>>Hello. I'm Professor Toru Suzuki Cherif cardiovascular medicine on associate dean of the College of Life Sciences at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, where I'm also director of the Lester Life Sciences accelerator. I'm also honorary consultant cardiologist within our university hospitals. It's part of the national health system NHS Trust. Today, I'd like to talk to you about our Lester Clinical Data Science Initiative. Now brief background on Lester. It's university in hospitals. Lester is in the center of England. The national health system is divided depending on the countries. The United Kingdom, which is comprised of, uh, England, Scotland to the north, whales to the west and Northern Ireland is another part in a different island. But national health system of England is what will be predominantly be discussed. Today has a history of about 70 years now, owing to the fact that we're basically in the center of England. Although this is only about one hour north of London, we have a catchment of about 100 miles, which takes us from the eastern coast of England, bordering with Birmingham to the west north just south of Liverpool, Manchester and just south to the tip of London. We have one of the busiest national health system trust in the United Kingdom, with a catchment about 100 miles and one million patients a year. Our main hospital, the General Hospital, which is actually called the Royal Infirmary, which can has an accident and emergency, which means Emergency Department is that has one of the busiest emergency departments in the nation. I work at Glen Field Hospital, which is one of the main cardiovascular hospitals of the United Kingdom and Europe. Academically, the Medical School of the University of Leicester is ranked 20th in the world on Lee, behind Cambridge, Oxford Imperial College and University College London. For the UK, this is very research. Waited, uh, ranking is Therefore we are very research focused universities as well for the cardiovascular research groups, with it mainly within Glenn Field Hospital, we are ranked as the 29th Independent research institution in the world which places us. A Suffield waited within our group. As you can see those their top ranked this is regardless of cardiology, include institutes like the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute. Mitt Welcome Trust Sanger, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Kemble, Cold Spring Harbor and as a hospital we rank within ah in this field in a relatively competitive manner as well. Therefore, we're very research focused. Hospital is well now to give you the unique selling points of Leicester. We're we're the largest and busiest national health system trust in the United Kingdom, but we also have a very large and stable as well as ethnically diverse population. The population ranges often into three generations, which allows us to do a lot of cohort based studies which allows us for the primary and secondary care cohorts, lot of which are well characterized and focused on genomics. In the past. We also have a biomedical research center focusing on chronic diseases, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health Research, which funds clinical research the hospitals of United Kingdom on we also have a very rich regional life science cluster, including med techs and small and medium sized enterprises. Now for this, the bottom line is that I am the director of the letter site left Sciences accelerator, >>which is tasked with industrial engagement in the local national sectors but not excluding the international sectors as well. Broadly, we have academics and clinicians with interest in health care, which includes science and engineering as well as non clinical researchers. And prior to the cove it outbreak, the government announced the £450 million investment into our university hospitals, which I hope will be going forward now to give you a brief background on where the scientific strategy the United Kingdom lies. Three industrial strategy was brought out a za part of the process which involved exiting the European Union, and part of that was the life science sector deal. And among this, as you will see, there were four grand challenges that were put in place a I and data economy, future of mobility, clean growth and aging society and as a medical research institute. A lot of the focus that we have been transitioning with within my group are projects are focused on using data and analytics using artificial intelligence, but also understanding how chronic diseases evolved as part of the aging society, and therefore we will be able to address these grand challenges for the country. Additionally, the national health system also has its long term plans, which we align to. One of those is digitally enabled care and that this hope you're going mainstream over the next 10 years. And to do this, what is envision will be The clinicians will be able to access and interact with patient records and care plants wherever they are with ready access to decision support and artificial intelligence, and that this will enable predictive techniques, which include linking with clinical genomic as well as other data supports, such as image ing a new medical breakthroughs. There has been what's called the Topol Review that discusses the future of health care in the United Kingdom and preparing the health care workforce for the delivery of the digital future, which clearly discusses in the end that we would be using automated image interpretation. Is using artificial intelligence predictive analytics using artificial intelligence as mentioned in the long term plans. That is part of that. We will also be engaging natural language processing speech recognition. I'm reading the genome amusing. Genomic announced this as well. We are in what is called the Midland's. As I mentioned previously, the Midland's comprised the East Midlands, where we are as Lester, other places such as Nottingham. We're here. The West Midland involves Birmingham, and here is ah collective. We are the Midlands. Here we comprise what is called the Midlands engine on the Midland's engine focuses on transport, accelerating innovation, trading with the world as well as the ultra connected region. And therefore our work will also involve connectivity moving forward. And it's part of that. It's part of our health care plans. We hope to also enable total digital connectivity moving forward and that will allow us to embrace digital data