, you know, good times, bad times. You know, people are gonna have birthday parties. People get married holidays. They're going to come. You know, you've had a really great day. It's a candy bar. You know, you've had a really bad day. It's the candy bar. That's just it's an impulse buy, but it's an impulse buy with your favorite. I mean, it's something to comfort more than anything else, actually. And the technology side talk about how you guys were organized. What? Some of the challenges and how does Bumi fit in? Take us through the journey. Sure, when we started out, we thought, How hard could it be doing? Data entry will get the orders. They'll come across, we'll have some people. Instrument to the system will start filling up, you know, and then everything else will take care of itself. And within about a few minutes, we realized that that was probably not going to work. It was not scalable because first of all, data entry is air pro. You know, if you have someone actually trying to do with their, it's not gonna work for us. So we realized that there was a mechanism out there with Edie I and we went to 1/3 party provider to help us with the FBI. And that's how we started with the first couple of integrations and it was good. It got us off the ground and got us further into that door. >>So you started with, um, how many different partners trading partners take us back to kind of the last 10 years of candy dot com and how that Trading Partner Network has grown. >>Oh, it's like the journey. It's still we starts with the first step. We had one that was interested, one that wanted to work with Austin, and we started to do the work with them and figure out how to handle it. But they had multiple divisions, so, you know, there was only one that was 32 actual integrations that had to be done on being a traditional brick and mortar. It's very competitive. So once the word got out that they were work with us, there was a couple other. So we had six pretty big ones lined up early on that we needed to have integrated in up and running very quickly. >>And from a digital perspective, what were some of the initial system's applications that you implemented just start being able to manage and track those trading partner interactions to ensure that you're able to deliver? You know what? The candy, the candy demand that you need to fill? >>It was, sadly, a lot of C S V. A lot of email, a lot of phone calls back and forth. There was a lot of hours, and it was one those ones where we would really just bring in temps and try to keep up with it did not really have a repeatable process or a good technical footprint of what we needed to d'oh way didn't know what we didn't know when we started, and we very rapidly came to become aware of what we needed to do. >>So starting with air P Net sweet brought net Sweden two years ago. Tell us about that and what you thought was gonna solve all of our problems. Well, that's why it's >>a great package because it brought us both order management and it brought us here. Pee in. There were so many models and so much technology behind it and they have a warehouse module. There's, like all we could grow forever With this, it will never be bounded. This is gonna be fantastic. But what we forgot is that it was only as good as the data in there. And if we're using as a manual data entry, it's not going to meet our needs. We needed to come up with a better way in a more efficient way to get the data in. And this was still back in the day when we're trying to fulfill something within a week, much less where we're at today. >>Okay, so where does Bumi fit into play? >>We realized, unfortunately that even when you have an integration up and running and as good as the integration is, some of your trading partners will have changes. They're going to give you a different reference number. They're gonna give you a different requirement. They're gonna make something that was optional now mandatory. So we had problems because it wasn't just also that was impacting everyone that was doing an integration with that trading partner had it. So if I had outsourced it and there was 100 people that had that map. We were one of 100. Sometimes we were one, and sometimes we were as far away from one is possible and you understand that, and you appreciate it because there's only a finite number of hours to get things done. So we understood that to be really profitable and get to the level of service we needed to control the data. And that's when we decided that we needed to bring the E. D I and house. >>So when you were looking for the right integration partner, what was it about Bhumi from a technology perspective and a business perspective that really differentiated it. >>First and foremost, the number one requirement had to talk to nets. We had a have a native nets. We'd integration if it did not talk to net sweet. It wasn't gonna make it onto our plate because we weren't gonna spend the time to reinvent the wheel when obviously the wheel was out there. We had actually done that once before, and it was successful but painful. And there's people out there who build a connection and work to silver partners like blooming in the platinum partners that can go out and they can actually keep up with the release before it comes out. And you're being proactive by the reactive from a business need. It was We can't drop data. We need to be efficient. We need to be timely. We need visibility. And looking at Bumi, it met all those needs. We had a connection into nets. We had a reporting tool. We had error messages coming back. We had everything that we needed to manage our own world and take control of it. Or so we thought >>that look. Okay, so get this implemented. What sort of opportunities is the start opening up? You talked about control there, or so we thought. What have you been able to unlock where control is concerned? In the last few years, >>what we didn't realize with what we were doing is that way. We're just basically turning on everything and trying to run this efficiently and fast as possible. And that was really the wrong approach to take what we needed to do it as some governance to it as some logic to it, too, you know, not compete with jobs. There's there's a finite number of avenues into the back end system, you need to utilize it. But there was also tools that we found out inside this system that handled things like error trapping and retrial, logic and time outs and stuff like that. And as we worked with the subject matter experts at Boom, as we worked with the people at Nets, we in our account managers who would show us things and help us long. We learned a lot more about him. When we went live back in February of 2016 we were very excited. We did 1000 orders into our system and one day and we thought, How phenomenal is this? I mean, 1000 orders. How many more orders could you actually look for? And we very soon realized that there was a lot more orders willing to come into our system if we could handle it. >>So what? So when you first started with Bhumi went from some number 2 1000 orders today. What was that original number that you guys were able to handle when it was more of a manual process? >>It depend on how many attempts we could hire that sometimes it was 100 orders we got in. Sometimes it was 100% dependent on people. Also depend on someone, Remember, understands the spreadsheet. >>The Sun's painful, >>painful and not really easy to plan for. >>But you discovered pretty quickly you went from I won't say 0 to 1000. But somewhere in between that realized tha the capabilities, though of this system was gonna allow you to get 20,000 orders per day. Where was the demand coming from? Was it coming from trading partners was coming from their customers? Was it coming from your internal team seeing Hey, guys, I think there's a lot more power here than we originally thought. >>Well, success begets success because we were able to get an order in now in a timely fashion and ship it out there. All of a sudden, I realized we were shipping orders within 48 to 72 hours. It wasn't taking 10 days anymore, so we had repeat customers, which obviously makes your numbers go up. And then, as you know, your experience is good and you share it because social media is the weight of the world All the sudden, you know if if you tell two friends and they tell two friends we start getting more volume. Damn white starts happening is someone realizes they're losing market share of their brick and mortar website. And who was fulfilling the orders for them if they're doing so well and we're losing business and they start knocking on the door saying what? We'd like to work with you as well. And the other thing, too, is just timing. In the United States, it's pretty warm between April and October, and the bulk of perishable and heat sensitive product will ship through one of our warehouses because we have the thermal controls in the programs in place to give a good experience to make sure the product arrives the way it's supposed to be treated. >>Yeah, you were mentioning that when you were on stage this morning with Mandy Dolly Well, Mami CMO and Jason Maynard from Net Sweet that there are obviously, if you order some chocolate. I wanted to get there in the exact state in which I saw it online, right? But there's you've gotta have a lot of access, invisibility and systems to be able to help you facilitate that temperature control, depending on the type of product. >>Absolutely. So we're very proud of the fact that, you know, we're temperature controlled where humidity controlled were suf certified. We've done everything the right way to make sure that what we do is gonna be the best experience that your food is safe. Because, Paramount, the last thing we ever want to do is to keep a product of someone's gonna make your child sex because, you know, you don't want anyone to get sick. But the worst feeling is apparent is when your kid doesn't feel well. So we understand that Andi have a phenomenal staff. Are Q A team will go through and we have ways to test the product to get to the melting point. And we know different products melted different temperatures, and we determine what those temperatures are. We build those thresholds we do calls out to get the weather. No, I'm shipping it from my location to you. What's the temperature of my It doesn't matter if it's cold at your place. It is 90 where I'm shipping it from. So we look at what is it now? Where is it going? What's it gonna be the next few days? How big is it? You know how much product is in there with that? That isn't heat sensitive. And we have a pretty complex algorithm that we put in place That has really enabled us to handle the summer months and give a good product because, I mean a lot of people like s'mores, but they don't want the pre melted chocolate showing up at their house. >>Would agree. That takes the fun out of the bonfire part, right? Exactly. So let's talk about the people transformation because you were saying your 100% dependent on manual Somebody even sending the spreadsheet little into star inputting data to process X number of orders per day went from almost 0 to 1000 overnight with Bhumi, then saw this capacity for 20,000. How have has your team has other business units within candy like finance? How are they benefiting from all of this? What a presume is massive workforce productivity gains that you're giving everybody? >>Absolutely. It was a great problem tohave because as we got bigger and we started getting more and more orders than we got more and more invoices and you know, we got more and more checks in which we always think it's a good thing, but those checks need to be reconciled. They have to be reconciled against the transaction Inside the Nets week. It's no exaggeration that we would have pages printed out with a ruler going down and highlighting one by one on the invoice to make sure nothing was omitted. And we were spending an individual spent an eight hour day, three days a week, just going through direct missile. One invoice that was coming in and we would get two or three a week from them. So it was painful and again also error prone. And these people are very creative, very smart, and they offer so much more to the business that it was a waste of their time in a waste of their intellect. S o del. Booming, we found out, is not just any eyes phenomenal, Aditi, I but it has all these other tools and won. The tools we had was to be able to take the remittance file from the financial institution, reconcile it against the invoice is in the system and create a C S V import that would run that we have a script for that created a cash payment in our system that would actually close out the invoices and be paid so that we don't take care of it. It was done, and finance would basically get the file and e mail to us. We would file it back and they'd run an import. So instead of 250 hours a week, it was five minutes of file. >>That's a dramatics saving hundreds of hours a month, but also faster time to revenue recognition. >>That's a big one, you know, because when you try to get people discounts or give them brakes or if your terms are out there, it's nice to get it in there and keep your system's clean, because you also have to answer to the end of the month. You know you want to close the books and everything in manual processes. Air one the few things that you can't just throw more horsepower at. >>I'm glad you brought up, though from a resource kind of reallocation. Perspective is, these folks, in particular areas of the business, have value that they're not able before weren't able to really unlock and deliver. Now, with the technology in place, they're able to probably focus on more strategic areas of the business or more strategic projects. I also imagine your sales. We said faster time to revenue in revenue recognition, but big boost to candy dot comes sales. Since you've implemented the technology >>direct, I mean the sales numbers have just grown. I mean, as much as we do. No do are forecasting and think where it's going to go. Wee wee drastically underestimated this year. The summer was very, very good to us. Our first year under booming, we ran for 11 months. We did a little over 600,000 orders for that first year. In comparison, in June, July and August this year, we did over a 1,000,000 orders. That's a lot of chocolate. So a >>lot of candy, >>most certainly >>busier time, period. I mean Halloweens in a few weeks, Christmas is coming. How does that compare in terms of like the Flux >>way? Have a peek? Obviously, Halloween Halloween is obviously the time, of course. November 1st, our orders are zero because everyone walks in with a pillowcase of candy from their kids to the office, so it literally goes from a 1,000,000 miles an hour or two nothing, and it's it's kind of eerie. But throughout the summer we stay very, very busy because a lot of the market places don't have the facility and listen, they're great, you know, it's one stop shopping. They have everything, but everything is in a warehouse in that entire warehouse is not properly controlled to handle food products. So they decided it was an advantageous for them to ship, you know, during the summer, and it's poorly monitored as a summer Shipp program. But it's really more of a heat sensitive program because we'll add the thermal product to protect the thermal packaging to protect the product, even in February. I mean, there's some spots in Florida in Texas at a pretty one that you want to protect the item. So it's a heat sensitive program that we're very proud of, and we keep advancing and we keep growing. And, you know, I have. I'm very fortunate. I have a great team. I mean, we're not gonna call out, you know, like Jim and Scott, because that would be wrong to deal with. These guys have been with me from the start, and they put the E. T. I in place. They put the scripting in place that the guys were just, you know, rock stars on. Do I look good because of their effort? And I'm very, very proud of the team we've assembled that does this to make sure that you're and satisfaction is always met. >>Awesome story. So I imagine you know, when we hear like, four out of five dentists recommend this kind of bet. Is the fifth dentist recommending candy dot com? Is that where that guy's been? >>Yeah, he's got four kids >>going through college and >>everything, so he figures candy dot com to go. Way to make the money to make sure those tuition skip. >>All right. Well, Gary, it's been a pleasure to have you on the keys. Thank you for sharing what you're doing with bhumi at candy dot com. We appreciate and thanks for all the candy. >>Oh, our pleasure. Thank you very much for having been a great couple of days. I'm glad to be part of it. >>All right. Our pleasure for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Bhumi World 19. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBEConversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Alto's CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for a special CUBEConversation as part of our new brand of tech leader series as well as Extracting the Signal From the Noise. We're here with Gary Conway, the CMO of Automation Anywhere, a hot startup, heavily funded, attacking a whole new market segment, that's kind of changing the game of value in digital, obviously, RPA, robotic process automation, is the buzz word. It's actually real, it's happening, we're seeing a lot of success in companies there. It's changing the way business is operated, business is structured, and value is created. Gary, thanks for joining me. >> My pleasure. >> So we covered your event, Automation Anywhere. You guys are essentially doing very very well, heavily funded, growing like crazy. RPA is one of the fastest growing segments in this next generation digital culture. You're seeing a lot of companies coming out attacking this. What's your perspective, why is RPA so important, why is it so hot? >> It's a pretty simple reason, actually. You know, the truth of the matter is that companies are now, because of RPA, able to automate parts of their business processes, or entire processes that they were never able to automate before, and they can do it with RPA at a relatively little cost compared to a lot of other technologies out there, especially from the big ERP vendors. We say that, and we really believe this, and we're finding this to be true, that since the onset of automation about 30 years ago, from the big technology companies, only about 20% of the processes that businesses manage now are actually automated. The 80% of them that are not automated are pretty much done by human beings, you know. Millions of human beings employed to manage those back office processes. RPA is enabling companies to actually automate more of those processes than ever before. >> Before we get started, just quickly define, what is RPA for the folks that are learning for the first time, because we're now seeing the concept really penetrating mainstream right now. It's becoming, frankly, a topic that's being discussed across most of the largest enterprises and small business, what is RPA? >> So RPA means robotic process automation. So think of them as robots that are built as predesigned software bots that you can plug into any business process, and it'll automate a part of that process, or the entire process, by just plugging it in. It actually is capable of observing what human beings do, remembering what human beings do, and then repeating that again and again and again, only in a fraction of a second. That's the easiest way to think of it. >> So when I think of robots, I think of like a machine, you know, moving things around, from, like, manufacturing, whatnot. It's beyond that, it's not just robots, it's software as well, and this is the key in all this. >> It is software, I mean. >> It is software, it's not robots. >> RPA is only software. >> It's only software. >> I think most people, when they think of robotics, do think of, you know, mechanical robots used in manufacturing. That's not what RPA is. RPA is robotics that is only constructed with preconfigured software. >> I want to get your take on the impact to business and how leaders are adapting to this, but first I want to get to the mainstream topic that is trying to be figured out, and the classic one is technology's going to automate my jobs away, and the example that I use is retail. Most people go to retail, and they think, you know, whether it's a person out of college, or someone working in retail, that oh my god, a robot's going to show up and move stuff on the shelves, and eliminate those jobs. It's not so much robots, per se, it's Amazon that's going to impact in retail. We know what Amazon and Walmart has done to commerce. So that's already happening, retail's impacted. It's not so much that jobs are going away, they're just changing. That's our opinion. Can you share your opinion on the impact of software automation to jobs? >> We agree that jobs are not going away. They will change, but I always tell people when I'm asked this question that there's not been one technology that's ever been introduced that has actually done anything but create more jobs, and I always use the example of the PC. You know, I'm old enough to remember when the PC was introduced, the headlines were what will people do with all this additional time? You know, people were predicting a three day work week because of all the efficiencies that would be created by the PCs, and in fact the opposite has happened. Technology actually makes people more productive, and when they're more productive they're capable of doing more things. So with the automation of certain things that people happen to be doing now, those people are being upskilled, they are being redeployed to other jobs, as we've seen in the past, and actually, more jobs are being created. >> You know, we cover a lot of the Big Data space going back to 2010 when we first started theCUBE, at Hadoop World, which that kind of had its course, but ultimately Big Data, which became AI, you know the bank teller example, you know the ATM was going to kill the branches, when in reality there's been even more branch offices-- >> That's what we're seeing, yeah. >> than ever before. So again, I think the argument is pretty clear from the data and the trend, technology is actually helping create new jobs, but not the jobs maybe that there were once there. That seems to be the big debate, so we agree with you on that. Now we applied some of our, not RPA, but we had some technology that applied to all of our videos that we did with you at your event, and a couple things came out of the entity extraction. I want to share with you, I want to get your reaction. Business hubs, human versus machines, complex problems, digital colleagues, digital worker, new potential applications, digital native companies, supply chain, system integrators, labor platforms, AI assistance, inefficiencies, and machine learning. These are key words that really kind of point to the next generation. This is essentially the language of your company. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I'm not sure it's the language of our company as much as it's the language that people are using to determine what role they will play in the future, and what role, how they will impact their businesses going into the future. So these are not our terms, these are terms that exist in the space right now as people try to determine for themselves the role they will play in defining the future and how they will use technology to make their businesses more efficient. >> And companies are using cloud, for instance, to kind of reshape. We had a big conversation yesterday around, you know, do I want to be in the business of managing data centers, or be in the business of managing my business with technology. These concepts are interesting from an industry standpoint. Business hubs. Good concept, I get that. Digital worker. This is the impact that you guys are enabling. What's the managerial leadership role as an executive or a worker in these new cultural shifts? Because, as this is being enabled, new value is being created. Digital is enabling that. How does someone manage all this? What do you guys see, how do you see that playing out? >> Look, I think that whenever things are changing, and things are changing dramatically in business today, the only way to manage it is a day at a time. You can't project yourself so far into the future that you trip over the things that are immediately facing you now. So my suggestion would always be to evaluate options every day, every week, and make decisions when it's the right time to make decisions for your business. But let's go back to one of the terms you described, digital worker. So a digital worker in our view is actually available in what we call our bot store, which is a bot that is actually preconfigured to have skillsets that you would require. So let's just say you need an order-to-cash person, person who understands that, and it's a part of an automated process. The idea is that you would be able to download a digital worker with similar skills, and plug that bot into your process, and it would begin to work with, I would say, the skillsets of somebody who understands the order-to-cash process. That's really what a digital worker is. Now imagine that, in the future, and that future is not that far away, where every human being will be working side by side with a digital worker, so that the human being can offload the repetitive things that a digital something could actually do for them, and that digital worker would take on the task-based stuff, freeing up the individual to use their creativity to create higher order value for the business. That's really what we mean by digital worker and the importance of a digital colleague, for example. >> I think that it's a profound statement, and I think this is one of the cultural shifts that I see that this next generation workforce and leaders have to get their arms around, and in watching folks in Washington, D.C., we've been covering a lot of the procurement changes going on in government and businesses. There's a leveling up going on in the IQ of organizations, because that is a profound statement. Now we saw that with DevOps in cloud. You know, you talk to tech people, if you're doing the repetitive task more than three times, automate it. You're getting at something a little bit different. You're not just automating, you're adding intelligence to it, so what I like about the process automation area, is it's not just an undifferentiated, heavy lifting, mundane task. Yes it is, but there's an era of machine learning, you're seeing intelligence being applied to it, so it's truly becoming an augmentation to a human. That's kind of what I hear you saying. Do you agree with that, and is that something that you guys see happening, and what does that actually mean for the enterprise? >> No, I do agree with it, and we are at various stages of that evolution. But like anything else in business, and in life, you don't just flip a switch and all of a sudden people migrate to that new model, that's not how life really works. We evolve to those things, and I think what we're seeing is a very fast evolution to exactly what you just described. >> I want to get your thoughts on operationalizing new technology. You know, obviously, being an entrepreneur, I've done a bunch of startups, and the startup ethos is come on a narrow entry, get a landing area, and then sequence to the broader market opportunity. There's a lot of entrepreneurial ethos involved in how to operationalize something new like RPA, because you can't just, you know, shut down the old and bring in the new, there's a method there. This is a challenge in any new technology. How do you guys see this playing out? Because you guys are on the front end, bringing real value to the table, but people might want to get more aspirational and then get the reality. How do you get into the point of going into someone and saying I love what you guys do, what's the playbook, what do I do next? This is the challenge, can you share your thoughts on how an executive or a business can operationalize these benefits? >> So we have a lot of customers, 1800 customers, unique customers, and 2800 entities around the world that are using the software now. And I think that each of them had one thing in common. They started in bite-sized chunks. They said we're going to try this, and what's happening with RPA, which is one of the reasons it's growing so fast, is that once you try it, once you implement a few bots to automate the things that you weren't able to automate before, it starts ramping like this, right? It has a very very fast ramp-up. So you realize some successes in the processes that you begin to automate that you've never automated before. And the more you do it, the more you learn from it. The more you learn from it, the more you want to do it, the more processes you identify that could be automated, and should be automated, and what starts happening in most companies is they start adopting much much faster once they understand the benefits of it. And the benefits to business is driving higher levels of efficiencies, and reducing costs dramatically. >> So the tie to value is fast. >> Right, the value is very fast, compared to-- >> And that's driving the ramp-up, to your point. >> And that's driving the map. >> The flywheel kicks in, you start with a process that's known, and you automate it, wow, that's good, do it again, do it again. >> Correct. Well, do it again, and do it with more processes, right? And the other unique thing about this technology is human beings, once they understand the advantages of automating things that other human beings may have to do manually, most of those people who have been doing them manually will say I want more of that. We should be automating this, we should be automating that, and it actually makes them much more productive, and it makes them feel as if they are delivering higher value to the business themselves, and what an amazing human dynamic that is. >> You know, I was talking to Dave Vellante about this, we were talking about the TAM, the total adjustment market, for RPA, we're like, I think it's just in the trillions because with digital, everything is connected, so you can measure everything. Everything is ultimately a supply chain, whether it's network effect for internet, whether it's, you know, some process with cryptocurrency, whether it's blockchain or a process with cybersecurity, digital is pretty much connected, it's pretty much a supply chain. Some of them are more formed than others. This seems to be the entry point that most people would go to. Do they go to the supply chains first, or, better yet, what's the use cases that you see as the low hanging fruit that people come in on and automate? Is it simple supply chain stuff that's known, or are they applying it as they grow to other areas? >> It's very broad, but the fastest adoption, especially beginning about two years ago, were from the companies in industries like banking, other financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, which is supply chain, as you rightly point out. Those businesses that tend to be earlier adopters of technology have also become earlier adopters of RPA. But what we're finding now is it's now, because of the results that these businesses have demonstrated, and because digital native competitors are actually coming into the space and threatening what are sometimes referred to as legacy businesses, businesses are not delaying the investments they're making so that they can actually become more competitive, and when you think about that, it's not just the efficiencies that these technologies like RPA drive, but it's the ability to make businesses acutely more competitive than they've ever been before. >> That's a great angle, competitive strategy has always been one of those things where, you know, the cloud native world or digital native world was like oh yeah, pick one feature, innovate, and you can go beat an incumbent. The incumbent now has leverage in the marketplace, whether it's physical presence or other assets. Using RPA gives them a way to level up, so to speak. >> Level up, for sure. So let's just take something we're all familiar with, right? You can now go on your phone, and you can have a car at your house to take you somewhere in about four minutes in most cities, right? If you have an issue, you can solve that issue on your phone as well. You don't have to call anybody, you just solve it on your phone. These ride share companies have made it so simple, it's almost as if there's no such thing anymore as a front office or a back office. Digital native companies have brought those things together, and now there's one office. So that immediacy is what legacy companies are actually competing against, and if those companies don't adopt this kind of automation to make more efficient those processes and narrow the gap between customer facing and back office, they won't be able to compete. >> Yeah, they can turn a liability into an advantage, with software. Big big bullish on the software, I think the competitive landscape also is interesting, I'd like your thoughts on. There seems to be a battlefield, at least from my perspective, my opinion is that, okay, RPA software is out there, it's going to grow really fast. The competitive battle will be around intelligence. How do you guys view the competitive levers? How do you guys compete, what's the advantage? Is it intelligence, is it being more intelligent, is it more operational, what's the advantage you guys see vis-a-vis the competition? >> Yeah, so we're actually seeing a sort of a bringing together of technology, what we have considered to be strictly technology, and what's being described broadly now as artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is still evolving. Everybody has his own definition of what it really is, but what we're seeing, and I think in other sectors we're seeing the same thing, is now the merging of things that have truly been technology with things that are perceived to be artificial intelligence, and they're beginning to come together. What that will look like five years from now, nobody knows. What it'll look like 10 years from now, no one can even conceive of, but we're seeing that dynamic in place now, and this is the beginning. >> It's a great wave, excited to have you on and share your insights, Gary. It's great stuff you guys are doing over there at Automation Anywhere, love the, we love this wave, I think it's going to be relevant. My final question for you, though, is little bit different. You know, you're at a cocktail party, you're at a friend's house, you're at a confab, and you see people that aren't in the business, and they're like Gary, I need to get, I need to be more competitive. What do I do, what is this RPA thing, how do I change my culture, how do I get my people and my process aligned with software, what's the playbook, what's your advice? >> So what I would say is, get started as quickly as possible, because if you delay too long, you will be left behind. So that's would be my first bit of advice. The other, it would be to start slowly. Learn as quickly as you can. Don't worry about automating things that are hard to automate, go to the things that are easy to automate. Companies find that when they address those things first, they're actually able to drive more success faster, and then they will look for more and more opportunities based on what they've learned and the success that they've derived, and that's what happens to create this ramp effect, where it becomes almost viral-like. Where you have one process that works great, you automate that, you automate another one, you automate five more, 10 more, and before you know it, believe it or not, we have customers that are implementing more than 3000 bots over the last year and a half, and that's how they started. >> Get rid of the mundane work, you've got happy people, HR is happy, you've got more revenue coming in, you're more competitive as a business, this is a good value proposition. It's an easy sale. >> Nothing's easy, but it has a huge appeal. >> Gary, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights around RPA, appreciate it and congratulations on your success. >> Thank you. >> This is CUBEConversation, and I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019, brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground at Coupa Inspire'19 from the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. And I'm pleased to be joined by one of Coupa's spend setters from Highmark Health, Gary Foster, VP of Procurement. Gary, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's pleasure to be here. >> So we're here with about 2,300 folks or so I think this is the eighth Coupa Inspire. Lots of energy and excitement this morning in the general session as Rob kicked that off. There is some of the interesting things that I've learned about Coupa in the last short while including this morning was that there's now $1.2 trillion of spend going through being managed by the Coupa platform. Tremendous community of data. And so imperative as the role of Chief Procurement Officer is changing, the CFO is changing. You are a veteran in the procurement industry. Before we talk about Highmark Health, give me a little bit of an overview of some of the things that you've seen change in procurement and where you think we are today in terms of that role being not only very strategic, but very influential to the top line of a business. >> Okay, it's a great question. I have spent a little over three decades in procurement. We've come a long way from back then. There was a lot of carryover from the industrialization era, and post-World War II and Korean War era, et cetera. Where really wasn't even called procurement it was purchasing. And there was a bit of the darling in the manufacturing industry, because that had such a high impact on the cost of goods sold. And as you got into other organizations, it was kind of relegated to a back office function, very transactional, very administrative, very clerical. So it really took someone with a lot of guts and a lot of vision to say we can be more than that. We can provide insights, we can deliver efficient transaction work and free up people to do more advisory type of roles. So I'm pleased to say I experimented with that early on in my procurement career. And that has been the shift that I think is continuing on. The whole buzz around digitization is another enabler to free up the talent that we have, that we can put into providing insights and predictions and becoming true strategy advisors to the business. So when the most recent, I've had for teams that I've taken over to either completely transform or build from the ground up. And this most recent one, I've sort of mashed up a lot of things that I've learned over the past three decades, to try to prepare them for where I believe that the profession is going, where I believe the function is going. Back to your original question. It's really evolved a lot from that back office transactional, just focus on price, a little bit on supply reliability, if it was in manufacturing, to slowly but surely started evolving to, what can you do to help us with some business objectives? And do we trust you with some important strategic initiatives that we need to accomplish as a company or in my business? >> Right, so it sounds like early on that you had this awareness of, there's pockets, there's silos of spend and purchasing happening there that we don't have the visibility into, 'cause we're talking a lot about that today with, that's what today's CPO and CFO really need is that visibility and control. >> Gary: Right. >> Especially as all of these forcing functions or disruptors happen, the more regulatory requirements or companies growing organically or inorganically. And suddenly, there's many, many areas within a business that are buying and spending. >> Right. >> And if they don't have that awareness and visibility into it, not only is it obviously, it's a cost issue, but one of your points to the resource utilization perspective. There's a lot of opportunities miss. So it sounds like you kind of saw that early on in your career, that there are things going on, we need to get visibility into all of this. >> Yes, yes. And it's, that's probably the, that's one of the foundational building blocks is to get a good handle on where's the money going. So the financial side of the house understands it from their journal entries and from their cost centers. But procurement, really great world class procurement, brings a different lens that the business doesn't think of. And that the financial industry, financial segment of the business doesn't think of. So that's, but you're really kind of a chicken and egg thing, you can't really provide the insights, if you don't have your hands on the information. And the information is got to be usable, right? Data versus information-- >> Absolutely. >> Quandary. That's very much the case with procurement. But you can't get bogged down and going for perfection, because then you'll just, analysis paralysis. You won't get out of that cycle and you'll never be able to provide. So you have to know, you have to have a gut feel that this is enough, this is directionally correct. Let's take this to the next level. Let's start moving with, here are the patterns that we see, here's what we think is happening, here's where we think there are issues, right? So those are, I think, are some of the foundational pieces to the spend analysis question. >> So talk to us a little bit about Highmark Health. What you're doing there and how you guys are really focused on changing America's approach to healthcare? Which I think would be welcomed by a lot of people, by the way. >> (chuckles) Yes, we have a very, very ambitious goal. We believe we can be a catalyst to change healthcare in America. >> Lisa: How so? >> Well, first of all, we think that the model was wrong. If you think about the way that the healthcare industry has grown up in the US, you went to a hospital because you were either sick or injured. You had to go to those locations. You had to follow those procedures. You had to fill out those forms. You had to, you went to where the care was, and you had to bend to your schedule to whatever was available, right? We've all experienced trying to get an appointment with a doctor, and it's four months out, right? So we're doing, this was a year and a half ago, we introduced same-day appointments. So we have both a hospital system and an insurance company. So we can see the whole value chain-- >> Lisa: Okay. >> Through the healthcare experience. And one of the fundamentals that we're doing is, we're trying to bring a retail mindset to healthcare. >> Where the wellness comes to- >> You, as opposed to you having to go somewhere to access your health or to get connected with experts that can advise you or for checkups, et cetera. You're wearing an Apple Watch, that's only one of those Fitbits, et cetera. There's a multitude of wearables that are coming. The combination of IoT, and healthcare and big data is intersecting at a rapid rate where we will be, we are already able to look at millions of records, of chart information about patterns of diagnoses. And we know that the data tells us that if we can get people to engage in their health and make small changes, and just learn more, be educated and learn more about how, we know that the long-term costs of their healthcare will go down. So we are looking to partner, obviously, can't do this all on our own. >> Right. >> So this is not a David and Goliath kind of a thing. So we're looking actively to partner with breaking company, lead companies and breaking technology companies to be partners with us on this journey of how do we bring health to people and help improve their health, lower their disease rates, provide a better quality of life, lower their cost of health care, lower all the complications, you can see the graphs, right? It all runs, as you get as you get older, if you don't take care of yourself. >> Lisa: Right. >> The complications of healthcare issues just go exponentially up. And we know we can bend that curve down if we can transform the way that health is thought of and delivered to people in the country. >> Well, I'm already signed, you got me. So talk to me, though, about from a technology perspective. If we think about all the emerging technologies, you mentioned IoT, millions and millions of devices, we are sometimes overly connected. >> Gary: Yes. >> What is the opportunity that Highmark is working on with Coupa to be able to start changing that mindset and bringing that retail model to healthcare? How are they hoping to ignite that? >> Well, it's not on a direct connection with Coupa. Coupa is our procuring platform. So it enables us to provide efficient transactions and we get data insights. Coupa is very much an enabler for us in this process. What I would say is, and this goes back to the evolution of procurement as a profession, by having Coupa and other technologies at the fingertips of my team, it frees them to immerse themselves into their clients' business as well as their categories. So if they're, if I have someone who's a category manager of digital marketing, they can immerse themselves into that, and they can work that, my folks go, they attend senior level staff meetings, they have one on ones with executive VPs, they co-locate with the client on a regular basis. We really immerse ourselves into it. What Coupa is doing is it's allowing us to spend less time on transactions and process, and more time learning the business, more time understanding the industries that they operate in, looking for innovation, and bringing those innovative partners to the business that wouldn't necessarily have happened on its own. We have this incredible network, particularly if we have people that really, really have a passion for procurement, and really have a passion for being intimate with the customer. I know it's an overused phrase, but the trusted advisor status is definitely where we should be. That's an, the Coupa org, the Coupa platform, and tools enable my team to have, to bring those insights and those opportunities to the business. And we've gotten tremendous accolades from the CEO through the entire C-suite, about the level of business partnership that the procurement organization has, with all of the various areas of the Highmark organization. >> So you have this visibility now that you didn't have before with Coupa? >> Yeah. >> This control. Sounds like your resources and different parts of the organization are much better able to use their time to be strategic on other projects and to really start bringing that retail experience out there. Coupa kind of as, you mentioned, as an enabler is really foundational to that. I know you've actually won some awards. I think, Rob Bernstein actually mentioned this on stage this morning that you took top honors at the Procurement Leaders, Inaugural America's Procurement Awards. >> Gary: Yes. >> You've also been recognized as a Procurement Leader of the Year for transforming Highmark Health. What I love about the story is that showing how procurement, not only has it transitioned tremendously to be very strategic, but you're helping to transform an industry by getting this visibility on everywhere, where there's spend there, that operationally, Highmark Health seems to have a big leg up. >> Yes, yeah. No one could be everywhere at once. And if we can earn that trust, then the people in the business who are hired to play certain roles, strategy, development, or whatever, if they're, if they will, let us help them with our expertise, they can spend, they're more effective in their role. >> Right. >> Because they're not doing procurement work. They're not talking to suppliers. They're not negotiating deals. They're not looking, then let us provide that service, that professional service to them, really, as a consultant, as an advisor, and bring companies that, the more we get in depth into understanding the industries that we're buying in, the more we're learning about emerging companies. Who are the innovators? Who are the disruptors? Bringing those organizations because we're studying that in our markets, to our business partner, and making that introduction, which sparks an idea, which sparks an opportunity for the two to work together collaboratively on something new, or to resolve an issue that has not been addressed and no one found an answer to in the past. >> Well, you've put this really strong foundation in place that not only gives you the visibility and control, but it's going to allow Highmark Health on this ambitious goal, as you mentioned, about bringing wellness to us. And of course, there's the whole, there's the human in the way. So maybe tomorrow, Deepak Chopra, who's keynoting, will be able to give you guys some insight into how to help these people. And it's all of us people, right? Really embrace mindfulness, to be able to focus more on our passions. But what you guys are doing to transform healthcare is really inspirational so Gary, thank you-- >> Thank you very much. >> For joining me on theCUBE today. >> It was a pleasure. >> Likewise. For Gary Foster, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire'19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're coming to you live from Magento Imagine 2019. Welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Gary Specter, the VP of Commerce, Sales and Customer Success at Adobe. Gary, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here. >> So there's about 3,500 people here, you guys have, from 60-plus countries. >> Gary: That's right. >> I think 100 sessions, 150 speakers. People coming down from ceilings, up from the floor. >> Gary: And we're streaming live. >> First ever live stream, yes. >> On the general set, first ever. That's right. Someone tweeted out that there are 35,000 people watching. >> Marketing probably loved that and then had a heart attack at the same time. >> Yeah, I'm sure they did. Not exactly accurate but I'll take what I can get. >> Tell us about the event, the spirit of the event. This is kind of, yesterday evening things kicked off. What of some of the things you've hearing from customers, partners, developers? >> So, I think the thing