>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. I'm coming to you from Palo Alto. It's a digital event, just like everything else in 2020. But we're excited to have our next guest. I think he's coming in all the way from Atlanta, Georgia. He's Jim Shook, the director of cyber security and compliance practice at Del Technology. Jim, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. It's quite the title there. Thanks for getting all that out. >>I have a big posted notes so that, uh, that's very helpful. But, you know, it's it's actually kind of an interesting thing because you have compliance and cybersecurity and your title, and it's it's It's interesting relationship between compliance as a motivator of behavior versus you know, you need to go a lot further than just what the compliance says. So I'm curious if you can talk about that relationship between yeah, we need to be compliant, and we need to follow the rules. But you need to think a lot bigger than that. >>Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's so many different standards out there and requirements. So typically, what we'll see on the regulatory side is very much a minimum baseline, and leading the way, as usual in the cybersecurity space, will be financial and health care organizations. That's particularly true in the US, but pretty much globally, at least on the financial side. So they'll set some baselines. A lot of industries don't really have many. And so what we look at many times is just general risk to the business. And, of course, if you're a publicly traded company, that might trigger some SEC requirements or other things like that. But again, we really look at those requirements as minimum baselines, and you have to work up from there based on the organization's risk profile. >>Yeah, yeah, and we see that we see that, too, with privacy and a whole a whole bunch of stuff where traditionally the regs and the compliance kind of lag, you know where the technologies and where the markets moving. So let's before we get too deep into it. Let's let's talk about the cove it impact because obviously a huge thing. Insecurity, Uh, you know, a light switch moment in mid March when everybody had to work from home. So suddenly your tax surfaces increase exponentially. People are working out of home environments that you don't necessarily know what's going on there. Who's going on there, The shared networks with the spouse and the kids and and everybody else. And but now we're, you know, 678 months into this. This is something that's going to be going on for a while, and even the new normal will have some type of a hybrid relationship with with, you know, an increased level of remote remote work once they work from home. But it's really work from anywhere. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts about how things have transitioned from you know, what happened in mid March, taking care of your own business and your own people to, you know, then taking care of your customers and the emergencies that they had. But now really thinking in terms of more of kind of a long term, fundamental shift in the security profile that people have with all their data and information >>Yeah. Gosh, it's been really interesting. I think organizations have done an amazing job when you think about the things that they've had to get done just really overnight. So a lot has been written about the pandemic, and you mentioned Jeff to really that expanded threats surface. All of a sudden, you've got people working from home. There wasn't enough VPN capacity. A lot of places. I talked to some organizations. Employees just took their desktop off of their desk and brought it home so it wasn't really ready toe work at a remote location. But organizations really adapted well to it. Meanwhile, that was opportunity for the criminals, and they've taken it. But Jeff, one of the things that I think about two is to an extent, this is the new normal, not necessarily the work from home, but the shift that's going to consistently happen in cybersecurity. Things change. The criminals air really smart, they adapt. So that was work from home. What's the next thing going to be? There's I O T. There's remote devices. There will be some vulnerabilities. We just have to get used to this pace and continue it. Unfortunately, >>right, right, right Yeah, it's always it's always a little bit of, Ah, a cat and mouse game, Right? But what? And then one of the other trends that we're seeing, I don't know, maybe more visibility or maybe higher profile is is the ransomware attacks, right? So we've seen, you know, kind of this thing really interesting continuation of different types of security threats between just the the local kid who's just trying to do it because it's fun versus, you know, competitive stuff where people are trying to take out their competitors versus nation states and nation states being, um, you know, kind of driving these attacks. But the ransom, the ransom where we've seen before, but it seems to be increasing in frequency. Maybe we're just hearing about it. What's special about ransom, where as a specific type of security threat. >>So I started this practice about five years ago, and at that point, ransom or was just barely a blip, it was really about destruction and the way that we talk about it in the cybersecurity spaces. There's this triad, these three components of our data that we're trying to protect. So one of those is confidentiality, and that traces back to the attacks you're talking about. That's when somebody steals your data. You don't want them to do that. That breaks the confidentiality of the data. And that's really where the cybersecurity controls kind of grew up around, that you didn't want credit cards, intellectual property, healthcare information. And that's still a problem with ransom, where they're affecting the availability of the data or the integrity of the data. And those were