as well as collectivity. These three key words will ah Linkous our health care systems for the future. Now, to give you a vision for the future of medicine vision that there will be a very complex data set that we will need to work on, which will involve genomics Phanom ICS image ing which will called, uh oh mix analysis. But this is just meaning that is, uh complex data sets that we need to work on. This will integrate with our clinical data Platforms are bioinformatics, and we'll also get real time information of physiology through interfaces and wearables. Important for this is that we have computing, uh, processes that will now allow this kind of complex data analysis in real time using artificial intelligence and machine learning based applications to allow visualization Analytics, which could be out, put it through various user interfaces to the clinician and others. One of the characteristics of the United Kingdom is that the NHS is that we embrace data and captured data from when most citizens have been born from the cradle toe when they die to the grave. And it's important that we were able to link this data up to understand the journey of that patient. Over time. When they come to hospital, which is secondary care data, we will get disease data when they go to their primary care general practitioner, we will be able to get early check up data is Paula's follow monitoring monitoring, but also social care data. If this could be linked, allow us to understand how aging and deterioration as well as frailty, uh, encompasses thes patients. And to do this, we have many, many numerous data sets available, including clinical letters, blood tests, more advanced tests, which is genetics and imaging, which we can possibly, um, integrate into a patient journey which will allow us to understand the digital journey of that patient. I have called this the digital twin patient cohort to do a digital simulation of patient health journeys using data integration and analytics. This is a technique that has often been used in industrial manufacturing to understand the maintenance and service points for hardware and instruments. But we would be using this to stratify predict diseases. This'll would also be monitored and refined, using wearables and other types of complex data analysis to allow for, in the end, preemptive intervention to allow paradigm shifting. How we undertake medicine at this time, which is more reactive rather than proactive as infrastructure we are presently working on putting together what's it called the Data Safe haven or trusted research environment? One which with in the clinical environment, the university hospitals and curated and data manner, which allows us to enable data mining off the databases or, I should say, the trusted research environment within the clinical environment. Hopefully, we will then be able to anonymous that to allow ah used by academics and possibly also, uh, partnering industry to do further data mining and tool development, which we could then further field test again using our real world data base of patients that will be continually, uh, updating in our system. In the cardiovascular group, we have what's called the bricks cohort, which means biomedical research. Informatics Center for Cardiovascular Science, which was done, started long time even before I joined, uh, in 2010 which has today almost captured about 10,000 patients arm or who come through to Glenn Field Hospital for various treatments or and even those who have not on. We asked for their consent to their blood for genetics, but also for blood tests, uh, genomics testing, but also image ing as well as other consent. Hable medical information s so far there about 10,000 patients and we've been trying to extract and curate their data accordingly. Again, a za reminder of what the strengths of Leicester are. We have one of the largest and busiest trust with the very large, uh, patient cohort Ah, focused dr at the university, which allows for chronic diseases such as heart disease. I just mentioned our efforts on heart disease, uh which are about 10,000 patients ongoing right now. But we would wish thio include further chronic diseases such as diabetes, respiratory diseases, renal disease and further to understand the multi modality between these diseases so that we can understand how they >>interact as well. Finally, I like to talk about the lesser life science accelerator as well. This is a new project that was funded by >>the U started this January for three years. I'm the director for this and all the groups within the College of Life Sciences that are involved with healthcare but also clinical work are involved. And through this we hope to support innovative industrial partnerships and collaborations in the region, a swells nationally and further on into internationally as well. I realized that today is a talked to um, or business and commercial oriented audience. And we would welcome interest from your companies and partners to come to Leicester toe work with us on, uh, clinical health care data and to drive our agenda forward for this so that we can enable innovative research but also product development in partnership with you moving forward. Thank you for your time.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Everyone welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public sector summit. Virtual, of course, is the Cube virtual. We're here sheltered in place in our quarantine studio. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Got a great guest here? Cube Alumni. Can Eisner, Who's the director of worldwide education programs for AWS Amazon Web services? Ken, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. This could be a great segment. Looking forward to chatting. >>Thanks so much, John. Great to talk to you again. >>You know, I'll say, Cube Virtual public sector summit Virtual. We've been virtualized as a society. I'll see the pandemic and all the things that is going on around has been pretty crazy. And one of the things that's most notable is the impact on Education. New York Times This morning and many published reports around the impact College education. Not only economics on the campus aside, the state of the people in the society and Covert 19 is pushed schooling online for the foreseeable future. What's your reaction is you're in charge you've done a lot of work on the foundational level to get Amazon educational programs out there. Take a minute to explain how how this has