that's really unique about Imagine is that it does involve partners, the community, developers, along with Magento and our customers and our prospects. And it makes it really different because the developer community and our partners are so passionate about Magento. And I think everybody feels really good about the marriage of Adobe and Magento. You had technologies that were very well aligned, not overlapping. It enables us to extend the capabilities of what we can do from both the Adobe side or the Magento side. I like to say that the color palette got a lot bigger, and I think there's a lot of excitement around that and what that means to all of these people, developers, partners, the ecosystem, customers, prospects. So the energy is really high. I think obviously people are, what's next? And what does this mean for Magento? And I think it means investment, I think it means a higher rate of agility and an expansion of what we do. Acceleration of our roadmap. So I think people are very, very positive. And this is my fourth Imagine, and it's really, I've never felt the energy higher than at this Imagine. So it's exciting for me. >> Gary, one of the interesting ways that you talked about community and everybody wants developer communities, right? And you guys also have open source as a passion. But you phrased it in a way I've never heard before, is that you like going to sleep at night knowing that there's a whole bunch of other CEOs betting their business-- >> That's right. >> On this platform. >> Yeah. >> And it's not just you guys, so it's a really different way to think about open source. We often think of the developers and there's smart people outside your four walls contributing code. But it's not often couched in terms of the business terms. >> No. >> If there's are other people betting their business, thinking about how are they gonna help grow your business by building their business on top of Magento. >> That's what drives the passion of the community. These people realize that there's a symbiotic relationship here. If Magento successful, the ability for them to be successful is very broad. And if Magento's not successful, then you have to ask yourselves did I make the right bet? So a lot of our tech partners have build these great solutions on top of Magento, and it's a partnership. And you don't have that anywhere else, and again, I sleep better at night, to your point. I don't know where you got that quote, but it's actually mine, it's phenomenal. >> No, no, I think I got it from your Argentina 2017 talk perhaps. >> Actually, it's true. I know that all of these tech partners, these CEOs, they have my back. I'd like them to know I have theirs. And I don't think Adobe has any, there's no reason or rhyme why that would ever change. I think Adobe will enhance it. And I think that's why there so much excitement here. >> Well, and it's really a validation and what we talked about before, the prior segment, was now to bring the marketing tools, and the AI and all the power that's in that big building in San Jose, free the commerce transaction, really, to your point, adds so much more horse power to the total solution. >> Like I said, color palette just got a lot bigger. There's so many more things that we can do and so many more colors we can use to create these great experience for our brands and our customers, that we could've done before but it was a lot of work, but now we've got all of the makings of a platform that will enable that and we're already pretty far along in taking the Adobe experience cloud and making that work. And I'm just really excited about the future and what this offers for our customers and our brands. >> We've heard a number of guests that talk about just what you were referring to a minute ago, and that was really this symbiosis of Adobe, the power that Adobe brings, the data that Adobe brings, along with Magento, So a new Adobe commerce buy was just launched a couple of months ago, at Adobe Summit powered by Magento Commerce, but you look at it as analytics, advertising, marketing, commerce, fundamentals for managing what is a changing and highly demand customer experience, 'cause we want more and more things accessible from right here. So some of the feedback from customers, partners, developers since that announcement and now going "Ahh, okay now I can actually touch and see and play with this two symbiosis machines coming together." >> Yeah, I think it's not a hard thing to get. I think when the acquisition first happened, there's a little let's wait and see and make sure they get it right. And I think what I feel today, or what people have given to me today is the feedback that they're believers. They know that we're gonna execute on this strategy, and this strategy is gonna allow us to extend our lead on our competitors, which in return, allows these brands and these commerce players to extend their lead on their competitors. >> Let's talk about the small/medium business folks for a minute. When the announcement was made last year, the intention, right after Imagine 2018 I believe, for Adobe to acquire Magento, and then right after they acquired Marketo, there was some concern for is Adobe gonna kind of shift what Magento has been doing, so successfully for so long, away from focusing on those smaller merchants to the enterprise folks. Yesterday and today, we heard some great, exciting announcements with what you guys are doing with Amazon Sales Channel, with Google Shopping, and it sounded like the small and medium business size folks were going "Yes, this is what we need." Talk to us a little bit about that. >> I mean, you mentioned two, along with PWA and some of the other things that we're doing. While these can be leveraged in the enterprise, they were built for the mid-market in the SMB space. And there is no doubt that Adobe and Magento both understand how important SMB and the mid-market is. And in fact, we've seen acceleration in the SMB space since the acquisition, from the Magento side of the house. And Adobe is fully committed and knows that there's market share there to be had. And the application or the business problems that we solve at the enterprise, are still applicable for the mid-market and the SMB space. They're handled in a little bit different of a manner, but they have same aspirations. And the solution's gonna be able, when you look across everything that you're gonna be able to do, it plays for both markets. And Adobe has an incredible opportunity to really drive market share in this mid-market. They don't have a big footprint there today. Even if you capture just a small portion of it, and its our plans to capture a large portion of it, but even a small portion of it is gonna make a big impact on Adobe. So I think that we will see acceleration in the mid-market and in the SMB space with what we're doing, what we're developing together, and the different types of products that we can offer to those markets that Adobe has in its broader portfolio. >> And of course on the enterprise side, what we don't see here that we saw at Adobe Summit a couple weeks back are some of the really big integrators who have huge practices built around and on top of the Adobe tool set that now you get to leverage. I'm sure you're pretty excited about as running field. There's, again, a whole nother group of people, not necessarily CEOs, but managing partners, who have bet their jobs, bet their livelihood, bet their practices on this, and now you getta take advantage of those resources as well. >> Absolutely, and I think that a lot of the large integrators and partners, I think everybody's starting to understand that commerce is very different now than it was five or 10 years ago, right? I call it bite small, chew fast. And HP is a great example, where they started in some of the smaller APAC countries and then went to Brazil, and they're looking at the US last, but they're taking it a step at a time. One country, one country, one country. And a lot of our big retailers or brands that wanna expand globally are doing the same things, or companies that have portfolios of brands, one at a time. Bite small, chew fast. Launch, be successful, launch, be successful. And I think the SIs, including the large partners, understand that and they're changing the way that they look at businesses holistically. So I think right time, right place. >> Yeah, we had Gillian Campbell from HP on right after her keynote this morning, and it was an interesting kinda POC program. And I said what was some of the market dynamics that identified APAC as the right market to start in. And part of that, I think, was that from a historical legacy perspective of using Magento on the HP Inc. side. But some of the things I found interesting to them was that leveraging the data to understand the cultural e-commerce differences snd how different cultures interact with different social media platforms or purchasing platforms differently, and how important it is to really understand those commerce patterns and start to drive conversions from there there and then go success, roll it out, rinse and repeat. >> And she nailed it right? I mean, buy online, pick up in store versus having it delivered to your home, if you live in the middle of India, what's the reality of you getting that delivered in an hour? And if you look at country like Russia, which is very spread out, right, so there's not a high density outside of a lot of their major cities and you have a lot of the same issues. If you're gonna have it ship to your home, how long is it gonna take? It might be easier just to go pick it up in the store. And I think it's different in every region. And it's good to be able to have access to that data to get a good read on what are the things our customers want specifically to drive the experience they need within that region. >> Right, key for a company whether it's something the size of an HP Inc. or not, to be able to scale globally, but also have that sort of local market adaptation where you're able to react, understand the preferences in your markets, and deliver exactly what those consumers want. So having a tool like Magento as the power to enable that global scale regional adaptation, it's a driver. >> And I think you start to add complexity when you look at do they use their phone, do they use their computer? Do they use social networks and buy buttons? I have an interesting dynamic in my own house where I've got a 13-year-old, and the way that she would shop online is different than the way that my wife would shop online, which is very different from how I would shop online. I browse and go to the store. My wife uses her computer. My daughter shops on Pinterest, or Instagram, or Facebook. Very different journeys for the three of us, and we could be buying the same thing, and we're all gonna do it differently. So it crosses generations as well. >> So, Gary, it feels like kinda the dust has settled post-Adobe acquisition where everybody feels kinda comfortable, and it's been a year and everything didn't go bananas. So as you look forward now, after things have kinda settled, what are some of your priorities over the next year, If we sit down a year from now, what are you working on? >> I can tell you that for me, the biggest priority for me is to make sure that the mid-market and the SMB flywheel is effective, the way that we go to market, the way that we target that segment. And it's not that I'm not interested in the enterprise. I'm extremely interested in the enterprise. But we have a lot of people that are working on the enterprise. And Adobe doesn't have deep domain expertise around the mid-market. But with Marketo and Magento, you now do. So for me personally, I wanna make sure that that flywheel is well-run, it's well-oiled, it's set up for success, that operationally, the things that we do to drive market share in that segment run as effectively as the rest of Adobe on the enterprise side. It's a new sales motion for Adobe. But the good news is I think Adobe understands that. We understand that as a company, and I think over the next year, for me, that's where my focus is gonna be. >> So if we keep looking out to the next year, this is your fourth Magento Imagine. >> It is. >> Is there gonna be a Magento Imagine 2020? >> So I will tell you that there will be an Imagine 2020, and I will share details around that Wednesday. I've been asked to help close Imagine out, and when I do, I will be thrilled to announce our plans for Imagine 2020. >> So can folks watch that on the livestream tomorrow, Wednesday, that 15th? >> They can. >> Are you gonna be coming up from the floor, the ceiling? >> I think I'm probably just gonna dance on out. I have been invigorated, I love being here. Imagine is the one opportunity every year where I come out of this thing just feeling really good about the opportunities that we had ahead of us. And by Wednesday, although tired, I'm usually really happy to be going back and getting in the field with my teams and just driving opportunity. And I think we had an amazing one. >> Well, we'll be all watching. Is it imagine.magento.com to watch the livestream ? Or magento.imagine.com. go to to the Magento.com site, Wednesday tomorrow in the afternoon, you're gonna be able to hear more about what's to come next year. Gary, thank you so much for giving us time today. >> Thanks for having me, enjoy it. >> Our pleasure. >> It's great to meet you all. >> Excellent >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. Tou're watching theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back here when we're here. Live in San Francisco for IBM. Think twenty nineteen, two cubes Exclusive coverage. I'm over here, students to it's been four days. Were our fourth day powered through a lot of interviews. Obstructing the Civic Lanois number one live event covers a Cuba to great guests here. Ashutosh Mooney, vice president, Applications services with an IBM and carried to lose chief technology officer nationwide Building society in the UK Great to have you guys. Thank you, John, for applications. Big part of the focus because the applications air now dictating the data strategy. The II with a and you could cloud multi cloud underneath. So the chained, changing market requirements around what, after doing are super important? All this is a focus. It's dictating that the infrastructure what to do so that this is the key to the cloud. Talk about what you guys are doing. >> Absolutely, absolutely, in fact, not just for IBM. For clients, mostly for them to be able to ready for their customers, they need to make sure that their applications are up there for their customer experience as well. What we're seeing is most of these supper clients today are saying that all the work that they have done in past for the last five, ten years that's the core that they have been in there trying to look at how they can minimize the spend on that and maximize the spending a ll. The customer facing applications like to enhance the customer experience >> they call and you call that the workload? Oh, yes. Load is code for applications. Carry your customer of IBM. Let me explain what you guys do first. Then we can talk about some things you're working on, >> So we are a large, UK based mutual building society. We have about fifteen million members in the U. K. But you can think of us as a bank. In many respects, most people do. Challenge throws us, as you said, is basically we have thirty or forty years of legacy technology. We need to transform that technology and also bill the next generation digital services alongside that technology. So if Rose, it's the combination of how do we transform that legacy core whilst also building from you? >> And what are some of the use case is that the new technology going bring you because containers has been great with legacy because you don't kill the old to bring in the new. As you look at the modern modernization journey, you're on What is guiding principles? One things you guys are looking at, how you guys thinking that through? >> Okay, so a number of things. One is we've been on a thirty year journey towards looser and looser coupling on smaller and smaller micro services. So what you're starting to see is big applications, monolithic applications being broken down into services and the micro services. So for us, the key is the smaller and smaller micro services. The more agility we can create more value great. And that loose coupling them becomes really important because that then allows us to deliver a high level of parallelism in development in change. So those are two key areas. >> It has it going today. Good scar tissue. You learning its >> learning and its iterating and it's failing and its understanding. But the main thing is, you know, the more we do, the more we learn, the more we can then build that back into Nick's situation. >> Actually, I always love to hear, especially the financial services ones that have been around a while that that modernization and how they do that, I couldn't help but notice. You're both wearing the, you know, I heart a I the shirts. So if you connect the dots for us between that application modernization and the wave of a ay >> yeah. So I heard that Tom fail fast and fail regular. I mean, it's all good until you actually have atleast one success, right? Failing fast is good, but you cannot escape feeling. So where it comes into play is primarily making sure that you're basing your those decisions on what have been proven right in Pastor's. Well, so what we have seen, especially for financial services, is even though the system's off engagement has changed the fundamental principles on which the banking services all the insurance services operator has not changed. So you're still wearing the same set of services just in different ways. The expectation of the client has changed, but the services remain the same. So our ability to be ableto look at what we have been doing in past which services makes sense to be Microsoft's enabled us getting talked about. It's not that you just take all the functions and enable them. That's where we're able to bring value Tour Kari. What's the impact >> on this on your ultimate and user >> better value? So for us, it's about helping our members, who are customers, to make better financial decisions on. To do that, they need data. So what we're trying to do is to really take that Legacy estate, which is really about locking data into the course. Or we can use it trying to liberate that day to get it out into the hands of our members so they could make better decisions on a eyes were really keep part of >> you. I mean that that was what we think back to. That wave of big data was the I should be able to have smaller companies, you know, not take years and millions of dollars to be able to do that. Tell us what's different about, you know today in a I that that we might not have been able to do five years >> ago. There's a couple of things, really. So one is compute power. So what you're seeing really is eyes is not necessarily advancing massively in terms of the algorithms and the approaches in the methodologies. What you're seeing, though, is compute power in storage capacity growing at an exponential rate store. So what it's doing is enabling those algorithms to work in a way that they've never been able to do before. We're getting to value quicker because the time it takes to reach that value is much shorter. >> I want to get your perspective on you mentioned parallel breaking down, decoupling things with looser sets the services. This is certainly the cloud way make AP eyes have micro services. Big part of it. How is that going from a culture standpoint? Because this is one of the things we hear all the time is it's a cultural journey to one. Get people lined up with that. And then what if some of the business benefits that you see what this parallel isn't? His efficiency is an innovation. Where do you see that culture? What did What did you do to change the culture? Go. Cheers. Um, this is what people want to know about. >> So in fact, what we're seeing is a majority of the clients have started to look into this because everybody else was because somebody digital native out there was doing it, so they some of them actually last on too quickly. They have not been ableto change their internal culture within the organization when the customers were ready, but their internal organizations or not. But I think plants like Cup NBS have sought out a fairly good strategy, and it will be great to get if you can >> share with your secret sauce that you like Carrot Stick. They were gonna go this way or you burn the boats, as they say at the How did you get people to go in the right direction? >> For us? There's a really, really important related past this the culture of the people from a culture perspective. You know, we've got teams of people who have been doing phenomenal pieces of work for thirty forty years coming to the end of their career. And you know, the technology that we're using again, we're looking at and the service life. So how do we how do we get away from that world where we're constantly focusing on the legacy to start focusing on new technology? So it's bringing in new people with new ideas. It's changing the way we work, so we started to focus on things like our child. They've ops, automation, new ways of working to allow people to really sort of liberate away from the old ways of working and give them new ideas and new opportunities. That's part of that as well. There's a couple of things in there for us which is really important. So one is bringing new technologies in bringing new people in that Khun, use those technologies. We also have to make sure we keep our own people trained up as well, so we can't forget the people that we've got. So it's it's a set of different things, >> and training is critical. Was gonna open source out there. It's like, you know, every years like a dog here, and you gotta keep up to date, Keep learning >> and all these aspects of procreation, right? So you cannot do it in isolation if you're doing it together. I mean, whether use design, thinking or not right, that's it. That's it. That's the way to do it. But I think the aspect of co creating in your end stakeholders and your own stakeholders, Orin more >> talk about more about that, cause this is a big team co creation we love doing with content were in the Q. We're doing it here with constant when you get into development. This is a new psychological dynamic, but also it's a productivity opportunity. Can you share what you're seeing there? Explain co creation a litte bit deeper >> Look so that we talk hypothetically, right? So from hypothetical perspective, if we were able to look at organization or a flat form where were able to access an amount ofthe computational power computation skills are programming skills. Our ability to be able to do the most creative expects for any use case and industry would be enormous. We just don't have that. We're limited to specific parts that were working with the Limited with specific employees that we have Andrea limited to the customers that were kids, and I think if we expand, so while we don't have, uh, handle off all the things that we haven't played. But if you are able to bring in our customers or internal stakeholders as well as our partners that we're working with and are able to build a common team and one of those common themes could be that I need to get you those services quickly and then figure out how to three can actually work in tandem we'll be able to make. >> How does that change your engagement model? Because I might be the same in eight days there, Miss Captain. Well, we used to do that before we usedto partner and understand their needs Bring solutions to the marketplace. Is it more software driven? So what's changed from the old way to the new way? Because I don't agree with you, by the way, I'm not I'm not a skeptic, but, yeah, that was what skeptic might say. >> Yeah, no, I think earlier what was happening was they were It was more offering leg and what I mean by offering letters these of the sex I have. And let's make these assets find the solutions. So what people will do is they will say this is the banking solution I have in this specific case and let's figure out what fifteen things I can >> do without those solutions. >> Approach now is different. They approach now is This is what the customer is demanding and the reason they're demanding is because customers expectation is based on there most recent experience that they had somewhere else, not necessarily with the bank. They may have experience and over, so when they have experienced that experience there, they want the similar services from the bank. So now the co creation model is actually starting from the other side of the equation rather than coming from Essex out. That's >> so it's flipped. The old model was hears. We got here's what you could do, Your limited and now it's like is what we want to do >> This ice >> program the infrastructure and focus on software to find agile. This is seems to be the new way. >> Let me add to that as well, because I think one of the things that we've done over the last year is really focusing on what our technology strategy, how this technology going change. Our business we've done is created a strategy where our ambition actually exceeds our ability to execute. So from a co creation perspective, we actually need really good partners are going to work with us in that context on be strong challenges br critical friend in the process. >> So it's more efficient and more productive. You get best of both worlds and the outcomes are more aligned via agile. Got me more acute on target. Many pretty much that >> getting Carrie actually love to get your perspective on like, what does it mean to have a cloud strategy today? We heard this week. You know, Jenny said, We're, you know, entering chapter to of the clouds. We took care of the twenty percent that was a little bit easier. We're getting eighty harder. Lots of customers I talked to. It's It's changing all the time, and things like hybrid and multi Cloud don't really mean much to them. Got serious in your shop, how you think of things. >> Great question. I think it's changing, and it's different from industry to industry. So I'm banking. The challenge for us has always been regulation has been the regulators pushing back on public cloud and saying, You know, we were nervous about that. Have you manage the security of the controls around that? So a lot of banking is focused on private Cloud? Can we adopt the technology in those banking's those styles of technology delivery in the private cloud way? But we're now starting to see that there is this shift towards public cloud with the economic advantage that public cloud house on the innovation that's going on in public cloud. It's becoming really attractive. So the strategy for us is about how do we make that happen? How do we build that multi cloud model? And then how do we move that sort of hybrid model from private to public and get the advantages of the different styles of cloud computing? >> Guys, Thanks for coming on, Given the inside love, this Dev ops Co creation model and really applications air driving the requirements now with programmable infrastructure. This is changing. The procurement is changing. The culture hiring strategist is really disrupted. This is really the digital transformation. It's all about creating great shop. Thanks for coming on. We appreciate final question while we're here. Thoughts on think this year in San Francisco. Libit Rainy February. That's okay, but all tightly together. What's your thoughts? What's the themes? What's your What's the top story here? >> Getting your pops? >> Whether it makes me feel like >> home is fantastic. Eso No, it's been It's been an amazing week. >> Lots of innovation, Lots of great conversation. So I really enjoyed it. >> Yeah, No, absolutely. I think we've gone around myself, even though we are definitely aware of what's going on in here. But I think there have been lots of partner ecosystem that has been here, and I think that collaboration has been great. Thank you. >> It's been great. Show a lot of inside Kaspar perspective. Thanks for sharing what your journeys on and some specifics Way appreciates. A cube coverage. I'm shoppers to Minuteman. Stay with us for a day, for we're four days a coverage. We're here on day for Stay with us for more after this short break.