the other two prongs that go with confidentiality. And so these attacks. That's why they feel different. Their impact in your ability to access the data, which in many cases can shut a business down. There have been headlines over the last couple of months. Some businesses that really were closed off for components of their business that were shut down, and it's because they didn't have their data or their systems, and then eventually they either found a way to recover them. Or perhaps in many cases, the speculation is they paid the ransom to get the data back, >>right. And of course, the problem with ever paying a ransom, um, is that you don't necessarily know you're going to get the data back. That you may just be encouraging them to hit you again. Eso paying the ransom is is not necessarily the best solution. And then then, in talking about this thing, turns out that in fact, not only may it not be the right solution, you may be breaking the law. This is a pretty interesting thing. I had no idea that there's really laws dictating, you know, I guess responding to a criminal threat. What? Where does that go? What's that from? >>Yeah, that's we've talked about this for a while. But it wasn't until about two weeks ago that some information was released from the Department of Treasury. So the idea here is that every not every country, many countries, the US among them have lists of countries and organizations that you can't do business with. So essentially a prohibited or sanctions list. And, as it turns out, many of the ransomware bad actors and Jeff is actually real name of one of them evil court. It sounds like a movie or a book, but that's one of the ransomware bad actors there on those lists. So if you get attacked by an organization that's on the list and you pay them. You have now completed a transaction with a prohibited entity and you're subject to potential sanctions. There was a lot written about this being a new law, or the US came up with this law, and that's not the case. The laws have been on the books for a while. It was the Department of Treasury, kind of issuing some guidance, just nudging people. Hey, by the way, you shouldn't be doing this and some of the research I've done a lot of countries have these laws. So while it's just the US that came out with this advisory, which was very public and certainly a big wake up call, these laws exist in a lot of other countries. So organizations really need to be prepared for what they're going to do if they get hit with the Ransomware attack. Not really counting on paying the ransom for the reasons that you said, Plus, it may be against the law. >>And just to make sure I understand you, it's against the law because you're effectively doing business by having a financial transaction with one of these, prohibited either organizations or they're in a prohibited country complete. >>That's correct Yeah, mostly about the organization, um, and then an interesting component of this and we won't get into too much of the weeds on the legal side. But the law is actually a strict liability. So that means it doesn't matter whether you knew or should have known that the entity was on a prohibited list. The mere fact of having that transaction makes you liable. And then the way that the the regulations are written, you can't get someone else to do your dirty work for you. So if you are facilitating that transaction anyway, you may be running afoul of those laws. >>Jesus. One more thing to worry about where you're trying to get business. You're trying to get your business back up and running, but specifically with with with ransomware and why it's different. I mean, there's been business continuity, planning forever. You know, you guys have backup and recovery solutions. Uh, you know, there's so much effort around that What's different here? Is it just because of the time in which you have to respond the availability of those backups toe to come back and get in production? What makes Ransomware so special from a business continuity perspective besides the fact that you're not allowed to pay him because it might be breaking the law. >>Ah, lot, You hit on a couple things there. So we've known forever that with D R. Disaster recovery One of the major things you're doing there is your replicating data quickly so that if you lose sight A you can pop up its site B With ransomware, you're replicating the corrupted data, so you lose that with backups. The bad guys know, just like you mentioned that if you have a backup, you could use that to recover. So they are more frequently now gathering their credentials and attacking the backup. So many cases we see the backups being deleted or otherwise destroyed. And that's really where we have focused with our power. Protect cyber recovery solution is creating a new, extra offline air gapped copy of the most critical applications. That's not going to be susceptible to the attack or the follow up attack that deletes the data. >>So let's jump into that a little bit, um, in a little bit more detailed. So this is a special solution, really targeted, um, as a defense against Ransomware because of the special attributes that ransom where, uh, e guess threatens threatens or the fact that they they also go after your backup in recovery at the same time, knowing you're gonna use that to basically lower the value of their ransom attack. That's crazy. >>Yeah, they're smart. You know, these these Attackers air smart. There's billions of dollars at stake. E think organizations like Evil Corp estimates are they could be making hundreds of millions of dollars. So they're they're not even small businesses. They're almost industries unto themselves. They have advanced tactics, They're leveraging capabilities, and they have. They have products, essentially. So when you think about your production data, your backups, your disaster recovery, those air, all in environments, that they're not accessible on