impacted you guys and your ability to bring that educational stuff to the to the foreseeable future. >>Yeah, the first thing I'd say is this This truly is an absolutely unprecedented time There. Move from virtual instruction. Excuse me from in person classroom instruction into the virtual world at such amazing scale, rapidity is something that educational institutions weren't ready for that couldn't be ready for at this time. We had to enter it with amazing lump levels of empathy for what was going on on the ground in K 12 schools and higher ed schools with our educational technology and publisher providers. So I think the first thing was we had or for the speed at which it happened, we did have to step back and look at what was going on. There are some changes that are happening in the immediacy, and there are some things that Corbett, 19 is has sped educational institutions around the world to look at. An AWS is working with those K 12 providers, higher educational providers teachers and so on on that switch, whether it's providing infrastructure that move into online learning, helping teachers as they prepare for this sort of new normal you some of examples of what has happen. We've been working with the University of Arizona. Help them stand up contact centers with the onset of of cove it and students and teachers. It's being pushed into their home environment or into virtual environments to give instruction to receive instruction. There have been a lot of calls that happen in virtual environments to staff to help them support this. And so we stood up with the University of Arizona and Amazon Amazon Connect help staff provide mobile solutions through the cell phone or computer for for students. >>I want to get your thoughts. Absolutely. I talked to Andy Jassy about this as well as well about agility. This is the Amazon wheelhouse, and you guys have gone into the I T world now developers. You went cloud native, you in that market. He won the enterprise I t market. But the reason why is that you took an old school outdated, antiquated system of I t and made it agile. That seems enough This is the country with Teresa and Andy about education in public sector. The modernization is happening, but there's also the triage and you guys have to do now in terms of getting people online. So what specifically are you doing to help education customers continue their instruction online? Because they still got to execute. They still need to provide this discussion around the fall window Coming up. You got to have the foundational things. I know you've done that, but it is hard. So what's the downstream triage when you come out of this mode of Okay, here you go. And how do you get people set up and then how they transform and re invent? >>Yeah, at this time, the disaster recovery from how do you get in that phase one with this immediate move was so prominent. And we're trying to work through that phase one and sort into sort of phase two delivery of education, which is you're moving with scale moving with agility into this world, speed and agility are really going to be the new normal for education. There were some advances that just weren't happening quick enough. Students should always have access to 24 7 learning, um, and access into that mobile arena. And they weren't having that several things that we did was we looked at our infrastructure were some of those key infrastructure elements that helped with both learning and work remotely. There were things such as Amazon, your work Doc's, which enables thieves virtual our workspaces, which enable virtual desktop environments, and appstream, which enables it APs to be streamed through virtual arena onto your removal or your desktop. Yeah, Amazon connect as I. As I mentioned before, there were services that were vital in helping speed into the cloud that was quick burst into the cloud. And so we enabled some of those services to have special promotional free rates or a given time period, and we have actually now extended that offer a into the fall into September 30th. So first we have to help people really quickly with educators. So I run this program AWS Educate, which is Amazon's global program. To provide students and educators around the world with resource is needed, help them get into cloud learning. But what we saw was that teachers around the world we're not prepared for this massive shift what we did to help that preparedness is we looked at our educators. We found that we did a survey over the weekend and found that 68% of them had significant experience or enough experience in teaching distance or online virtual education, too. Potentially leverage that for other educators around the world. So we and the other thing is teachers are really eager to help other teachers in this move, especially as they saw and they empathize with With her was the panic. Our confusion are best practices and moving into that online arena. So we saw both that they had that experience in a mass willingness to help other people, and we immediately spun up a Siri's of educator and educator help tools, whether it was a Morris Valadez are No a gift, and Doug Berman providing webinars and office hours for other educators around the world. We also did a separate tech talks offering for students. So there were there was the helping scale, whether it's getting blackboard as they ramped up to over 50 x of their normal load in 24 hours to help them deliver on that scale, whether it waas the Egyptian ministry that was trying to had to understand. How could they help students access the information that they need it in speed? And they worked with thinkI, which is a net educational technology provider, to provide access to 22 million students who needed to get access online or whether it was the educator mobilization initiative that we ran. Threat US of AWS Educate Helps Teachers have the resource is that they need it with the speed that they needed to get online. This is we are working. We're learning from our customers. As this happens, this is a moving target. But when I move from this immediacy of pushing people into the virtual space into what's gonna happen this summer, as students need toe recapture, learning that they might have lost in the spring are depending where you are worldwide. There's getting to your point all K 12 higher ed and educational technology providers into the position where they can act with that agility and speed. And it's also helping those educators as they go through this. We're