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf 18. Brought to you by Splunk. >> We're back in Orlando, everybody, at Splunk .conf18, #splunkconf18. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. You're watch theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We like to go out to the events. We want to extract the signal from the noise. We've been documenting the ascendancy of Splunk for the last seven years, how Splunk really starts in IT operations and security, and now we hear today Splunk has aspirations to go into the line of business, but speaking of security, Gary Mikula is here. He's a senior director of cyber and information security at FINRA, and he's joined by Siddharta "Sid" Dadana, who's the director of information security engineering at FINRA. Gentlemen, welcome back to theCUBE, Gary, and Sid, first-timer, welcome on theCUBE. So, I want to start with FINRA. Why don't you explain, I mean, I think many people know what FINRA is, but explain what you guys do and, sort of, the importance of your mission. >> Sure, it's our main aspiration is to protect investors, and we do that in two ways. We actually monitor the brokers and dealers that do trades for people, but more importantly, and what precipitated our move to the Cloud was the enormous amount of data that we have to pull in daily. Every transaction on almost every US stock market has to be surveilled to ensure that people are acting properly, and we do that at the petabyte scale, and doing that with your own hardware became untenable, and so the ability to have elastic processing in the Cloud became very attractive. >> How much data are we talking about here? Is there any way you can, sort of, quantify that for us, or give us a mental picture? >> Yeah, so the example I use is, if you took every transaction that Visa has on a normal day, every Facebook like, every Facebook update, and if you took every Twitter tweet, you added them altogether, you multiplied it by 20, you would still not reach our peak on our peak day. >> (laughs) Hence, Splunk. And we'll talk about that but, Sid, what's your role, you got to architect all this stuff, the data pipeline, what do you... >> So, my role is basically to work with the webs teams, application teams to basically integrate security in the processes, how they roll out applications, how they look at data, how they use the same data that security uses for them to be able to leverage it for the webs and all the performances. >> So, your mission is to make sure security's not an afterthought, it's not a bolt-on, it's a fundamental part of the development process, so it's not thrown over the fence, "Hey, secure this application." It's built in, is that right? >> Yes. >> Okay. Gary, I wonder if you could talk about how security has changed over the last several years. You hear a lot that, well, all the spending historically has been on keeping the bad guys out the perimeter. As the perimeter disappears, things change, and the emphasis changes. Certainly, data is a bigger factor, analytics have come into play. From your perspective, what is the big change or the big changes in security? >> So, it's an interesting question. So I've been through several paradigm changes, and I don't think anyone has been as big as the move the Cloud, and... The Cloud offers so much opportunity from a cost perspective, from a processing perspective, but it also brings with it certain security concerns. And we're able to use tools like Splunk to be able to do surveillance on our AWS environments in order to give us the confidence to be able to use those services up there. And so, we now are actually looking at how we're going to secure individual AWS services before we use them, rather than looking to bring stovepipe solutions in, we're looking to leverage our AWS relationship to be able to leverage what they've built out of the box. >> Yeah, people oftentimes, Stu, talk about Cloud security like it's some binary thing. "Oh, I don't want to go the Cloud, because Cloud is dangerous" or "Cloud security is better". It's not that simple, is it? I mean, maybe the infrastructure. In fact, we heard the CIA, Stu and I were in D.C. in December, we heard the CIO of the CIA say, "The Cloud, its worse day is better than my client's server from a security perspective." But he's really talking about the infrastructure. There's so much more to security, right? >> Absolutely, and, so I agree that the Cloud gives the opportunity to be better than you are on PRAM. I think the way FINRA's rolled out, we've shown that we are more secure in the Cloud than we have been on traditional data centers, and it's because of our ability to actually monitor our whole AWS environment. Everything is API-based. We know exactly what everybody's doing. There's no shadow IT anymore, and those are all big positives. >> Yeah, I'm wondering how you've, what KPIs you look at when you look at your Splunk environment. What we hear from Splunk, you know, it's scalability, cost, performance, and then that management, the monitoring of the environment. How are they doing? How does that make your job easier? >> So, I think we still look at the same KPIs that Splunk advertises all the time, but some of the reasons, from our perspective, we kind of look at it in terms of, how much value can we give it to not just one part of the company, but how can we make it much more enhanceable part for everyone in the organization. So, the more we do that, I think that makes it a much better ROI for any organization to use a product like this one. >> You guys talk about the "shift left" movement. What is "shift left" and what is the relevance to security? >> Yeah so, "shift left" is a concept where, instead of looking at security as a bolt-on, or an add-on, or a separate entity, we're looking to leverage what are traditional DevOp tools, what are traditional SDLC pipeline roles, and we're looking at how we integrate security into that, and we use Splunk to be able to integrate collection of data into our CDCI pipelines, and it's all hands-off. So, somebody hits a button to deploy a new VPC and AWS, automatically things are monitored and into our enterprise search, I'm sorry, enterprise security SIM, and automatically being monitored. There's no hands-on that needs to be done. >> So, on a scale of one to five, thinking of a maturity model in terms of, in a DevOps context, five being, you know, the gold standard and one being you're just getting started. Where would you put FINRA on that spectrum, I mean, just subjectively? >> So, I'll never say that we're a five because I think there's always, >> You're never done. >> You're never done and there's always room for improvement, but I think we're at least a strong four. We've embraced those concepts, and we've put them into action. >> And so, I thought so, and I want to ask you from a skill standpoint how you got there. So, you've been around a long time. You had a Dev team and an Ops team before the term DevOps even came around, right? And we talk about this a lot, Stu. What did you do with the Ops guys and the Dev guys? Is it OpsDev or DevOps? Did you retrain them? Did you fire them all and hire new people? How did you go through that transition? >> Yep, that's a fair thing. I went to my CISO John Brady a couple of years ago and I told him that we were going to need to get these new skill sets in, and that I thought I had the right person in Sid to be able to head that up, and we brought in some new talent, but we also retrained the existing talent because these were really bright people, and they still had the security skills. And what Sid's been able to do is to embrace that and create a working relationship with the traditional DevOps teams so that we can integrate into their tools. >> So, it does include a little bit work even on our end to do where you kind of learn how the DevOps forces work, so you've got to do it on your own to first figure out things and then you can actually relate to the problems which they will go through and then you work through problems with them, rather than you designing up a solution and then just say, "Hey, go and implement it out." So, I think that kind of relationship has helped us and in the long run, we hope to do a bit better work. >> Yes, Sid, can you bring us in a little bit, when you look at your Splunk deployment, FINRA'S got a lot of applications, how do you get all those various applications in there? You know, Splunk talks about, you can get access to your data your way, do you find that to be the reality? >> Yes, to a certain extent, so... Let's take a step back here. So our design is much more hybrid-oriented. So, we use Splunk Cloud, but that's primarily for our indexers whereas we host our own sort of class receptor. All the data basically goes in from servers from AWS components, from on-prem, basically it flows into our Splunk Cloud indexers, and we use a role-based access management to actually give everyone access to whatever data they need to be looking at. >> Alright. The number of enhancements from 702, updates, the Cloud, Gar-Gar, is there anything that's jumped out that's going to architecturally help your team? >> So, I think one of the interesting things is the new data pipeline, and to be able to actually mangle that data before I get it into my Splunk indexers is going to be really really life-changing for us. One of the hard parts is that developers write code and they don't necessarily create logs that are event-driven. They don't have date-time stamps, they do dumps. So, I'm going to be able to actually massage that before it hits the indexers, and it's going to speed up our ability to be able to provide quick searches because the indexers won't be working on mangling that data. >> And how big of a deal is it for you? They announced yesterday the ability to scale storage and compute separately in a more granular fashion, is that a big deal for you? >> So, I actually, I remember speaking to Doug Merritt probably three years ago. >> You started this! (laughing) >> And I said, "Doug", I said, "I really think that's the direction that you need to go. You're going to have to separate those two, eventually, because we're doing a petabyte scale, we realized very early that that'd need to be done. And so, it's really really refreshing to see, because it's going to be transformative to be able to do compute-on-demand after that. Because now we can start looking at API brokers, and we can start looking at containers, and all those other things can be integrated into Splunk. >> Love having customers on like you guys, so knowledgeable. I have to ask, switch gears a little bit, I want to ask you about your security regime. We had a customer on yesterday, and it was the CISO who reported to him. He was the EVP, and he reported to the CIO. A lot of organizations say, "You know what? We want the CISO to be separate from the CIO. Cause it's like the, you know, the fox in the henhouse kind of thing. And we want that a little bit of tension in there." How do you guys approach it? What's the regime you have for... >> That is a fair question, and I've heard that from many other CISOs that have that same sort of complaint. And I think it's really organization-based. And I think, do you have the checks and balances in place? First of all, our CIO, Steve Randich, is extremely, he cares a lot about security, and he is very good at getting funding for us for initiatives to help secure the environment. But more importantly, our board of directors bring up security at every board event. They care about it, they know about it, and that permeates through the organization. So there's a checks and balances to make sure that we have the right security in place. And it's a working relationship, not adversarial at all, so, having our CISO John Brady report to Steve Randich, the CIO, has not been a hindrance. >> And I think that's a change in the last several years, because that regime that I described, which was, there was sort of a wave there, where that became common, and I think you just hit on it. When security became a board-level issue, and for every Fortune 1000, Global 2000 company, it's a board-level issue. They talk about it every board meeting. When that occurred, I think there was an epiphany of, "We need the CIO to actually be on this." And you want the CIO to be responsible for that. And the change was, it used to be, "Hey, if I fail, I get fired." And I think boards now realize that "failure" in security doesn't mean you got breached. >> Sure. >> You know. Breaches are going to happen. It's how you respond to them and, you know, how you react to them that is becoming more important. So there's much more transparency around security in our view. I wonder if you agree with that. >> I think there's transparency. And the other thing is is that you have to put the decision-making where it makes the most sense. Most of the security breaches that we're talking about are highly technical in nature, where a CIO is better able to evaluate some of those decisions, not all companies have a CEO that came from a technology train in order to be able to make those decisions. So, I think it makes more sense to have the CISO report to somebody in the technology world. >> Great, thank you for that. Now, the other question I have for you is, in terms of FINRA's experience with Splunk, did it start with SecOps and security, or was it, sort of, IT operations, or...? >> It did, it started with security. We were disenfranchised with traditional SIMs that were out there, and we decided to go with Splunk, and we made the decision that security was going to own it, but we wanted it to be a corporate asset from day one. And we worked our tails off to integrate, through brown bags, through training. So we permeated through the organization. And, on any given week, we pull about 35-40% of all of technology is using Splunk at FINRA. >> So, I'm curious as to, we heard some announcements today, I don't know if you saw them, about, you know, Splunk Next, building on that, Splunk for the line of business, the business flow, they did a nice demo there. Do you see, because security sort of was the starting point, and your mission was always to permeate the organization, do you see that continuing to other parts of the organization more aggressively now given this sort of democratization of data for the business lines, and... Will you guys be a part of that, directly? >> We hope so. We hope we are part of that change, too. I mean, the more we can use the same data for even business users that will help them, that would relieve a lot of, and they made this point again and again in the keynote, too, that, the It Ops and SecOps are already burdened enough. So, how do we make life easy for business users who actually leverage the same data? So we hope to be able to put these tools up and see if it can make any difference to business users. >> So, you guys have put a lot of emphasis on integrating with Splunk and AWS Cloud. You have a presentation later on today at .conf18 around the AWS Firehose that you have with Splunk. What's that all about? What's the AWS Firehose? How are you integrating it? Why is it important? >> So, it is streaming and it allows me to get information from AWS that's typically in something called the CloudWatch Logs, that is really difficult to be able to talk to. And I want to get it into the Splunk so I can get more value from it. And what I'm able to do is put something called a subscription filter on it, and flow that data directly into Splunk. So, Splunk worked with AWS to create this integration between the two tools, and we think we've taken it to a high level. We use it for Lambda, to grab those logs, we use it for VPC Flow Logs, we're using it for SaaS Providers, provide APIs into their data, we use it for that, and finally, we're going to be doing database activity monitoring, all leveraging this same technology. >> Love it, I mean, you guys are on the forefront of Cloud and Splunk integration, Cloud adoption, DevOps, you guys have always been great about sharing your knowledge, you know, with others, and we really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back. You're watching theCUBE from .conf18, Splunk's big user conference. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCube's Ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. It's theCube's exclusive coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. It's day three of three days of live coverage. Go to thecube.net, siliconANGLE.com, to get all of the stories. And of course, I'm here with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon, my co-host for the week. Our next guest is Gary Harrison, Head of Technology Services, Metsi Technologies, welcome to theCube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you guys, it's good to be here. >> So, you're in the Cisco Ecosystem, so Stu and I have been talking about this all week. A couple of big trends: open, Cisco's opening up, you've got DevNet success with developers. Cloud is a new architecture, okay. Intent driven architectures are huge. Sounds like outcomes to me, so I hear a lot of these conversations about "what's the outcome?", and then building a technology. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that, from your perspective, what does that mean to you? When you hear that, intent networking, developer community, it sounds a lot like a different Cisco. >> It's a different model. It's changing, I think, the way business processors are today, and getting organizations to understand the process of capturing what they want the infrastructure intent, and their application intent look like. And then understanding how that drives different models for deploying services, as well as the operations behind it. >> You guys do a lot of stuff with customer, I want you to take a minute to explain what you guys do, your company. What are some of the things you guys get involved in? Where are you in the ecosystem? What kinds of projects are you engaging on? >> We're a company, so we're a professional services partner, we're a service only integration partner with Cisco. So it's just through, we don't resell, so we get to focus on purely customer success, and we help enable the channel and the partners directly. And the focus is the Enterprise Cloud Suite. So it's really around helping customers understand how to get the most out of those technologies, how to choose the right element of the cloud suite for the job. >> Gary, so you're in an interesting position, to watch some of the transformations going on in Cisco. We said the old way of measuring Cisco was boxes and ports, and the new way is, you know, software, to open and those things. Since you're not one of the, you know, not in a derogatory way, box sellers, you know, give us your viewpoint as to how Cisco's going through that transformation and how your customers are reacting to that. >> So it's definitely a good shift towards those softer elements of it. And we're seeing the strength of the software and the products that come out, and the capabilities, it's rapidly changing. And you're seeing the increase in the product suite recently, the number of, the move towards analytics and other software to support operational life cycles as well as just the provisioning cycles. I think a challenge for the customers is a lot of complexities introduced. A lot of the new tools out of the box out there. And the difficult question is always how to best use each particular tool to get value for the business. >> Yeah, it's one of the big questions is it used to be, I really understood my network because I built it. I racked it, stacked it, wired it, you know. Configured it in the CLI, today a lot of the pieces of the network you're managing, you don't own. They're in the cloud, they're extending beyond. How do your services and solutions help customers get their arms around this, kind of, multi-cloud world? >> It's always the focus on, I guess, is reducing that complexity. There's a lot you can do with the different software that's out there. And really, to try and step back from just the solo tools, and looking at the cloud stack as a whole, and starting small, starting simple. Identifying those early use cases that will help drive cloud adoption in an organization, and then understanding how the software and the tools benefit them to do that. You know as you say, you can't see inside the software easily. If you're going to bare the infrastructures code, you need a way to make sure that as you build that code and those processors that you keep that visibility into what that softwares meant to be doing for you. >> Gary, on that point, I want to just double down on that concept holistically. We hear that, all week we've heard from interviews, from Cisco executives as customers, that it's the systems view almost, it's not the box view. What does that mean to the customer today, and how far along are your customers in that mindset? Are they there, are they kicking the tires? 