the Internet. But that's where you're doing business. So there is access there. There's employees that have access, and the bad guys find ways to get in through spear phishing attacks, where they're sending emails that look like they're from somebody else and they get a foothold. Once they have that foothold, they can leverage that access to get throughout that production environment. They have access to that data, and they deleted with cyber recovery. What we're doing is we're creating a vaulted environment that's offline. They can't get there from from where they are, so they can't get access to that data. We lock it down, we analyze it, we make sure that it's good and then this happens automatically and day over day. So you've always got that copy of data. If your worst case scenario develops and you lose your production environment, that happens. You've got this copy of data for your most critical applications. You don't want to copy everything in there, but you can use to actually recover and that recover capability. Jeff is one of the pillars of a cyber security structure, so we focus a lot, kind of like you said before. What's different about these attacks? We focus a lot on protecting data and detecting bad guys. This is the recover capability that is part of all these frameworks, >>right? So there's a lot to unpack there before we get into the recovery. And kinda actually, why don't we just start there and then I want to get into the air gap because that's a great That's a great thing to dig in on the recovery what's kind of your targeted s l A Is it based on the size of the application? Um, is it based on on, you know, a different level of service. I mean, what is what is the hope? If I buy into this this solution that I can get my recovery and get back into business if I choose, not toe to pay these guys? What? What does it? What does that kind of look like? >>Most of the time, we're providing a product that our customers are deploying, and then we have some partners that will deployed as a service to, so the SLS may vary, but what we're targeting is a very secure environment, and you can look at how it's architected and think about the technologies. If it's properly operated, you can't get there. You can't get to the data. So the points that we're really looking at is how frequently do we want to update that data? So in other words, how much data can you afford to lose? And then how long will it take you to recover? And both of those? You can leverage the technologies to shorten those up to kind of your requirements. So loosely speaking, the in the shorter you make the time may cost you a little bit more money, a little bit more effort. But you can tighten those up pretty much what your requirements are going to be, >>right? Right? And then let's talk about air gaps because air gaps. That means something very, very specific. It literally means classically right, an air gap. There is a space in between these systems until electrons learn how to jump. Um, they're they're they're physically separated. Um, but that's harder and harder to do, right, because everything is now a P I based, and everything is an app that's based on a bunch of other APS, and there's calls and there's, you know, everything is so interconnected now. But you talked about something specifically said, an automated air gap. And you also said that you know, we're putting this data where it is not connected for some period of time. So I wonder if you could explain a little bit more detail how that works, how it's usually configured, um t to reintroduce an air gap into this crazy connected world. >>Yeah, it's kind of going backward to go forward in a lot of ways. When we're careful about the term, we'll use the term logical air gap because you're right, Jeff on Air Gap is there's a gap, and what we're doing is we're manipulating that air gap in a way that most of the time that data are are safe. Data are vaulted, data is on the other side of the air gap, so you can't get there. But we'll bring it up in air. Gap will logically enable that air gap so that there is a connection which enables us to update the data that's in the vault, and then we'll bring that connection back down. And the way that we've architected the solution is that even when it's enabled like that, we've minimized the capability to get into the vault. So, really, if you're a bad actor, if you know everything that's going on, you might be able to prevent the update. But you can't get into the vault unless you're physically there. And, of course, we put some controls on that so that even insiders are very limited what they can do if they get inside the vault and the A. P. T s, the advanced persistent threats. People who are coming from other countries. Since they're not physically there, they can't access that data. >>That's good. So it's on its off, but it's usually off most of the time, so the bad guys can't get across there. >>Yeah, and again it's It's important that even when it's on it za minimal exposure there. So you think about our triad, the confidentiality, integrity, availability. You know, we're blocking them from getting in so they can maybe do a denial of service type of attack. But that's it. They can't get into break into the vault and break things and destroy the data like they would in production. >>I want to shift gears a little bit gym, and I've I've gone to our essay, I think, for the last three or four years of fact, I think it was the last big live event we did in 2020 before everything came to a screeching halt. And, you know, one of the things I find interesting about the security industry is this one of these opportunities for cooperative Shin um within the security industry that even though you might work for a company that competes with another company. You know there's opportunities to work with your peers at other companies. So you have more of a unified front against the bad guys as well