learning from our customers every day. >>Yeah, I want to get into those some of those lessons, but one of things that will say, You know, I'm really bullish about what you do. Getting cloud education, I think, is going to change the literacy and also job opportunities out there. I'm a huge believer that public sector is the next growth wave, just like I t was. And it's almost the same movie, right? You have inadequate systems. It's all outdated. You need these workloads, need to run and then run effectively, which you guys have done. But the interesting thing with Cove it is it essentially exposes the scabs and the uh out there because, you know, online has been an augmentation to the physical space. So when you pull that back, people like me go, wait a minute. I have kids. I'm trying to understand their learning impact. Everyone sees it now. It's almost like it's exposed. Whether it's under provisioned VP ends or black boys networking and everyone's pointing their fingers. It's your fault and its the end. So you brought this up. There's now stakeholders whose jobs depend upon something that's now primary that wasn't primary before. Whether it's the presenter, the content presented the teacher certainly high availability. I t. Um >>all these things >>are just under huge pressure. So I gotta ask you, what are the key lessons and learnings that you have seen over the past few months that you could share because people are shell shocked and they're trying to move faster? >>Yeah. So first of all is speed and agility and education are the new normal. They should have been here for a while. They need to be here now when you've got a 30 year textbook, your ruling over education when students need to get the skills of tomorrow. Today we need to be adapting quickly in order to give those students the skills to give educational institution those opportunities. Every institution needs to be enable virtual education. Every institution needs to have disaster recovery solutions and they weren't in place. These solutions need to be comprehensive. Students need access to devices. Teachers need access to professional development. We need contact centers. We worked with Los Angeles Unified School District not just to stand up a contact center, which we did with yeah, Amazon connect. But we also connected their high school seniors too, with headphones. I think we provide 132,000 students with headphones. We are helping to source with through our Amazon business relationship devices for everybody. Every student needs access in their home. Every student needs access to great learning and they needed on demand. Teachers need that readiness. I think the other thing that's happening is the whole world is again speeding through changes that probably should have happened to the system already that virtual learning is vital. Another thing that's vital is lifelong learning. We're finding that and we probably should have already seen. This is everybody needs to be a student throughout their entire life, and they need to be streaming in and out of education. The only way that this could be properly done is through virtual environments through the cloud and through an access to on demand learning. We believe that this that the work that's being done I was actually talking to some people in Australia the other day and they're saying, You know, the government is moving away from degree centrist city and moving into a more modular stackable education. We've been building AWS educate to stack to the job to stack to careers, and that type of move into education, I think, is also being spent So were you were seeing the that move Apple absolutely accelerate. We're also seeing the need to accelerate the speed to research. Obviously with what's going on going on with Kobe 19 there is a need for tools to connect our researchers two cures to diagnostic, um, opportunities. We worked with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver General Hospital and the Vancouver I Get this thing, the Vancouver Coastal Health Research UNE Institute to develop to use Amazon sage maker to speed ai diagnostic tool so that pushed towards research is absolutely vital as well. We just announced a $20 million investment in helping you speak that that research to market so education needs to operate at scale education needs to operate at speed, and education needs to deliver to a changing customer. And we've got to be partners on that journey. >>And I think I would just add reinvent a word. You guys name your conference after every year. This is a re invention opportunity. Clearly, um, and you know, I was talking to some other parents is like, I'm not going to send my kids to school online learning for zoom interview, zoom, zoom, zoom classes. I'm like, Hey, you know, get a cloud data engineering degree from Amazon educate because they'll have a job like that. Once you put on linked in the job skills are out there. The jobs are needed. Skills aren't so. I got to ask you, you know, with this whole re Skilling, whether it's a Gap year student in between semesters, while this takes care of our up Skilling people on the job, this is huge world economic form said by 2020 half of the employees will need to be re skilled up skilled. This is a huge impact and even more focus with covert 19. >>That's absolutely correct. Yeah, I think one thing that's happening is we're cloud computing has been the number one Lincoln skill for the past four or five years. The the skill. Whether it's software development in the cloud cloud architecture, your data world, our cyber security and other operational rules, those are going to be in the most demand. Those are the skills that are growing. We need to be able prepare people for rules in technology. The lifelong worker, the re skill up skill opportunities, absolutely vital Gap year is going to be available for some students. But we also got a look at you know how the this that how covert 19 can accelerate gaps between students. Every student needs access to high quality education. Every teacher needs to be equipped with the latest professional development. We've got focused like a laser, not just on. The people could afford a gap. Here are the people who who are going to be some schools who actually had solutions that could immediately push there kids into their their youth, their students in college or even employees. You need those re skills. We're all home. But it also needs to extend into the middle of the middle of Los Angeles and and you're