'Cause you got to engage on real frontline projects where there's outcomes involved and the plumbing's in place. Okay, so how do you get there without disrupting? Right, that's the question we hear. But so how do I get the holistic view without disrupting the business? What's your thoughts on customer's position on that? >> I think to get the holistic view, it's about the business needs I think embrace that. And understanding, though, it's about delivering applications and services now. And the infrastructures there to support that. And not focus on these infrastructure-centric models. So that's the first journey, is understanding, you know, what are the services that are important to the business, and how those services are involved. And then I think the challenge we see from the customers is actually, you know, intend to your organizational and process challenges. The technology itself is not necessarily all the complexities, it's how that aligns to the organization. And so I think those early wins and those early outcomes are a organization that's aware of those challenges. >> Like almost getting a little stepping stone, you get a little success, you know, don't take a big project. What's your take on road-mapping in that? Because that's challenging. What have you seen for success use cases that customers can take right out of the gate to get this intent thing going? What are some of the low-hanging-fruit opportunities? >> So one thing we focus on, I guess, is changing our engagement model with the customers. It's something we sort, I guess, of pride ourselves on. Is we're a lot more flexible and agile, ourselves, as a, in terms of delivering infrastructure services. So again, we try to communicate to our customers find used cases that deliver value and return on investment early. And focus on delivering that, sort of, one use case. It doesn't matter what it is in the cloud-sect, whether it's through automation of network infrastructure, orchestration of services on top of there. We pick a very clear use case and develop that first, and then once you understand how the technology's stitched together end to end, you can then start to grow that inside the organization. >> Is there any use cases that pop out that you can just point to, anecdotally, that seem to be popular? >> So there's a couple different extremes, so ACI is a massive enabler at the moment. You know, it's really, since SDN's come along it's a catalyst to drive the rest of the cloud change infrastructure. So we have some very specific use cases around automating that infrastructure. Not just what ACI does itself, but to create that automation layer on top of that. So, you know, people are deploying lots of infrastructure, so that's one of the specific use cases we see. >> Gary, I really like what you said about it's changing the engagement model, because it used to be "I'm gonna' roll out a new application, "okay, I need to figure out the plumbing." Now when I look at intent based offerings there, it's really more about I'm building new applications and the network is a critical piece of it, it actually helps me drive some of these new, you know, modern micro architectures there. You've got to, I'm sure, be talking to a little bit of a broader, you know, jobs inside the customer. How does that change your engagement? Who are the roles that you're talking to today? >> Well actually this is what we find, is tools like Cloud Sender, and for me one of it's strengths is it's fine ability to tangibly capture intent in a application blueprint. And I find that's a good way to bring organizations together, because now we have a focal point for your network and infrastructure, your platforms teams, and your application teams to come together. And it provides a common language to talk about it. And that's one of the real strengths we find to start having those conversations with those different teams within the organizations. >> Gary talk about the old way and new way. We always like to kind of break things down in a very simplistic way. And Chuck Robbins, the CEO, on stage said "that's the old way", it looked like an architecture, hey, firewall, I get that. And he's like, some people actually have this today. And he's kind of looking at the modern cloud, obviously the circle with all the different services. So kind of Cisco plug. But from your standpoint, when you talk to customers, what was the older conversations, that you could point to saying "we used to do it this way", this is what we would talk about, these are the meetings we would have, now the shift is towards this. What's the old way, and what's it transforming into, when you actually have those conversations, what is it like? >> So the big difference for the infrastructure projects, where they were projects, they're very traditional waterfall model. You work out what you want to buy, where you want to be, you put a project plan around that and deliver that. But the engagement we have today to say to people, all the importance is in the software. It's the services you're delivering on the software, and the capability to develop in the software. And that's not something out of the box. It's very difficult to say: where do I want to be in six months, or where do I want to be in a year? So again the way we encourage and the way we engage with our customers is to put a roadmap together, but to identify something in a much shorter term that you can deliver. Start delivering something, and then take a more agile approach around it, to come back, review, and re-plan again, and look at what your priorities are. >> What's the role of the solution architect on this, 'cause a lot of the things we're seeing and then we're trying to, kind of, connect the dots here. Holistic roadmaps are interesting, because you've got have to have a foundational architecture. What is the preferred kind of consistent theme you're seeing around architectural decisions? Are there table stakes, are there certain things that are always going to be in flux? How do you view the big picture on the solution architect piece of it? Is there certain things that are must-haves, weight on this? What's your reaction to that? >> I think a solution, I think it's a challenging piece. I think it's probably where you see organizations are probably weaker, is having a cloud-solution architecture function. We still see infrastructure architecture, enterprise architecture, but that solution architecture for the cloud model, I think that's actually more a challenging piece. I don't think there's any obvious answer in what, you know, for the customers we see, there's no common answer. >> That's a really hot area right now. >> Gary, one of the biggest challenges we see in multi-cloud, is no two customers are alike. >> No. >> But through the customers that you're talking to, what are some of the common stumbling blocks or hurdles for really getting, you know, full value out of their solutions that you see from customers today? >> I think it's understanding the end to end life cycle of a service. So we can do a lot with a multi-cloud capabilities, in deploying when an internal infrastructure to external. But the processes have to be the same, with security, compliance, these other aspects that come into it add a lot of complexity. And also it's not just the way the applications and the infrastructure are built, patching life cycles, you know, post-deployment of, you know, virtual images. The way people then update and maintain them and that life cycle around it. And I think it's different in a virtualized world, in a containerized world we see a lot more advancements around it, and multi-cloud is easier. I think it's for people to take their legacy applications and try and move them into a cloud-native scenario, which is a real challenge. >> Gary, pretend that I'm a friend of yours and I come to you and say "hey Gary, you know, "I'm new to this whole intent-based networking thing, what is it?", how would you describe it? What's your definition of, what is intent based networking really mean? >> There's two parts of it: one is to identify somewhere to capture what the definition of your applications and services are, and what that means, and the infrastructure that lies underneath. Say cloud centers one part of it, other organizations may have other models, but it's rather than working two traditional high level design, low level design, and we see your requirements analysis, now capturing that intent in somewhere that's both software consumable and can be software defined. You can use software to push intent in there, and you can consume it through software. And the next major bit of the puzzle is to provide that freedom to the infrastructure layers underneath so they get to decide how they implement that intent. And that's what gives you this multi-cloud freedom, you know, how we're implemented in our public cloud can be different to how we're implemented in the private cloud. The tools, the processes, the infrastructure, the software, can be different, but the outcome that's delivered is the same. >> Yeah it's interesting to show, you mentioned SDN earlier, we see a lot of activity on software defined data center, architectural things, and again, it's challenging because not everything looks the same, but it's super important. But then we hear things like Google Cloud on stage, and we hear Kubernetes, we hear ISTIO, which is a service mesh, so you start to see up the stack, the applications taking, kind of, almost a network services-like mindset. I mean, micro services are basically, have the same feel as networking, but it's more up higher in the stacks. So you've got some really interesting dynamics. You've got the SDN thing going on, and then you've got in the middle of the stack, towards the application, these cool Micro services with cloud native. This is an opportunity for network engineers. I mean, how would you describe to the audience out there the opportunity for a network engineer, or someone who's in the network game, to take advantage of that, this new trend that's coming very fast? >> It's a different model of networking. And again, the good thing about containers is they do provide this very application-centric focus. Networking is now about providing a service for the application sit on there. And Container Frameworks make that very obvious. So I'd say network engineer, it's a good place to understand that model and that ecosystem. And then see how that can be applied to what we've done in virtualization. And as SDN comes along in a more traditional private cloud infrastructure, on top of the data center infrastructure we have today, take some of those models that we learned from things like Container Frameworks and how do we apply them to virtualization. >> That's a great point about the virtualization, it's almost a roadmap to how to understand the impact and interplay between the networks. It really is. Okay final question for you is, you know, Cisco Live this year seems to be different, what's the vibe of the show, what's your, if you had to, for someone who didn't come here that's watching, say "hey, I missed it this year, "heard there's a lot of action, DevNet's got 500,000 developers", what's different about this year for Cisco Live, what's the most important story? Can you share your opinion on what's happening? >> I guess for us, being the definite village, it is about the definite zone. The buzz we're seeing, the people, the types of questions we get asked on the stand now, there's definitely a lot more interest in this development side of it. >> What's some of the questions you're getting? What are the hot topics if you stack ranked them? >> People just want to understand, you know, new trends in software, coding, you know, how can I apply my coding skills to coding the network, or where do I learn about that, and we get asked lots of questions as people pass the stands. >> Gary, thanks so much for coming on theCube, great to see you, thanks for coming on and sharing your commentary here. Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, this is the live Cube cover day three here at Cisco live, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we're here breaking all the action down, we'll be back with more. Stay with us for day three coverage. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from New York City, it's buck you. Here is your host, Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back. I'm Jeff. Rick. We're here at the Cubes. Fifth birthday party. A big date in Icy in Manhattan is part of the big Date. A week. It's got Stratos cough, a dupe world. And, of course, big Aidan. I see. So now having our party, which is always good to have, and I'm joined department X gas. Kerry McFadden from Parodi Research. Carrie. Welcome. Well, thank you very much. So last last we saw he was actually a big data and twenty thirteen, So it's lots changing the year. >> Absolutely, Absolutely. I think the whole hoodoo thing is really taken off. And the thing that interests me the most about show or or the exhibitors at the show is that Bye. You could get a lot of data into Duke, but how do you get it out? How do you make it useful? What do you do with it when you get it out? You know, I said on structure data is structured. Date. Is that a combination? Is it ski Melis? >> All the above all the above, >> right? Exactly. So I think really, that's been on and actually have been Jeff to all the shows, right? Since the beginning, when it was just a new world. Okay, Cube started back. And I think two thousand ten two thousand filling our fifth birthday. Right? So at least at least at least twenty ten. So since then, you've seen, you know, progression off vendors coming in to provide services that actually enable Duke to do more than it does started is kind of a batch oriented type of solution that now, because of these other value added solutions can to really or near real time processing, you can take the data out of it a lot more easily. You can use do basically as a as a repository, right on DH. And a lot of the solutions out there are are evolving to the point where you can, uh, you could basically make a sense of the information, and I think that's a really important rights. Dated information information inside, right? That's where we want to go with this thing. Business decisions made in real time. Which way? Define as in time to do something about it. Right? Right. Yes. Some of the players, I mean, you've got the map. Our guys. You've got the act. Aeon folks that just bought pervasive software. So they've got the Predictive Analytics piece sort of covered. Obviously. That's stone breakers. Old company, you know, a variant of ing gris, right? You've got. Obviously, IBM is a player in this space. With their blue mix and their cloud capabilities and all of their information management pieces, every major vendor is got a piece of is part of the action, if you will. Trying to build something on top of a dupe to make it more useful and make it more valuable. Yeah, the floor was filled with little companies, big companies, and everyone is certainly jumping in. So let me get your prospectus that you've been coming for a lot of years on this thing. Where are we on the journey? How? How? You know, I think we're past the P E O C stage, right? People are getting stuff into production deployments, but it's still early days. You know, the Giants are playing tonight. Go Giants, are we? First inning, third inning, seventh inning. Where are we? I think we're probably in the second or third any second. I think we got a ways to go. And what's the next big hurdle to get us to the next inning. I think one of the problems is this storage issue, right? So you've got this issue of being able to scale out theoretically, exponentially, right? The nice thing about do piss If you need Teo, if you need more space, you just add No J had storage and whatnot, But what happens when you get too much information? You're into the pedal bike, multiple PETA right range now, and most of that data, you know you're not going to access. You may access only two percent of it overtime. I think they're a lot of figures around that. But actually, a wicked bon article that I read recently is very interesting, one called Flake Flake or what they were doing. Flake. I want to make sure he gets a slave by a herd where he said it to me off camera, right? It's a f L a P. It's a combination of flash and tape on DH. Basically, there's a great article on the Wicked Bond site by Wicked Bonds CTO, David's lawyer Okay, and his premises that at some point, relatively soon a cz thie as data grows exponentially into the multiple petabytes ranges and maybe even beyond The thing is gonna get squeezed is the traditional HDD or hardening is spinning disc, right? So tape has become much more, uh, much more resilient. Uh, tape last has a meat time failure of about twenty six or thirty years versus disc, which is about five. And obviously flash is much, much faster, right? Right in some cases don't get into all the nuances of almost feet feet, but flavor going to squeeze out disks and the men think so. And what that'll offer customers is a is a much lower TCO from managing those huge petabytes scale environments and also accessing it at a relatively quick speed. So I think that's that's a piece. It's interesting that the other part that's very interesting to me, Mr Cognitive Computing face. So I was at the no SQL event last week last month in in San Jose, and with that they had a cognitive computing component on DH. I think thie idea of trying to get machines to think more like people building neuro morphing chips to two. It's kind of mimic the way synapses or electricity, electricity in the brain, you know, works how neurons fire and so forth is very interesting. And I think once you Khun Get Dupe is the repository. You've got the data there. But how do you make use of it? And I think that's the challenge. That's going to be, well, paramount the next few years. Exciting days ahead. Well, Gary, thanks for taking a few minutes. We're at the fifth birthday party at the Cube. Were at Big Data and nice jefe. Rick, we're on the ground. Thanks for watching.

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World," sponsored by HPE and Intel. Today we're going to discuss the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable process impact on containers and AI. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, and I'm joined by three experts to guide us along. We have Jordan Plum, Senior Director of AI and products for Intel, Bradley Sweeney, Big Data and AI Product Manager, Mainstream Compute Workloads at HPE, and Gary Wang, Containers Product Manager, Mainstream Compute Workloads at HPE. Welcome to the program gentlemen. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. >> Thank you for having us. >> This segment is going to be talking about containers to deploy high performance AI applications. This is a really important area right now. We're seeing a lot more AI deployed, kind of next gen AI coming. How is HPE supporting and testing and delivering containers for AI? >> Yeah, so what we're doing from HPE's perspective is we're taking these container platforms, combining with the next generation Intel servers to fully validate the deployment of the containers. So what we're doing is we're publishing the reference architectures. We're creating these automation scripts, and also creating a monitoring and security strategy for these container platforms. So for customers to easily deploy these Kubernete clusters and to easily secure their community environments. >> Gary, give us a quick overview of the new Proliant DL 360 and 380 Gen 11 servers. >> Yeah, the load, for example, for container platforms what we're seeing mostly is the DL 360 and DL 380 for matching really well for container use cases, especially for AI. The DL 360, with the expended now the DDR five memory and the new PCI five slots really, really helps the speeds to deploy these container environments and also to grow the data that's required to store it within these container environments. So for example, like the DL 380 if you want to deploy a data fabric whether it's the Ezmeral data fabric or different vendors data fabric software you can do so with the DL 360 and DL 380 with the new Intel Xeon processors. >> How does HP help customers with Kubernetes deployments? >> Yeah, like I mentioned earlier so we do a full validation to ensure the container deployment is easy and it's fast. So we create these automation scripts and then we publish them on GitHub for customers to use and to reference. So they can take that and then they can adjust as they need to. But following the deployment guide that we provide will make the, deploy the community deployment much easier, much faster. So we also have demo videos that's also published and then for reference architecture document that's published to guide the customer step by step through the process. >> Great stuff. Thanks everyone. We'll be going to take a quick break here and come back. We're going to do a deep dive on the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable process and the impact on AI and containers. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back. (intense music) Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World" series. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, joined by Jordan Plum with Intel, Bradley Sweeney with HPE, and Gary Wang from HPE. We're going to do a drill down and do a deeper dive into the AI containers with the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable processors we appreciate your time coming in. Jordan, great to see you. I got to ask you right out of the gate, what is the view right now in terms of Intel's approach to containers for AI? It's hot right now. AI is booming. You're seeing kind of next gen use cases. What's your approach to containers relative to AI? >> Thanks John and thanks for the question. With the fourth generation Xeon scalable processor launch we have tested and validated this platform with over 400 deep learning and machine learning models and workloads. These models and workloads are publicly available in the framework repositories and they can be downloaded by anybody. Yet customers are not only looking for model validation they're looking for model performance and performance is usually a combination of a given throughput at a target latency. And to do that in the data center all the way to the factory floor, this is not always delivered from these generic proxy models that are publicly available in the industry. >> You know, performance is critical. We're seeing more and more developers saying, "Hey, I want to go faster on a better platform, faster all the time." No one wants to run slower stuff, that's for sure. Can you talk more about the different container approaches Intel is pursuing? >> Sure. First our approach is to meet the customers where they are and help them build and deploy AI everywhere. Some customers just want to focus on deployment they have more mature use cases, and they just want to download a model that works that's high performing and run. Others are really focused more on development and innovation. They want to build and train models from scratch or at least highly customize them. Therefore we have several container approaches to accelerate the customer's time to solution and help them meet their business SLA along their AI journey. >> So what developers can just download these containers and just go? >> Yeah, so let me talk about the different kinds of containers we have. We start off with pre-trained containers. We'll have about 55 or more of these containers where the model is actually pre-trained, highly performant, some are optimized for low latency, others are optimized for throughput and the customers can just download these from Intel's website or from HPE and they can just go into production right away. >> That's great. A lot of choice. People can just get jump right in. That's awesome. Good, good choice for developers. They want more faster velocity. We know that. What else does Intel provide? Can you share some thoughts there? What you guys else provide developers? >> Yeah, so we talked about how hey some are just focused on deployment and they maybe they have more mature use cases. Other customers really want to do some more customization or optimization. So we have another class of containers called development containers and this includes not just the kind of a model itself but it's integrated with the framework and some other capabilities and techniques like model serving. So now that customers can download just not only the model but an entire AI stack and they can be sort of do some optimizations but they can also be sure that Intel has optimized that specific stack on top of the HPE servers. >> So it sounds simple to just get started using the DL model and containers. Is that it? Where, what else are customers looking for? What can you take a little bit deeper? >> Yeah, not quite. Well, while the customer customer's ability to reproduce performance on their site that HPE and Intel have measured in our own labs is fantastic. That's not actually what the customer is only trying to do. They're actually building very complex end-to-end AI pipelines, okay? And a lot of data scientists are really good at building models, really good at building algorithms but they're less experienced in building end-to-end pipelines especially 'cause the number of use cases end-to-end are kind of infinite. So we are building end-to-end pipeline containers for use cases like media analytics and sentiment analysis, anomaly detection. Therefore a customer can download these end-to-end containers, right? They can either use them as a reference, just like, see how we built them and maybe they have some changes in their own data center where they like to use different tools, but they can just see, "Okay this is what's possible with an end-to-end container on top of an HPE server." And other cases they could actually, if the overlap in the use case is pretty close, they can just take our containers and go directly into production. So this provides developers, all three types of containers that I discussed provide developers an easy starting