as learn from what's going on. Uh, with some of the other you know, people. So you can learn from the from the attacks that they're surfacing. There's interesting, uh, organization called Sheltered Harbor that it came across and doing research for this. You guys have joined it. It was basically it looks like it was built around 100 30. This this article is from earlier in the years. Probably groaning is from February 130 participating financial institutions, which collectively hold 72% of all deposit accounts and 71% of all U. S retail brokerage assets. It's a big organization focused on security, Del joined not as a financial institution but as a vendor. I wonder if you can share what this organizations all about. Why did you guys join and what? Where you see some of the benefits both for you as well as your customers? >>Yeah, there's a lot there, Jeff. I've been part of that process for a little bit over two years and kicked it off after we identified. Sheltered Harbor is an organization that we wanted to work with. So, as you said, founded by some of the banks and credit unions and other financial institutions in the US, and what's unique about it is it's designed to protect the U. S. Financial system and consumer confidence. It's not actually designed to protect the bank. So of course, that's an outcome there if you're protecting consumer confidence than it's better for the banks. But that's really the goal. And so it's a standards based organization that looked at the problem of what happens if a bank it's attacked, what happens to the customers. So they actually came up with the specifications, which follows so closely to what we do with cyber recovery. They identified important data. They built requirements, not technologies, but capabilities that a vault would need to have to protect that data. And then the process is to recover that data if an event occurred. So we talked to the team for a while. We're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish with them is the only solution provider in their advisory program, and the work that we've done with the power protect cyber recovery solution. We have some more news coming out. I'm not permitted toe announce it yet. It's pretty soon, so stay tuned, and it's just been a really great initiative for us to work with, and the team over there is fantastic. >>So I just one or two. If you can share your thoughts as as the role of security has changed over the last several years from, you know, kind of a perimeter based point of view and you know, protection and walls and, uh, firewalls and and and all these things which is completely broken down now to more of a integrated security approach and baking security into your data to your encryption to your applications, your access devices, etcetera and really integrating security more into the broader flow of product development and and delivery and and how that's impacted the security of the of the customers and impacted professionals like you that are trying to look down the road and get ahead of the next. You know, kind of two or three bad things that are coming. How is that security posture really benefited everybody out there? >>It gets a really difficult problem that we just keep working at it again. We don't have a goal, because if we're targeting here, the threat actors is a bad actors. They're gonna be here. I was reading an article today about how they're already the bad actors already employing machine learning to improve what they're doing and how they target their phishing attacks and things like that. So thinking about things like security by design is great. We have millions billions of devices, and if we start from the ground up that those devices have security built in, it makes the rest of the job a lot easier. But that whole integration process is really important to I mentioned before the recovery capability and protect and detect Well, if you look at the nice cybersecurity framework has five pillars that have capabilities within each one, and we need to keep focusing on our capabilities in those space, we can't do one and not the other. So we do multi factor authentication. But we need to look at encryption for our devices. We need to build from the ground up. We need to have those recover capabilities. It's just kind of a never ending process. But I feel like one of the most important things that we've done over the last year, partly driven by the changes that we've had, is that we're finally recognizing that cyber security is a business issue. It's not a nightie issue. So if your digital and your assets are digital, how can you confine this to a nightie group? It's It's the business. It's risk. Let's understand what risk is acceptable cover the risk that isn't and treated like a business process that it ISS. >>That's great, because because I always often wonder, you know, if you think of it as an insurance problem, you know, then you're gonna be in trouble because you can't You can't just lock everything down, right? You gotta you gotta do business. And you always think of the, you know, ships or safest, uh, at harbor. But that's not what ships are built for, right? You can't just lock everything down, but if you take it more of a business approach, so you're you're measuring investments and risk and putting dollar amounts on it. Then you can start to figure out how much should I invest in security because you can't spend ah, 100% of your revenue on security. What is the happy medium? How do you decide and how do you apply that investment where, you know, it's kind of a portfolio strategy problem >>it is. And and that's one of the areas that again my five years in the building, the practice we've seen organizations start to move to. So you want to protect your most important assets the best. And then there are things that you still want to protect, but you can't afford the time, the budget, the operational expense of protecting everything. So