into low income students. And in Egypt, I was really excited. We we've been working with Northern Virginia community colleges as I think you know, they were one of the lead institutions. On launching an associate degree in the cloud, they took their courses and offer what they call a jump year to 70,000 high school senior. Our high school students in Northern Virginia in the northern Virginia area, including enabling some of our cloud computing horses, are the work courses that we worked on with them to the students. So yeah, those new partnerships, that extension of college into high school and college into re skill up skills, absolutely vital. But institutions need to be able to move fast with the tools that the cloud provides you into those arena. >>Well, you know, I think you've got a really hard job to do there. It's foundational in love, what you're doing and you know me. I've been harping people who watch the Cube know that I'm always chirping and talking about how the learning is non linear. It's horizontally scalable. There's different application. You can have an application for education. It's a Siri's of different things. The workload of learning is completely different. I think to me what you guys are doing right now setting that basics foundation infrastructure. It's like the E. C two s three model. Then you got more on top of it platform, and I think ultimately the creativity is going to come from the marketplace. Whoever can build those workloads in a very agile, scalable way to meet the needs, because, let's face it, it can't be boring. Education is gonna be robust, resilient and got to deliver the payload and that's gonna be customized applications that have yet to be invented. Reinvented >>absolutely. Hopefully were jump starting that next wave of innovation spreading the opportunities Teoh all students. Hopefully we are really looking at those endemic issues and education and following leaders like University of Arizona. What the Ministry of Education, um in in Egypt has done and Northern Virginia community. Hopefully we are really taking this the opportunity of this disaster to invent on behalf of our students. Bring in you forward to the 21st century as opposed to yeah, just looking at this naval gazing way we do wrong and the past. This is an exciting opportunity, albeit a obviously scary one is we're all dealing with this with this and >>there's no doubt once we've retrenching and get some solid ground postcode 19. It's a reinvention and a reimagine growth market opportunity because you got changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are needed. These are three major things going down right now. >>Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, the retraining of workers, the up skill that the great thing is that governments realize this imperative as do educational institutions and obviously yet students. This is, and we seem like what educators can do when they want to help. Yeah, other educators, this is This is an opportunity in our society to really look at every everybody is a constant learner were a constant learning from our customers. But everybody, there is no end to education. It cannot be terminal. And this is an opportunity to really provide the students learners with skills that they need in an on demand fashion at all times and re think re innovate, reinvent the way we look at education in general. >>Well, a man, Jeff Bezos says Day one. It's a new day, one, right? So you know that there is going to reinvent Ken. You doing great work. Director of worldwide education programs Ken Eisner with Amazon Web services, Certifications and degrees and cloud computing will be the norm. It's gonna happen again. If you're a cloud data engineer. Data says you're going to get a job. I mean, no doubt about it. So thanks so much for sharing your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you, >>John. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. >>Can guys They're here Inside the Cube. Virtual coverage of AWS Public sector Online Summit. We've been virtualized. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation here from our Boston area studio. Welcome back to the program from ClearSky Data, Ellen Rubin the CEO and Laz Vekiarides who is the CTO. Laz and Ellen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Us too, nice to be back. >> Hi, thanks for having us. >> All right, so, always good to talk to a local company, we talked about technology, I was actually in the Seaport district earlier, recently, and you know there's a lot happening in this space, as we know, it doesn't all happen, in Seattle for the cloud, Silicon Valley for all the VCs, so Ellen I've been speaking with your company since its early days-- >> Stealth mode, yeah. >> Stealth mode. First time I met you in person was at the Amazon reinvent shows, so still one of the focal points of the cloud and everything that happening there. But give us the update, you've got some new fundings, some new partnerships, tell us what's happening with ClearSky. >> Absolutely, I'm really happy to be back. So yeah, we've been, last night been building this company together, we started in 2013 with the, you know, sitting in a room with a white board but the company has really been actively funded and kind of building customers and our service offering since 2014. And we've just seen a tremendous amount of growth especially in the last year. So we're excited to be able to share that we are raising a 20 million funding round, and it includes some new investors, strategic investors as well as some of our existing investors from General Catalyst and Highland and Polaris. So it's very important for us but it's also great for our customers because it gives us a chance now to be in more places and have more people on our team to really grow and add to the support the operation of what we're doing. So that's kind of part A. And we're really looking forward to doing that. We've added a head of our sales organization, our chief revenue officer, Roger Cummings, and so we've really kind of filled out our team and our growing as a company overall. So that's kind of part A. >> So yeah congratulations on the numbers. The other piece, I think back to the first discussions we had when you talked about living in lots of environments and how do you help customers, there was somebody that you're partnering with now that I believe came up in that first discussion because they've got one of the largest global foot print on the