point to get them up and running quickly and make them productive. And that's a really important point. You talked a lot about performance, John. But really when we talk to data scientists what they really want to be is productive, right? They're under pressure to change the business to transform the business and containers is a great way to get started fast >> People take product productivity, you know, seriously now with developer productivity is the hottest trend obviously they want performance. Totally nailed it. Where can customers get these containers? >> Right. Great, thank you John. Our pre-trained model containers, our developmental containers, and our end-to-end containers are available at intel.com at the developer catalog. But we'd also post these on many third party marketplaces that other people like to pull containers from. And they're frequently updated. >> Love the developer productivity angle. Great stuff. We've still got more to discuss with Jordan, Bradley, and Gary. We're going to take a short break here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll be right back. (intense music) Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of "Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier with theCUBE and we'll be discussing and wrapping up our discussion on containers to deploy high performance AI. This is a great segment on really a lot of demand for AI and the applications involved. And we got the fourth gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with HP Gen 11 servers. Bradley, what is the top AI use case that Gen 11 HP Proliant servers are optimized for? >> Yeah, thanks John. I would have to say intelligent video analytics. It's a use case that's supplied across industries and verticals. For example, a smart hospital solution that we conducted with Nvidia and Artisight in our previous customer success we've seen 5% more hospital procedures, a 16 times return on investment using operating room coordination. With that IVA, so with the Gen 11 DL 380 that we provide using the the Intel four gen Xeon processors it can really support workloads at scale. Whether that is a smart hospital solution whether that's manufacturing at the edge security camera integration, we can do it all with Intel. >> You know what's really great about AI right now you're starting to see people starting to figure out kind of where the value is does a lot of the heavy lifting on setting things up to make humans more productive. This has been clearly now kind of going neck level. You're seeing it all in the media now and all these new tools coming out. How does HPE make it easier for customers to manage their AI workloads? I imagine there's going to be a surge in demand. How are you guys making it easier to manage their AI workloads? >> Well, I would say the biggest way we do this is through GreenLake, which is our IT as a service model. So customers deploying AI workloads can get fully-managed services to optimize not only their operations but also their spending and the cost that they're putting towards it. In addition to that we have our Gen 11 reliance servers equipped with iLO 6 technology. What this does is allows customers to securely manage their server complete environment from anywhere in the world remotely. >> Any last thoughts or message on the overall fourth gen intel Xeon based Proliant Gen 11 servers? How they will improve workload performance? >> You know, with this generation, obviously the performance is only getting ramped up as the needs and requirements for customers grow. We partner with Intel to support that. >> Jordan, gimme the last word on the container's effect on AI applications. Your thoughts as we close out. >> Yeah, great. I think it's important to remember that containers themselves don't deliver performance, right? The AI stack is a very complex set of software that's compiled together and what we're doing together is to make it easier for customers to get access to that software, to make sure it all works well together and that it can be easily installed and run on sort of a cloud native infrastructure that's hosted by HPE Proliant servers. Hence the title of this talk. How to use Containers to Deploy High Performance AI Applications. Thank you. >> Gentlemen. Thank you for your time on the Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World sponsored by HPE and Intel. Again, I love this segment for AI applications Containers to Deploy Higher Performance. This is a great topic. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay, I'm John. We'll be back with more coverage. See you soon. (soft music)

>>Good Morning Cloud community and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are at AWS Reinvent. It is day four here on the Cube. I'm Savannah Peterson with Lisa Martin. You are looking fantastic. Day four, we've done 45 interviews. How are you feeling? Oh, >>Great. I can't believe it's day four. The cube will be producing over 100 interviews. >>Impressive. Right >>On this stage where there are two sets, and of course we have the set upstairs as well. It's amazing how much content we've created, how many great conversations we've had, right? And the excitement around AWS and the, and the community. >>Yeah. I feel like we've learned so much together. Love co-hosting with you, and so excited for our first conversation this morning with Wira. Welcome, Tim and Kashmira, welcome to the show. How you doing? You both look great for day four. Thank >>You. Yeah, we're doing good. Great. We're doing good. Ready to go. Day four, let's go. >>That's the spirit. That's exactly the energy we need here on the cube. So just in case someone in the audience is not familiar, tell us about Wipro. >>So Wipro is a global consulting company and we help transform our customers and their businesses. >>Transformation's been a super hot topic here at the show, quite frankly a big priority, especially with cost cutting and everything else that's going on. How, how do you do that? How do you help customers do that? Has >>Me run? So we, we, so we have our A strategy, which we call our full stride cloud strategy. So particularly from a cloud perspective here, obviously with aws, we have end to end client services. So from high end strategic consulting through customer journeys, technology implementation, all the way through to our managed services. So we help customers with the end to end journey, particularly as here we're talking about cloud, but also business transformation as well. And we have, you know, a whole host of technologies. So about a few years ago we made an announcement around a billion investment in cloud casual and that Yeah, absolutely. A cool billion and just a cool billion. Yeah. And that pocket >>Change. Exactly. >>Right. And that investment. Over the last few years, we've acquired a number of really exciting companies like Capco, which is a consulting company in the financial services space. We've acquired design companies, a company called Design it, looking at customer journeys and user experience, and then also technology companies called Rising, which looks after the whole SAP space. So we've kind of got the end to end solutions and technologies. And then we also invest in what we call Wipro Ventures. These are really innovative, exciting startups. We invest in those companies to really drive transformation. And the final thing that really brings the whole thing together is that we have decades of experience in engineering. That's kind of the heart of where we come from. So that experience all of that together really helps our clients to transform their business. And particularly as we're talking about cloud helps us to transform the cloud. Now what we are really hoping is that we can help our clients become what we call intelligent enterprises, and we are focusing more and more on customer outcomes and really helping them with those business outcomes. >>Yeah. It doesn't matter what we do if there isn't that business outcome. >>Yeah. That's what it's all about. I'm curious, Tim, to get your, as the America's cloud leader, one of the things that, that our boss, John Furrier, who is the co CEO of the Cube, was able to do every year, he gets to sit down with the head of AWS for a preview of reinvent, right? He's been doing this for 10 years now, and one of the things that Adam Olitsky said to him, this is something about a week or so ago, is CIOs and CEOs are not coming to me to talk about technology. They wanna talk about transformation. Sure, yeah. Business transformation, not an amorphous topic of digital transformation. Are you hearing the same? >>Absolutely. Right. So I think this is my seventh reinvent, right? And I think six, seven years ago, the majority of the conversations you would've had are about technology, right? Great technology, but kind of technology for it to solve it problems. You know, how do I, how do I migrate, how do I modernize, how do I use data? How do I make all this stuff happen? Right now it's about how do I drive new business opportunities, new revenue streams, how do I drive more efficiencies through the manufacturing 2.0 or what have you, right? Yeah. One really good example, like take, take medical devices, right? So like a connected defibrillator, right? Anytime you're building a, what they call an IOT device or a connected device, right? You have four competing an edge device in the space, an edge device, yeah. Right? You have four competing elements, right? >>You've got form factor, power, connectivity and intelligence, and all those things compete, right? I can have all the power if I want, if I can have something as biggest as a tape, right? You know, I can have satellite if I, it gets right off if I can plug it in somewhere. But when you're talking about an implanted defibrillator, right? That, that all competes. So you have an engineering problem, an engineering challenge that's based on a device, right? And then it's gotta connect to the cloud, right? So you have a lot of AWS services, I ot, core device shadowing, all sorts of things. That individual patient then, so, so there's the engineering challenge of, okay, I wanna build a device, I gotta prototype it, I gotta design it, I gotta build it at scale, I have to support it. Then you have a patient, right? Which is the end goal of the business is the patient care. >>They have a console at home that connects to that defibrillator via Bluetooth, let's say. And that's where you get your device updates, just like your laptop, right? You know, now push from where updates to your chest. Yes. Device, ot. It's like, okay, I'm just gonna do this every Thursday, right? So now you've very quickly move to a patient experience and that patient experience will very greatly, right? You know, based on age and exposure to technology and all other sorts of things, how diligent they are. Do they do the update every week Right. To their primary care provider? And then what we're, we're also hearing, okay, so like Kashmira mentioned, we, we can, we can have that design discussion, right? Yeah. We can have the engineering device discussion with our device, device lab. Then we can have our, you know, what's the, what's the patient experience, but then broader, what's the patient experience as they move, as we all do through a healthcare, that's a healthcare network, it's a provider network, it's a series of hospitals and providers. So what does that big picture and ecosystem look like? And it's, you haven't heard me mention server or data center or any of that stuff? No. Right? This is >>The most human anecdote we've had on >>Show. Fantastic. This >>Sidebar. Okay. I mean it great. Keep going. It's wonderful. And it's, and it's, it's fascinating because none of this happens or is possible without cloud and, and the type of services that AWS is, is releasing out into their, into their, into their, into the world, right? But it very quickly moves from technology to human. It very quickly moves from individual to ecosystem to to, to partner and culture and, you know, society, right? So, so these are the types of conversations we're having. I mean, this is kind of stuff that gets me outta bed in the morning. So it's great, right? It's great that, I love that. It's great that we've moved, we moved into that space. >>Well, it's, I mean the human element is so important. Every, every company has to be a data company. Hospitals, absolutely. Grocery stores, retailers, you name it. And what we're seeing is this, and we talk about data democratization all the time. Well, another thing that Adam Slosky told John Furrier is that the role of, of data analysts is gonna, is going to change, maybe go away or the, or the term because data needs to be everywhere. The doctors need the data. Absolutely. Every person in the organization needs to be able to analyze data to deliver outcomes. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's fundamental part of our strategies. And when we are looking at, you know, data is everywhere, you need to really think about how do you align to it. But we are looking at it from an industry perspective. So when we're looking at solutions for our clients, we're looking at how do we deliver data solutions for our bank? How do we deliver data solutions in healthcare? How do we deliver data solutions in various different industry? So >>Many different verticals that you're >>Touching. Yeah, all the different verticals. So that's, you know, we have like a four point strategy industry is the first one. So we have been really worked with a lot of clients around migrations and modernizations. What we're moving to now is really this industry play. So this week we've spent a lot of time with our energy and utilities clients and the AWS practice at banking and financial services, which is a very significant part of our business. Also cloud automotive. This is a really, really, you know, the fascinat, this is so exciting, but the fundamental part of that, it's very, is data, right? It's all hits on data. So it was really great to hear some of the announcements this week around the data piece announcements just for me, that's really exciting. Yeah. A couple of other things that when we're thinking about our overall focus and strategy is, you know, looking at business transformation is, as you mentioned, is the ecosystem. >>So how do we bring all this together? And it's really, we see ourselves as an ecosystem orchestrator, and we are really here to look at leveraging our relationship with the best partners. We've actually met 17 partners here this week and had client sessions with them. And that's, you know, working with the license of Snowflake and Data Break in the, in the data space, our long term partners like sap, ibm, VMware, and you know, and new partners like Con. And we are looking at how do we bring the best of this ecosystem orchestration so that to support those client business outcome. Sure. And then one final sort of pillar, sorry, is talent, right? So the biggest thing that everyone is thinking about and we all think about every single day is talent. So we've done two really exciting things this year. One has been around our own talent. >>So we've really looked at our own internal influences, people who are speaking to our clients every single day. Not so much the technology people, but the client people speaking to the client. And we've really raised the level of cloud fluency with these people so that they can really start to have that discussion. You know, and our clients, you know, they know this technology way better than us, you most of the time. And then secondly, we actually announced last week and, and you initiative, which we are calling skill skills, which is very well known to our AWS clients because AWS provide this skill, skill concept to their clients. But we are the first partner to do the skills. Skills Yeah. From a partnering perspective. And this is really gonna transform. So it's not just about training and enablement, it's actually about creating a journey for you to, you know, do your best work. >>Tim, what, how do you define cloud fluency? We were actually talking about it yesterday. Sure, sure. Yeah. And, and really kind of bringing that across an organization, but what, what does it take for an individual who may not be a technologist to become cloud fluent? >>Sure. Well, there's a couple, there's a couple angles to that, right? One is, one is how do you create cloud fluency for people who might already be technical, right? And that's, and that's, you know, I've spent over a decade with, you know, boutique disruptive consulting companies who live and die by whether they can attract and retain talent. And there's sort of four elements to that. It's, can you, can you show people they're gonna work on interesting stuff, right? Are they gonna be excited about what they do? Can you show that they're gonna expand their skill sets? Yep. Can you show them a career path? And you can, can you surround all of that with a supportive engineering first culture, right? That, you know, rewards for outcomes, but also creates this sort of community, right? Yeah. That's, that's one thing that sort of, you know, that that will be a natural entropy, people will be attracted to that. On the other side of it, as you create fluency, you kind of do it with the conversation that I just had, like around something like medical devices or something like the cloud car. When you just say, look, you start with something everybody already knows, right? We all know what patient care is like. We all know what autonomous vehicles is kind of like, right? And you work backwards from that and say, now here's, here's how all the pieces stitch together to create this end outcome for, for us and for our customers, for >>The, you know, I'm speaking my language, Tim. So I run a boutique consultancy, my talent go, I live and die on that. Quite frankly. It's everything, right? And, and it's so, wow, it's so important. I mean, in eliminating that churn at scale, how big is your team? Now I'm just thinking about this cause I'm sure you're, your talent retention has to be a challenge as well. Sure. >>So, so we have 25,000 woo professionals on aws trained on, you know, tech cloud technologies globally. Impressive. Yeah. And then we have, in terms of our go to market team, we've got 50 strong as well. Well, so we, these are people who are live and breathe aws, right? And speaking and working with the cloud. >>Let's hang out there a little bit. Tell us a little bit more about the partnership with aws. Cast me, >>Let's go to you. Yeah, so our partnership is, you know, it's 11 years strong. It's been an and a really, really great partnership's. >>How longs >>That's true. Yeah. >>No, is you, were, you're, you're like day ones there. That's Yeah. Real legacy it. >>Awesome. You know, this year excitingly, we actually won the APJ partner of dsi, partner of the year. Congratulations. >>Really casual. >>Yeah. Just like >>Married the lead there. Congratulations. >>Yeah. So that really is testament to how we're really knuckling down and working proactively to, to really support our clients. And, you know, the, the partnership is a really, really strong partnership. It's been there for many years with, you know, great solutions and engagement and many of the things I talked about in terms of our industry plays that we're driving. We've got a whole new set of competencies that we've launched, like a new energy competency this year. So we're focusing on industry and then also security, two new security competencies. And you know, what's really exciting on the security side, you saw the announcements around the security data lake, but we've been working over the last few months with Gary, me and his team, and actually are one of the first partners that are driving that initiative. So we're really proud to be part of that. So yeah. You know, and then there's a client engagement as well. So we have a dedicated team at AWS that works with our dedicated team. So we're supporting the client's needs day to day. >>Are you as customer obsessed as AWS is? Absolutely. I >>Figured so. Absolutely. Everything's about the customer. Nothing happens about >>That. Right? Well, you talked about outcomes, it's all about outcomes. >>Well, and I mean, quite literally going for the heart with the defibrillator analogy. No, I mean, you tell the customers at the heart of what you're doing, part of everything. Can't resist a good pun there. So as I warned you, we have a little challenge for you here on the cube. We're looking for your hot take your 32nd sound bite thought leadership. What's the biggest takeaway from the event and moving forward, looking into 2023? Tim, you're giving me that eye contact. I'm going to you first, >>Right? Okay, sure. Love to. So I don't know how hot a take it is, but I kind of see this transition as cloud, as the operating system, right? So, so let's take the, the what we call the cloud car project. We have the connected car. You know, a car is a durable good, and we all know, or there's been a lot of talk about the electric cars or the autonomous vehicles being like more of a computer than a vehicle, right? But a vehicle's supposed to last 10, 15, 20 years. Our laptops don't last 10, 15, 20 years. So there's this cell, there's this major challenge to say, how can I, how can I change the way the technology operates within the vehicle? So you see this transition to where instead of it being a car that, that has a computer, then it, the, the, the latest transition is to more of a computer that, that operates like a car. >>This new vehicle that's going to emerge is gonna be much like a cell phone, right? Where it, it traverses the world and depending on where it is, different things might be available, right? And, and how and how, how the actual technology, the software that is running will, will be, you know, sort of amorphous and move between different resources in the network on the car, everywhere else. And so that's a really different way of thinking about if, if we think about how quickly the Overton window, like what becomes normal, it changes over time. We're really getting to like a very fast movement of that into something like this vehicle's still gonna be something that we don't even maybe think of as a car anymore. Just the way that an iPhone isn't what we used to think of a phone at our >>Pocket computer. Yeah. What's in the mirror part? Great. >>That's kind my >>Take. Awesome. Right? Catch me man. >>Yeah, and I mean I, if I was to suggest that, you know, summarize it by simply, for me it's really focusing on industry solutions, delivering client outcomes, fundamentally underpinned by data security and sustainability. You know, I think Nailed it. >>Yeah. Knock it outta the park. Perfect little sound bite. That was fantastic. You both were a wonderful start to the day. Thank you so much for being here. Tim and Kashmir, absolute >>Pleasure. >>This is, this is a joy. We're gonna keep learning here on the cube. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fabulous AWS reinvent coverage here from Sin City with Lisa Martin. I'm Savannah Peterson and you are watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE, "Unstoppable Domains Showcase." I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on Web 3.0. And also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening, Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Part of Kaleido Insights. Jeremiah, great to see you thanks for coming on I appreciate it. Ren Besnard, Vice President of Marketing and Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on theCUBE for this showcase. >> Wow, my pleasure. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Jeremiah, I want to start with you. You've seen many ways refer in all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the Web 2.0 wave now the Web 3.0 is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up it's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this Web 3.0, can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many webs. What is Web 3.0 mean, what is it all about? >> Well John, you and I worked in the Web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platform which are the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities, and could not really monetize or make decisions. So Web 3.0 which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto, blockchain and sometimes the metaverse. Is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And in this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it, and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's Web 3.0. Without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we're talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into to crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say it's kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with dream is actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the Web 3.0 movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? >> I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of Web 3.0. And at this stage I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, you know, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s, you know. When I started working with Google, at that point in time the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely similar except faster. >> Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations of the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007. But you got Amazon Web Services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movements. So you've got cloud which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you've got now decentralized wave coming, okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right. So how, how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook. They're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as- >> That's right. >> They can control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >> So the thing that we seen out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing. (Jeremiah coughing) Are the ones that have been easier to move across. Have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with (indistinct). So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise Web 3.0 when it to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. >> Pre-Web 3.0 no, but actions there. How do you guys see the dangers, 'cause there's a lot of negative press but also there's a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positive. It's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is. But what are the dangers, how do you guys educate people, what should people pay attention to, what should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >> Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, the sharing economy. And we are walking into Web 3.0 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks DAOn in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though. In the last periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was going to happen. And we walked and think this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media's going to change the world around. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's a change. And so I think we're going to see that sorted out in suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. >> Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be docs out there? You saw the board, eight guys that did that were kind of docs a little bit there. And that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment imutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this because this is a big issue. >> Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it to, you know. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety, reporting of potential attacks and so on. In Web 3.0, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of Web 3.0 of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety, the need for hardware, wallet, impersonators on discord, you know, security storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, oxydemous or fully docked. The decentralized nature of Web 3.0 will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities become public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of Web 2.O and Web 3.0 at play here, you know. Maybe occurring on the notion of 2.5. But for now I think in Web 2.0, all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If Web 3.0 enables us to be anonymous, if DAOs have voting control, you know. What happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are, basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. >> I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because. Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture. But if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, to this trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know I'm starting to getting into this new way. >> You're right, and that word you said trust, that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs, people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in the, that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonym and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet, address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a Web 3.0 FICO Score. And you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact, you know, how did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that. We might see a new form of a scoring emerge, of course. Who controls that scoring? That's a whole nother topic gone on controling and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFT projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and in their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC, you know, your customers. So that's self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between our full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >> That's awesome. And I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah we've become historians over the years. We're getting old I'm a little bit older than you. (Jeremiah laughs) But we've seen the- >> You're young men. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a, kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved, the standards organization just to slow things DAO and mark things up a little bit. So, you know, you look at DAOs like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is from people I talk to is, it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition, vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade offs of that? >> Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to, Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this It's a digital cooperative. and we've heard of worker cooperatives before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things, identity, governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on Web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate. And as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, what's your take, that's the setup. >> So, you know for me when I started my journey into crypto and Web 3.0, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant. And an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure, you know. In the traditional company structure, you have (indistinct), the company's led by a CEO and other executives. The DAO is a flat structure, and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision making is very different, you know. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using (indistinct) as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in Web 3.0 culture. And we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models. And I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >> Yeah and that's a great point. >> Go ahead, Jeremiah. >> That's a great point, Ren. Around the transparency for governance. So, John you post the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now in the most doubts are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Or you can appoint delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power. Almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there sometimes are hierarchy except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens. But that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. >> You know, Ren I was talking with Matt G, the Founder of Unstoppable. And I was telling him about the Domain Name System. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government 'cause the internet was started by the US. The Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, 'cause the innovation yet was isn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus melding with it. So there's certain technologies that require, Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community let's not formalize anything. Like the government did with the Domain Name System. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it. I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU. But this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's you guys reaction to that? >> So I think, you know to take the stab at it. We have as a business, you know, thinking of Unstoppable Domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So you know the degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAO, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove buyers quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. You know as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very you a different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. >> Awesome. Jeremiah, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in, we've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared, created content enabled things to much more of a vanity. You update the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web 3.0 or is it, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? 'Cause as Web 3.0 comes you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influencers, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation. People have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >> Sure, the influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web 3.0. In this market, I mean there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved. They are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aok, famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economy. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. >> Can you see- >> Lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are air dropping NFTs, branded NFTs influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Back to you. >> That's super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. And the brands which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game changing instrumentation level. >> I think that what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketeer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on Web 3.0 has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto. Because as Jaremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a fly wheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands are gaining and delivering elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. >> That's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic. And they didn't really know what to do they called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with authenticity and environment like Web 3.0 where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >> That's right, and be because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behaved with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives do they participate in these NFT communities, do they purchase them or numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, you know, different NFT projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course you could talk to, Ren about that because it's owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. >> That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now where it goes, all right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. >> Sure, I think the vision of Web 3.0 where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach Web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to of the end, it just doesn't. In part there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one-percenter. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenter now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >> Awesome, Ren final comments. >> I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notion of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion. One that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and Web 3.0 essentially you think of a few 100 tribes. And I think that more projects are going to be a more coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see, you know, an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low 100 millions of crypto and NFT holders into the big hands basically. And that's going to be extreme interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >> All right, Ren and Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight great segment breaking down Web 3.0 or Web 2.5 as Jeremiah says but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers. As part of theCUBE and the Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to the cube unstoppable Doneen showcase. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on in web three and also this new sea change cultural change around this next generation, internet web cloud, all happening, Jeremiah yang industry analyst, and founding part of the cleaner insights. Share my great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Uh, registered vice-president of marketing at unstoppable domains in the middle of all the actions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on the cube for this showcase. >>My pleasure. So I think it was done >>At Jeremy. I want to start with you. You've seen many ways, but fallen all of your work for over a decade now. Um, you've seen the web 2.0 wave. Now the web three's here. Um, and it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up. It's really just ramping up and you're seeing real practical examples. Uh, you're in the middle of all the action. What is this web three? Can you frame for us that mean you've seen many waves? What is web three mean? What is it? What is it all about? >>Well, John, you and I worked in the web to space and essentially that enabled peer to peer media where people could, could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos, um, without having to rely on centralized media. And unfortunately that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platforms or the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities and could not really monetize or make decisions. So web three is what is, which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto blockchain. And sometimes the metaverse is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again, and then this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways, it's, it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's web three without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >>Yeah, that's great. And ran. We were talking about, on the cute many times and one notable stat, I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the, um, Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups, which means that this there's a big wave coming in of talent. You seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation. You're seeing a lot more, I would say, kind of ramping up of real people, not just, you know, people with a dream it's actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the web three, moving with all this kind of change happening, uh, from people and also the new ideas being refactored. >>I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats. We see that there is an draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of web three. And at this stage, I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions know marketing, being one of them, sales, business development, uh, are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid two thousands. You know, when I started, uh, working with Google at that point in time, the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that are passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely dissimilar, except >>Yeah, Jeremiah. You've seen the conversations over the cloud. I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007, but then you got Amazon web services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movement. So you've got cloud, which is kind of classic today. State-of-the-art, you know, enterprise and or app developers and you've got now decentralized wave coming. Okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that, that architecture data is central in all of this, right. So how do you view this? As, as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data. I mean, LinkedIn Facebook, they're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as they can control back, comes to the forefront, how do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >>So the thing that we've seen and out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing, the ones that have been easier to move across have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central. Frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts to block blockchain ledgers to those of decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with Stelara. So they're still using the web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other farms like IPFS, where the data could be to spread it across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what we're to point out. So the vision and the problem with 3.0, when it comes to full de-centralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a web 2.2, five, >>Pre-web 3m, no actions there. What do you guys, how do you guys see the, um, the dangers? Cause there's a lot of negative press, but also is a lot of positive press. You seeing, you know, a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positives, it's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is, but what are the dangers? How do you guys educate people? What should people pay attention to? What should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >>Yes. So we've learned a lot from web one, we to the sharing economy and we are walking into two and three with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining, the, um, the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Um, also the architecture breaks down in certain periods and there's a lack of regulation. Um, this, this is something different though in the last, uh, uh, periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was gonna happen. And we walked in big, this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media is going to change the world. Hurrah is very different. Now people are a little bit jaded. So I think that's the big change. And so I think we're going to see that, uh, you know, soar it out and suss out just like we've seen with other prints. It's still very much in the early years, >>Right. I got to get your take on this whole, uh, should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be doxed out there? You saw the board eight guys that did, that were kind of docs a little bit there and that went, went viral. Um, this is an issue, right? Because we, we just had a problem of fake news, uh, fake people, fake information, and now you have a much more secure environment. Immutability is a wonderful thing. It's, it's a feature, not a bug, right. So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with, uh, NFTs as, as authentication tickets. What's your take on this because this is a big issue. >>Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. Uh, so I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it too. You know, if you think about every fortune 500 company, there is always training required by all employees on internet safety reporting of potential attacks. And so on in web three, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet, uh, for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about, uh, the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of web three, uh, of crypto basically, uh, whether you're talking about hacks online safety, the need for hardware impersonators on discord, uh, security, uh, storing your, your seed phrase. >>So every actor in France or ELs has got a role to play. I think that, uh, in that context, to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be, uh, anonymous, opposite inverse or footy dogs. The decentralized nature of web three will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels, um, so to speak, um, and the, uh, movements that we've seen around some influencers, identities becoming public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of web two and web three at play here. You know, maybe a on the notion of 2.5 for, I think in way to all business founders and employees are known and they're held accountable for their public comments and actions. Um, if web three enables us to be anonymous, if dials have 14 control, you know, what happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are basically, uh, what if the dowel doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be, uh, acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self regulate themselves and we'll create natural boundaries around what can be said or not. >>I think that's a really good point about, um, influencers and reputation because Jeremiah doesn't matter that you're anonymous. I have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture, but if I have an ongoing reputation, I have trust there's trust there. It's not like a, you know, just a bot that was created just to spam someone. It was just, you know what I'm saying? They getting into you getting into this new way. >>You're right. And that, that word you said, trust, that's what really, this is about. But we've seen that public docks people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces in and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in it that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerged even for pseudonyms and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their a potential, a wallet address, a series of numbers and letters. Um, that form might take a new form of a web 3.0 FICO score, and you can look at their behaviors. Did they transact? You know, how do they behave? Do they, were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that we might see a new form of, of, of a scoring emerge. >>Of course, who controls that scoring that's a whole nother topic, gong on control and trust. So right now, John, we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFG projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of, um, uh, products or platforms that require KYC, know your customer so that self-identification often with a government ID or a credit card in order to bridge out your, your coins and turn that into a Fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a coalition here between, uh, full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >>That's awesome. And that, and I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance ran. You mentioned some comments about Dow. So I want to get your thoughts again, you know, Jeremiah, we become historians over the years. We're getting old, I'm a little bit older than you, but we've seen the movie war. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic, and then they became much more of a kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved the standards organization just to slow things down and muck things up a little bit. Um, so you know, you look at Dallas like, Hmm, is a Dal, a good thing, or a bad thing that the answer is from people I talked to, is it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition. Vis-a-vis just adapt for the sake of having a doubt. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade-offs, can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a Dow and when not to do a Dow and the benefits and trade-offs of that? >>Sure. Maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to rent. So a Dao, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this. It's a digital cooperative and we've heard of worker cooperatives before the differences that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do the three things, identity governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and telegram and social networks to communicate. And there's a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal, um, Ren, but what's your take, that's the setup? >>So, you know, for me, when I started my journey into crypto and web tree, I had no idea about, you know, what that actually meant and, uh, an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a dowel and perhaps a more traditional company structure. Um, you know, in a traditional company structure, you have a Yorkie, the company is led by a CEO and other executives, uh, that that was a flat structure. And it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So, uh, to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a co-operative, uh, type of structure. The decision-making is very different. You know, we're talking about a hot, super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and, and voting systems, using applications, as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. >>I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently, uh, very interesting moments in web tree culture. And we have seen how that was suddenly have to make certain decisions and then come to moments of claiming responsibility, uh, in order to, uh, put his behavior, uh, of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that, particularly new governance models. And I think he's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >>That's a great point, ran around the transparency for governance. So John, you posed the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now most dowels are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that, they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar where you can appoint a delegates and use tokens to vote for them? And they have a decision power, almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there are some times our hierarchies, except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens, but that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures, >>You know, rent. I was talking with Matt G the founder of, and I was telling him about the domain name system. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the U S government cause unit it was started by the U S the department of commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications union wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, because the innovation yet wasn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus meddling with it. So there's certain technologies that require Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community. Let's not formalize anything like the government did with the domain name system. Let's keep it tight. And then finally released it, I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the, to the ITU, but this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation, can't go, what you guys' reaction to that. >>So I think to take a stab at it, um, we have as a business, you know, thinking of unstoppable domains, a strong incentive to innovate, uh, and this is what is going to be determining longterm value growth for the organization for, uh, partners, for users, for customers. So, you know, that degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to Dows, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the Dow is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove bias quite effectively, and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and all the upside in many ways. Um, you know, as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very, uh, diverse and part-time workforce in a very, uh, you know, different way. Um, and we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be, you never run to some form of extreme decentralization so that those are balanced from an organizational structure, uh, that comes, uh, either side >>Sharon. I want to get your thoughts on, on, on a trend that you've been involved in. We both been involved in, and you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of a role of an influencer it's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared graded content, um, enabled things to much more of a vanity that the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. Um, so is there a new influencer model with web three or is it, is it the, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or, or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? Because as web three comes, you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects, influences, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that because there's been a conversation with people who have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >>Sure. The influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to at three, this market, I mean, there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are in investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator, there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFC projects. Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved and they are also doing this as well. Steve Aoki, a famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And there are communities are coming around them and they're building economies. Now the difference is it's not, I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they hold, they literally holding own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a, that's a big difference as well. Lastly, there's, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are airdropping in FTS, branded NFTs influencers with wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Yes. >>Super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of, of how engagement's happening, how people are closed, looping their, their votes, their, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. Um, and some brands which are artists now, influencers. I mean, this is a whole game-changing instrumentation level. >>I think that's what we are seeing right now is super re invigorating as a marketeer who has been around for a few years, basically. Um, I think that the shift in the web brands are going to communicate and engage with our audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for, uh, brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and, and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences, um, dominate levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advanced the message and the mission because the explosion of content on web tree has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto, because as Jeremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects, holders of an NFTA, also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a flywheel, which is pretty unique of people that are hyping the project, and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem, uh, with IP rights, being given to NFT holders, you're going to see people pull a brand since then of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands, again, judging and delivering, you know, elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think, again, we've hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that. >>It's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here, Jeremiah, the old days, the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic and they didn't really know what to do. They called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with aura authenticity and environment like web three, where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >>That's right. And because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody is behave with their economic behavior. In the past, of course, big corporations. Aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But the individuals and executives who participate in this market might be, and we'll also see a new types of affinity. Do you executives, do they participate in these NFT communities? Do they purchase them? We're seeing numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, uh, you know, different MTV projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course, you can talk to rant about that because it's owning your own name as a part of this trust and being >>That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to give, share your thoughts on what you think is happening now, where it goes. All right, where's it going to go, Jeremy, we'll start with you. >>Sure. Um, I think the vision of web three, where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach web 2.5 and I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power is going to shift completely to the end. It just doesn't, there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the pro programs in the first place. And secondly, the, the startups themselves end up becoming the one percenters. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenters now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >>Right. And final, final comments, >>Um, fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notions of control, being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains, uh, uh, that we are going to see. And, and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness to palliate movements of expansion, one that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and web three, essentially you think of a few hundred tribes. Uh, and I think that more projects are going to appear more, uh, coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low hundred millions of people and an FTE holders into the billions perfectly. Uh, and that's going to be extremely interesting. I think that the next wave of crypto users and Ft fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology, adoption curves. I think the demographics going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >>All right, Ron, Jeremy, thank you both for that great insight, great segment, uh, breaking down web three or web 2.5 as Jeremiah says, but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers as part of the cubes and the unstoppable domain showcase. Um, John for your hosts. Thanks for watching.

Upbeat Music >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Day 2 of our coverage. We've been getting a lot of really great perspectives on automation and how it is impacting, significantly, every industry. We're pleased to have, from the keynote stage, Junaid Amed, the corporate Vice President of Finance at Applied Materials. He's going to talk us through why you have a why-can't-we-automate-it-all attitude. Junaid, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >> So you have a really aggressive strategy for digital transformation automation led digital transformation. Your keynote this morning was great. It was, I just thought, strategically, it was so well thought out. And then, when you got up here before we went live, you started talking about how fast the time frame was. >> Yes. >> Give the audience an overview of the strategy, what you're aiming to do and how quickly you're expecting to see change. >> Yeah, absolutely. So when we set out, when we launched about two and a half years ago, the company had doubled in size the prior five years. We were looking for it to double again. We were honest with ourselves, with the CFO and the finance leadership team, could we support the new wave of growth? And the answer is no. Okay, what do we do? We knew we had to do something, not just more things but take a complete new view on things. That's how this whole initiative got incubated. And we took a bold approach. We said, we don't want just to cover the next five years, let's cover the next 20 years. Set ourselves up to make sure we do this right for the company and for our people. So, we basically set some very ambitious goals. Which is, the key KPI that we set at our true north is, we're going to get 50 % of finance work effort, all oriented around decision support. That's what helps move the needle for the company. Sure, we have our responsibilities to close the books, to do all the transactional stuff, to do all the reporting stuff. We will do that. But that can't be the mainstay anymore. That's just table stakes. And the business is screaming for this. It's just that we didn't have the levers and the tools to be able to do it. To pivot. But given the technological advancements, we said, "This is possible now." And that's- >> I think we have to set the table here with your industry. Because you started your journey to PA automation in 2019. >> Yes. >> You participate in one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging, industry on the planet. >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Everybody, I don't know, maybe not the insiders but everybody else missed, absolutely no, the insiders missed it too. What was the impact of the pandemic, right? And now, chips are every part of our lives. We've got this massive chip shortage. And you know, Wall Street missed it. They said, "Oh, sell Applied Materials. Sell every semiconductor company." And then they realized, "Oh wow," kind of late into the cycle, that this is like a multi-year, perhaps a decade long transition to, maybe this never ending demand, who knows? So that's the backdrop of your business. That was driving it. What was it like inside your company? >> So Dave, you know, what we could see, obviously we couldn't predict the pandemic. We could see long term growth, right? Really tangible market inflection on the back of AI big data. If you want to say where we made a big bet as a company? We went all in on AI. Right? We believed in that growth, at a time when I think not everyone was so convinced. Okay, is this going to be- How strong is this going to hit us? So, we had the benefit of going all in on AI and saying this is another big computing wave. The next big wave of computing. Coming off of mobile and social media. And Gary Dickerson, our CEO, bet the company that we're going to enable this growth. This is real. This is going to touch the whole global economy. So yes, that's a bet, a successful bet, the company made. No one could foresee what would the pandemic do but we had the good fortune of saying we were reacting to the growth, that we were committed to service. And we knew we had to get ahead of it. So we quickly organized and got finance, our organization well positioned to successfully support the company. Now, we got hit with the pandemic. Luckily for us, we're proactive and then, you know what we did? We accelerated. >> So your move to automation was an offensive move- >> Junaid: Hundred percent. >> Not a panic move to respond to a pandemic. >> Hundred percent. What do investors want? Operating leverage. Operating leverage. >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, right now all the models have a certain baseline. Size of company, complexity. Okay, you need a certain amount of leverage coming out of this model. The models are going to change. Those that don't change ahead of the models, they're going to play catch up. It's not a fun ride. We wanted to be ahead. >> Well, I mean, talk about operating leverage. You're a company with what? 120+ Billion dollar market cap. You've got a 20+ Billion dollar revenue and you sell extremely expensive equipment. >> Extremely. >> And then a 5X revenue multiple. That's a trailing revenue multiple. I mean that's, that's impressive. That's operating leverage. >> Yes and but the bar keeps moving. You've got to stay ahead, right? You've got to be a leader. We're a leader. We've been a leader for five decades. It's the leadership mindset, I would say, in the company and our leadership team, that really propelled us towards this. The leadership of our CFO, Dan Durn, who invested. He made a bet. No one, you know, now we're sitting here, over almost 300,000 hours automated. We didn't have the playbook when we did it. >> You created the playbook. >> We created the playbook. >> Talk to me about the appetite, because obviously aggressive leadership, bold leadership, talk to me about the appetite to be able to be able to transform so quickly. Such that when, as Dave said, you're on the offensive, such that when the pandemic came, you leveraged that as an accelerator of what you've already been doing. Because culturally, that's challenging for folks to get on board to. How did you do that? >> I have to say, it is challenging. And it's at time's it feels counter-intuitive. We were going through the pandemic. We were having a large M&A integration happening, okay and we're transforming finance. And we're a resource constrained organization. Then you tell your people, "We've got more work to do. Transformation." And you're like, "Is that the right thing to do? Isn't everyone going to leave?" But when you dig deep, you say, "How do you get mind share?" How do you, first of all, you have to get people to see the value and then you have to make sure you do it fast enough, where they want to stick around. It's counter-intuitive. "Hey, we're going to launch this new platform. It's going to take three and half years. All right everyone, we're going to do this." What happens? People are like, in-out. Okay yeah, it'll come, we'll deal with it. Then instead, you say, "Hey, we're going to transform the way we plan. Completely. Top to bottom. 10 months. We're going to do it. Here's what you're going to be at your hands- Here's what you're going to have at your disposal in 10 months, all right? Oh, by the way, we're just showing you the high level. You get to really design. What do you want?" Now, when you have credibility, street cred with your organization, and you come out and say, "I'm going to give you top to bottom agility around forecasting and you get to have input on what you really want." Now people get excited. Like, "Oh, I'm going to work 25% more but wait a second, I'm really excited about what I get at the end of 10 months." >> So, the world was betting several years ago on the consolidation of fabs. "Oh, that's bad for Applied Materials." The exact opposite happened. You know, ARM changed the model, WAYFA volume's going through the roof. Now Intel is basically following that playbook, which is wonderful, they're breaking ground in Arizona. Which is, you have these massive tailwinds behind you. So I'm interested in how you forecast that and what role automation plays in that forecasting. >> Well, if you think about it, the fundamental demand isn't changing. Capacity has to go in. People think, wait a second, so and so is going to build less or whatever, The capacity, maybe geographically, is going to get dispersed out but it still has to go in. So I think it doesn't change the fundamental demand statement. Then, how does automation play into- I just thing that the fundamental nature and pace of business is changing. For us. And our customers are going through the same. So we have to be more reactive, we have to be able to respond to their needs. That whole thing cascades down into the organization. All the way deep into finance analyst forecasting, right? So, if everyone has to work off a weekly, monthly, quarterly cadence, you're too slow. Too late. Doesn't matter how good your plan is. It's old. It's stale. We're moving into a time and era where everything happens realtime. It always happened realtime but we just never had the tools to react realtime. Now, we have realtime business performance, enterprise grade dashboards. Any minute of the day you can see what the revenue forecast is, what the margin associated with that is. Yes, when we get into the official commit cycle everything firms up but it's not the big crank, right? You're fine tuning the knobs now. Which is great. What do you want in a plan? You want greater optionality. Is there a perfect plan? Of course there isn't. What is the North Star of forecasting? Give me as much options as- viable options and then let me decide. Because there's trade-offs. There's no one perfect plan. But you were limited. It just took too long to put a plan together. So you had very small degrees of freedom around it. Viable plans. We're changing all of that. >> This might be out of your swim lane but you had a slide up today and it had the IT in the middle- >> Yes. >> So technology's fundamental. And then, you had the elephant. The Hadoop elephant in the room. So I have to ask you, you guys announced this thing earlier this year called AI to the power of X, actionable insights. I remember reading about it, it's like you're collecting data across all the estate. So I'm like, wow this is a data company. Becoming a data company. So we've been talking a lot and of course the CFO purview is the reporting and I get that. The close, daily close, virtual close, all that. But then there's this whole line-of-business data play. >> Yes. >> And I'm wondering how automation fits there. I mean, that's got to be part of the vision. >> Yeah. Now, I can't speak to the capabilities you're talking to but we are leveraging some of that infrastructure, right? We have amazing IT organization. I have to say, we within Applied, we're a latecomer. From a product, customer product standpoint, already there is so much AI work being done. So we had the benefit of leveraging some of their capabilities for finance, when we launched Agile Finance. There is a lot going on over there. I think we actually enhanced that by introducing these RPA capabilities. And we did so from partnering with, I wouldn't say partnering, IT co-piloted this with us. Fundamentally co-piloted this, okay. And now, IT is taking it to other organizations. And they're taking it to product, they're taking it to operation, they're taking it to sales. So it will have a role. Hundred percent. But they're obviously starting, over the past three to six months is when they got started. So the answer is yes, for sure but I can't speak to exactly how it plays into that specific technology. >> But you addressed the dynamic. Which is, it started in a quick wind part of the company, finance. >> Yes. >> Which is logical. That's where I first introduced RPA a decade ago. A CFO conference, right? Then that now applies to the rest of the business. They're talking about operating leverage- >> Fundamental. Yeah. Hundred percent. >> How do you get that buy-in? How do you get finance and how do you get IT to work with finance, such that IT becomes a catalyst in all these downstream reactions to get this going across the company? >> Important question. >> Well they work for you. >> They don't. >> Oh they don't. >> They don't work for us. They work for me. I'm a customer of theirs. >> Okay. >> The first person that I needed to convince that we were serious and we're going to do it is the CIO. Okay, so you ask how do you get IT bought in? Well first thing, you have to get them in the tent. This is not about, "Oh, can you go do this for me? I need this from you. Can you do that?" Too slow, okay? This RPA, especially RPA, fundamentally, is such a, it's a technology that really needs to get embedded throughout the IT operating model. So you really need IT co-piloting this with you. This is how we did it. We said we're going to learn together. This is a must have for finance. We believe strongly this is going to become a must have for the enterprise but we're going to make the investment. In that must have for the enterprise, IT has to play the roll, right? So we started this together and we learned together and they've been fundamental in our being able to get to scale in 12 months. >> How do you federate governance? Who in the organization, what part of the organization owns governance, if you will? >> Yeah. So we created, established an RPA COE. They own the governance, the policies, the processes. Then, obviously there's a role to play for the business side. So we finance a business organization to them and there's roles to play. We actually, like I showed today in the presentation, there's multiple other players across the enterprise that have to vet these automations, right? Especially in finance. We have to be SOX compliant, we have to be data privacy compliant. We set all of those processes up. So, multiple parties have to engage but engage in an efficient way. >> We're seeing the CFO role emerge. I think of you as a CFO. I mean, I just use that umbrella, emerge as an innovator. I see this all of the place now, especially in Silicon Valley. You look at a company like Snowflake, I don't know if you know Mike Scarpelli but he kind of changed the world of software in some ways. So you're seeing very innovative CFOs emerge, that are technology savvy, they understand the operating leverage, we've used that term several times today, that you can get out of technology. It just reminds me, I don't know how long ago it was when Nick Carr wrote the book Does IT Matter. It seems like technology has never been more important. Along with people and process, of course, but in terms of creating that operating leverage, it's really a key part of the equation, the playbook going forward. >> I think it is a mindset change. We're trying to drive mindset change, right? But it's also, I think, come about because I think technology has become more friendly to non IT people. I think that's a fundamental driver. All these SaaS platforms in the market place, right? What did they design for? Business users. Of course IT has a very prominent role in that whole process and supporting it and implementing it. But the target audience is business users. What was the target audience for ERP? IT. Okay. Fundamental, the technology is changing by design and you're seeing now the impact of that. Where, "Hey wait, I can do this. I can do this by myself." Okay. IT always has been and will be a very important partner. They will service your data needs. This is how we're setting up the collaboration, right? But we really want the finance users to be able to iterate, model, analyze on the fly, in the moment. And they need to do it alone. >> Self serve, yeah. >> That's it. >> Self serve in realtime. I think one of the things, you mentioned it this morning, you mentioned it on our program and one of the things we've learned in the pandemic, that realtime and access to realtime data is no longer a nice-to-have. >> Yes. >> It's really a business critical element of any industry. >> Hundred percent. >> When do you think you'll put crypto on your balance sheet? I ask all the CFOs. >> He's been asking everyone that. >> There's an easy answer. I'm not authorized to answer. Above my pay grade. >> That's a good answer. >> That's good. >> Junaid, thank you so much for joining us. Talking to us about the transformation at Applied Materials, how you're partnering with UiPath to achieve that and the aggressive strategy that you've set out and congratulations on the success of it. We'll look forward to see what's going on in the next couple years. >> Great story. >> Of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at UiPath Forward IV. Day two of our coverage. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)