let's understand what really drives this business if I'm a law firm might be my billion and document management systems and health care. It's a electronic medical record and manufacturing the manufacturing systems. So let's protect the most important things the best and then kind of moved down from there. We have to understand what those systems are before we can actually protect them. And that's where the business really needs to work more closely. And they are with the I T teams with cyber security teams, >>right, and like, I like a lot of big problems, right? You gotta break it down. You gotta You gotta prioritize. You gotta, you know, start just knocking off what's important and not so overwhelmed by, you know, trying to protect everything to the same degree. This is not practical, and it's not not a good investment. >>That's exactly the case. And there's the ongoing discussions about shortage of people in the cybersecurity space, which there are. But there are things that we can do that to really maximize what those people do, get them to focus on the higher level capabilities and let the tools do some of the things that the tools air good at. >>Right. So, you know, you triggered one last point and we'll wrap on this, but I'll give you the last word. Aziz, you look forward. Two things like automation and two things like artificial intelligence and machine learning that you can apply to make those professionals more effective on automate some stuff. Um, how do you see that evolving? And does that give you big smiles or frowns as you think about your use of AI in a nml versus the bad guys, they have some of the same tools as well. >>They dio and look, we have to use those to keep up. I'll give you example with with power, protect cyber recovery. We already use AI and ML to analyze the data that's in our vault. So how do you know that the data is good? We're not gonna have somebody in the vault looking through the files by leveraging those capabilities. We could give a verdict on that data. And so you know that it's good. I think we we have to continue to be careful that we understand what the tools are. We deploy them in the right way. You can't deploy tool just to deploy honor because it's hot or because it's interesting that goes back to understanding the systems that we need to protect the risks that we can accept or perhaps cover with insurance and the risks that gosh, we really can't accept. We need to make sure that the business continues to operate here, so I think it's great. Um, the communities have really come together. There's more information sharing than ever has gone on. And that's really one of our big weapons against the bad actors. >>All right, Well, Jim, thank you so much for sharing your insight. I think your job security is locked in for the foreseeable future. We didn't even get into five G and I o t and ever increasing attack, surface and sophistication of the bad guys. So thank you for doing what you do and helping keep us safe. Keep your data safe and keeping our companies running. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>Alright, He's Jim. Mom. Jeff. Thanks for watching the cubes. Continuous coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable Best 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Welcome back. Everyone keeps live coverage of answerable fast here in Atlanta. Georgia John for my coach do Minutemen were here. Stephanie chairs to the vice president of general manager of the rail business unit. Red Hat. Great to see you. Nice to see you, too. You have all your three year career. IBM now Invincible. Back, Back in the fold. >>Yeah. >>So last time we chatted at Red Hat Summit Rail. Eight. How's it going? What's the update? >>Yeah, so we launched. Related some. It was a huge opportunity for arrested Sort of Show it off to the world. A couple of key things we really wanted to do There was make sure that we showed up the red hat portfolio. It wasn't just a product launch. It was really a portfolio. Lunch feedback so far on relate has been great. We have a lot of adopters on their early. It's still pretty early days. When you think about it, it's been about a little over 445 months. So, um, still early days the feedback has been good. You know it's actually interesting when you run a subscription based software model, because customers can choose to go to eight when they need those features and when they assess those features and they can pick and choose how they go. But we have a lot of folks who have areas of relate that they're testing the feature function off. >>I saw a tweet you had on your Twitter feed 28 years old, still growing up, still cool. >>Yeah, >>I mean 28 years old, The world's an adult now >>know Lennox is running. The enterprise is now, and now it's about how do you bring new innovation in when we launched Relate. We focused really on two sectors. One was, how do we help you run your business more efficiently? And then how do we help you grow your business with innovation? One of the key things we did, which is probably the one that stuck with me the most, was we actually partnered with the Redhead Management Organization and we pulled in the capability of what's called insights into the product itself. So all carbon subscription 678 all include insights, which is a rules based engine built upon the data that we have from, you know, over 15 years of helping customers run large scale Lennox deployments. And we leverage that data in order to bring that directly to customers. And that's been huge for us. And it's not only it's a first step into getting into answerable. >>I want to get your thoughts on We're here and Ansel Fest ate one of our two day coverage. The Red Hat announced the answer Automation platform. I'll see. That's the news. Why is this show so important in your mind? I mean, you see the internal. You've seen the history of the industry's a lot of technology changes happening