planet that I'm aware of. >> Indeed, so yeah, also today we're announcing our partnership with Equinex and we've actually been working, we've been talking with Equinex since we were in stealth mode and we've been working with them over the past several years already in a couple of locations. And we can talk in a lot of detail about sort of where the great alignment fit is, but the news for us is that we're now gonna be able to really expand the reach of our service across the rest of the United States. So we're gonna triple the number of locations, and we're gonna be basically anywhere our customers need us to be, as you know we are a metro-based service so it's very important from a latency and access that we be in more locations. And we see it as basically a great jumping off for filling out the initial vision of being across United States and now it's starting to expand that side. >> Yes that's great. Laz, let's pull you in here. If you look at the data piece of it, we understand that latency is clearly important. That's the conversation we've had back in the storage world for a long time. Data has gravity, it's tough to move it, and having some locality is super important. So what are your, for people who aren't as familiar with the company, just give us the thumbnail, architecturally, and tell us what you've been seeing update wise, from a technology standpoint. >> Sure, so, our technology is really metro-based network, so we deliver caching services on the edge to make all of the resources, specifically the data management resources that are far away appear as if they're nearby. Now one of the problem is, as you know with the cloud, is that they are only in certain locations. So unless your nation is in Virginia or you happen to be in the Pacific Northwest, you have a latency problem. And so as a result, some certain types of applications aren't gonna work well. What we've built is really an edge-based data management network. We provide high performance file and block services. To systems at the edge that leverage the cloud for their back ends. And so as a result, you get all of the economics of the cloud and the flexibility that you get with those type of services. But you get the experience of enterprise class functionality and capability's and it's nearby. So you don't miss any of the things that you are kind of used to. >> All right, Laz I want you to help explain something, when you say edge, what does that mean to you and your customers because there are server providers edges, there are kind of the IO key end devices edges, there are some things in between there, so what specifically are you helping with? >> So this is true it's actually really interesting. So we have a very specific definition of edge, we call it the data center edge. And hence our alignment with Equinix, they are in this metro facilities when you look at our architecture we're either putting an edge appliance either in an Equinix facility or in a customer's facility and then tethering that into the Equinix facility. So that last hundred or so miles around an Equinix facility is our edge and that is gonna be our definition now. That could change over time, just like everything else in the cloud changes, because we basically have built software that can run in any type of Linux environment with some monocom activity but in our current market push, our edge is really the data center edge. >> Okay, Ellen I love that that really fit in into the discussions I've been having a lot over the last year or so. People talk about hybrid cloud when they talk about multicloud. It's, they're using lots of SAS, they're usually using more than one public cloud provider and then they have their own resources, and their data center often times has a rack in Equinix and leveraging things like direct connect from Amazon, the equivalent for Google and Microsoft, or expanding those definitions. Bring us inside what are you hearing from customers. I love to hear what you can share about specific customers or in general what's the need that they have and where you fit in into all of it. >> Yeah, no, you're totally on point for what we see everyday which is we deal with medium and large enterprises. So our customers are in health care, they're in financial services, they're in legal services and also in managed service providers now as a newer market for us. So we have customers that include companies like Partners HealthCare, Mass General Hospital, Nuance Communications. We've just added Unitas Global as a managed service provider. Special Olympics is a customer and some regional hedge firms and law services, like Miles and Stockbridge. So what you can kind of see is that we have this really nice set of experiences that are not just what is Facebook doing or what is Stage3 doing but we kind of have a broad range of what CIO and heads of IT are really struggling with. And it's exactly what you're saying which is the edge to a customer very much depends on how they're thinking about where their application are gonna run, and our philosophy is don't worry about it, we've got you covered, your data is gonna be high performance, low latency, you're totally protected and you can access it from wherever you need to. But for a lot of customers honestly we've seen everything. I won't embarrass anybody specifically but there are still some kind of scary, old data centers out there. There are server closets that are acting as data centers. People still have things in their buildings. And then you've got everything to like world class, Equinix, Colo, that is in Ashburn, or whatever. And then people are obviously trying to adapt multiple shades and flavors of public clouds. And I was just out at a customer's yesterday where the CIO was talking to us about the fact that they have grown through a tremendous amount of acquisition. So they've got one of everything. And then the cloud for them was a bunch of people did a bunch of things in Amazon five years ago. Then they decided to standardize on Azure. They don't really know why they standardize on Azure. And they realized that that was not actually answer for all their problems and then they started to think about how Google might actually be a much better fit because of some of the analytics works they're trying to do, and by the way they've got data centers all over the world. That is a very typical scenario that we see everyday and for the customers hedging their bets and not being locked into anything is really, really important to them, because the application keep evolving and new things are getting in some ways built for the cloud, but sometimes the edge actually is still critical, right? In terms of where the actual physical source systems are. >> Yeah, so, I would say the elephant in the room is that kind of how do I get my arms around this multi cloud environment and there's not one company that's gonna solve all of these issues. I've had everything-- >> And even if they did, would you really put everything in one cloud? Probably you wouldn't? >> Right, but it's the, okay, I've got all of these clouds out there and all of these things, I have licensing issues I have to worry about, I have identity management I have to worry about, there's the overall management of it. And it seems primarily it's the networking piece that you're helping with, maybe explain a little bit more, Laz it probably comes to you as to that elephant there, it's ClearSky data, we solve your networking challenge for multicloud and it's more than just that. >> Right, so, it's sometimes embarrassingly I actually started my career in the networking space and so a lot-- >> It's okay, I did, too, it's a training. >> So when Ellen and I started talking about what we wanted to do, we were really focused on networking. Maybe I had enough of storage. And so a lot of what we discovered was that the network is an extremely sort of undersold part of the overall cloud strategy of any company. If you really want to go to the cloud this is really about moving huge amount of data back and forth from these locations. And so we've built a very, very high performance one-hub network from our pops right to all of the various regions of the public clouds. So what this basically means for our customers is that they don't have to worry about the internet, they don't have to worry about the security that they need to set up in order to get into the cloud, and the amount of throughput that we can get through is really astonishing. So we've really built a system that can maximize this network pipes. So even our smallest customers can move in excess of 20 terabytes a day back and forward from the cloud. So this becomes a really really interesting solution if you have a lot of source system or you have a lot of data to move. We can outrun that Amazon truck. >> So I want you to, I think back five years ago, I heard Equinix, some of the other large data centers, they were like, "Oh we're just gonna give you "a cloud market place and there'll be all these services "and if you need to access something, we'll just be able to "throw a 10 gig wire between somebody's connections." It sounded really good but it sounds like you're helping fill a gap. Maybe explain what that is. >> Well so most of the networking pieces are actually very expensive, very complicated to set up, first of all. So you also have port charges and all sorts of high availability issues that you need to resolve with each one of the clouds. Additionally, although they are sort of on demand, you're not using all those bandwidths all the time and you don't know when you're gonna need it. What we've done on the network is to make it possible for you to utilize 40 gigabytes of throughput, our 40 gigabytes of throughput, into the clouds pretty much whenever you need it. So for example, latency from Boston to Amazon niche, for us 11 milliseconds. For most people if they don't have direct connect at some exuberant price they're gonna end up experiencing in the hundreds of milliseconds if they're going over the internet. So that and the bandwidth guarantee is you think you have a one gigabyte internet connection but that's not really what all the elements along your path are gonna provide you. So there's a lot of variability and we make that all go away we make the management go away, the security issues go away, and so it's totally seamless. You just need to connect into our network with our edge, it's as if the cloud really isn't there. And if you need to access your resources in the cloud, we can bring your data to EC2 and you can connect instances to it. So the whole process of moving things back and forth is so seamless and transparent, you don't just manage it. It's all sort of a byproduct of the architecture. >> I was just gonna add, Equinix invested early and bet early on becoming a cloud hub. This idea of having a cloud exchange and a lot of the other services that are plugged in, is a tremendous value to customers. But what we do see is that there is still a lot of customers out there and I'm sure this will persist for a while where there's still even yet further distributed last mile issues, and customers are moving into Equinix and Colocation sites for all the benefits that they bring and we take full advantage of that and help drive that from our side. But we also see that there are things that are just not moving and need to stay put and it's either because of legacy reasons, compliance reasons, they don't want to invest to re-platform things. There are a lot of reasons that are out there and because we both come from the enterprise infrastructure world, that does not scare us. So we understand that what you have to do is you have to meet the customers where they live, right? And you have to make it easy and accessible and as Laz has described in kind of a turn key situation where however your application wants to run and be best situated, we're gonna make sure that your data is available to you. >> Yeah you bring out some great points there. A line I used many times recently is there was the promise that cloud was going to be simple and cheap and it turned out to be neither of those. What do you see some of the biggest challenges, Ellen, we start with you maybe, what are your customers facing, what do you excited about that's actually made progress the last few years, and what do we still need to do as an industry as a whole? >> Well I always have to say this and of course it makes me just feel completely so old but I've been in the clouds since 2008, right? My last company's cloud switch was kind of that early, okay, there's a thing it's called the cloud, it happens to be Amazon but there'll be other clouds too. So you have to say fast-forwarding 10 years, a lot of really good progress has been made and it is for sure the case that now when you talk to enterprise customers and to the CIOs they're in the cloud, they've adopted the cloud, the cloud is in their mental picture of where things are gonna be, they've accepted the fact that they have developer groups are already in the cloud and have been for a very long time and it's part of their portfolio now, to make sure it's protected and highly available and compliant. So I think that is progress. The best thing that ever happened was, I don't have to convince people the cloud is more secure than what they're doing on Prem, because everybody kinda knows that, so that's good news. We don't have to have that conversation 20 times again et cetera. But what I do see that's surprising to me is that still some of the fundamental problems are still problems. Getting my data into the cloud. You think, c'mon we've got lots of solutions, tools, and toolkits and stuff like that. But it's still a very major problem. Networking of course still being a key issue for customers. I don't want to rollout a bunch of new lines, I don't want to have to hire a snowmobile, I don't want to- you know, rebuild everything form scratch. So that is still I think shows up more than I would have guessed. Right now what we see is there's a lot of focus on operational things, in terms of how to optimize what turned out to be the high cost of the cloud. Every one of our customers knows if that pull data back from the cloud that's not good. So they've learned that, they've found that out and they were kind of a little surprised the first time the bill came in and it was really high. So this idea of having tools that allow optimization of using the cloud more cost-effectively and figuring out which cloud is going to be more cost-effective based on the access patterns. There's more awareness of it but there's still a lot of struggling with that. >> Laz, would love your comments on that. >> Well there are, the whole notion of cost-optimization is deeply embedded in our technology. Every time we have a conversation with a customer the first thing they ask, they ask about egress fees, is it really just the same price no matter how much I use it? And they think about all these different, like things about IOPS for example. Because the cloud providers have sort of indoctrinated the market to think about what their IOPS needs are. In order to get them to the appropriate price point. So there's a lot of optimization there, that I still don't think that the customers really got. How many people really understand how many IOPS a particular application really needs? And how many should I buy and if I buy the wrong number oh my god everything is messed up. So the ability to solve those types of problems for people. In a way that it becomes a non-issue is still. Certainly we're doing it for storage but there are all sorts of issues just like that for compute, there are all sorts of issues like that for networking as well. So anyone who's trying to build an application on top of this platform really needs to think about those things. Thankfully our customers don't have to worry about a whole slew of things because we've actually arbitrized out all of the unusual aspects of terrace of network providers versus cloud providers, access fees and transaction fees et cetera. Anyone whose doing this need to think about this in a very analytical way, which I don't think IT has been used to up until now. They overbuy as you know, and they continue to overbuy and as long as there's no complaints about performance, and there's no complaints about excesses in cost everything is fine. That's not how the cloud works. I think we're getting to the point now where any serious move to the cloud now is going to require a lot more thinking and a lot more analysis. There's still a mentality that the cloud is cheaper, and then when people try it, they quickly realize "Oh my god look at this bill." And it's forever, it's not like you can just shut everything off. It's every month. It's not just like you spent forty thousand dollars in a month and you can shut it off. So it's a difficult problem and I don't think IT's prepared, in general. >> I think one of the things we've seen at ClearSky over the last several years is the willingness that customers have to use the cloud for data protection. I think when we started it was sort of, you know, everything's going to the cloud, the whole thing. Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead, right? I think a lot of what people are actually doing is archival back-up DR, those are comfortable, state of the industry is sort of there should be a connection between the, wherever the Prem is for the customer and then out to the cloud for things that are longer tail kinds of things. The problem is, what if you have to pull the data back? So these are thing we think about everyday. >> Right, Ellen want to give me the final word, 20 million dollar phrase, the partnership with Equinex that's going to increase availability. What's this mean to your customers and to the company ClearSky as we look forward. >> Well I think one of the things that's true about the fact that we are a network centric kind of company is that the power of the network is in how many access points you have. So what this means is that customers who are national, and then global will have more opportunity now to be able to access things with ClearSky. And to grow and expand with us, which is great. We've seen tremendous expansion business this year. Really like a huge percentage has already expanded at least once if not multiple times with us. And that begs a lot of questions, well that's great you're here with us in this metro how do we get across the rest of our locations. So I think that's very valuable and also obviously from our side making sure we can handle the care and support that our customers are expecting. We're fully managed 24 by 7. So the bar is high, right? This is not the, here's a toolkit in the cloud go figure it out, this is we take care of everything we're SLAU and that's it. And obviously the customer wants to see that scale. >> Well Ellen and Laz, congratulations on all the progress you've made and always great to catch up with you on all the updates. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Alright and thank you so much for watching and be sure to check out The Cube .net for all of our coverage including. We're at all the cloud shows. Huge show at Amazon Reinvent at the end of November be sure to tune into that and everything else. Feel free to reach out if you've got questions for our team or teams that you'd like us to cover other events we should be at. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the CUBE.