in the modern enterprises. Now, as things become modernized both public sector and commercial, what's the most important thing happening? Why is this as well fest so important this year? >>To me, it comes down to, I'd say, kind of two key things. Management and automation are becoming one of the key decision makers that we see in our customers, and that's really driven by. They need to be efficient with what they have running today, and they need to be able to scale and grow into innovation. platform. So management and automation is a core critical decision point. I think the other aspect is, you know, Lennox started out 28 years ago proving to the world how open source development drives innovation. And that's what you see here. A danceable fest. This is the community coming together to drive innovation, super modular, able to provide impact right from everything from how you run your legacy systems to how you bring security to it into how do you bring new applications and deploy them in a safe and consistent way? It spans the whole gambit. >>So, Stephanie, you know, there's so much change going on in the industry you talked about, you know what's happening in Relate. I actually saw a couple of hello world T shirts which were given out at Summit in Boston this year, maybe help tie together how answerable fits into this. How does it help customers, you know, take advantage of the latest technology and and and move their companies along to be able to take advantage of some of the new features? >>Yeah, and so I really believe, of course, that unopened hybrid cloud, which is our vision of where people want to go, You need Lennox. So Lenox sits at the foundation. But to really deploy it in in a reasonable way in a Safeway in an efficient way, you need management on automation. So we've started on this journey. When we launched, we announced its summit that we brought in insights and that was our first step included in we've seen incredible uptick. So, um, when we launch, we've seen 87% increase since May in the number of systems that are linked in, we're seeing 33% more increase in coverage of rules based and 152% increase in customers who are using it. What that does is it creates a community of people using and getting value from it, but also giving value back because the more data we have, the better the rules get. So one interesting thing at the end of May, the engineering team they worked with all the customers that currently have insights. Lincoln and they did a scan for Specter meltdown, which, of course, everyone knows about in the industry with the customers who had systems hooked up, they found 100 and 76,000 customer systems that were vulnerable to Spector meltdown. What we did was we had unanswerable playbook that could re mediate that problem. We proactively alerted those customers. So now you start to see problems get identified with something like insights. Now you bring an answerable and answerable tower. You can effectively decide. So I want to re mediate. I can re mediate automatically. I can schedule that remediation for what's best for my company. So, you know, we've tied these three things together kind of in the stepwise function. In fact, if you have a real subscription, you've hooked up to insights. If insights finds an issue, there's a fix it and with answerable, creates a playbook. Now I can use that playbook and answerable tower so really ties through nicely through the whole portfolio to be able to to do everything in feeling. >>It also creates collaboration to these playbooks can be portable, move across the organization, do it once. That's the automation pieces that >>yeah, absolutely. So now we're seeing automation. How do you look at it across multiple teams within an organization so you could have a tower, a tower admin be able to set rules and boundaries for teams, I can have an array l writes. I t operations person be able to create playbooks for the security protocols. How do I set up a system being able to do things repeatedly and consistently brings a whole lot of value and security and efficiency? >>One of the powers of answerable is that it can live in a header Ji. In this environment, you got your windows environment. You know, I've talked of'em where customers that are using it and, of course, in cloud help help us understand kind of the realm. You know why rail plus answerable is, you know, an optimal solution for customers in those header ingenious environment. And what would love I heard a little bit in the keynote about kind of the road map where it's going. Maybe you can talk to about where those would fit together. >>Yeah, perfect and e think your comment about Header genius World is is Keith. That is the way we live, And folks will have to live in a head or a genius, a cz far as the eye can see. And I think that's part of the value, right to bring choice when you look at what we do with rail because of the close collaboration we have between my team and Theo team. That in the management bu around insights are engineering team is actively building rules so we can bring added value from the sense of we have our red Hat engineers who build rail creating rules to mitigate things, to help things with migration. So us develop well, Aden adoption. We put in in place upgrades, of course, in the product. But also there's a whole set of rules curated, supported by red hat that help you upgrade to relate from a prior version. So it's the tight engineering collaboration that we can bring. But to your point, it's, you know, we want to make sure that answerable and answerable tower and the rules that are set up bring added value to rebel and make that simple. But it does have to be in a head of a genius world. I'm gonna live with neighbors in any data center. Of course, >>what one of the pieces of the announcement talked about collections, eyes there, anything specific from from your team that it should be pointed out about from a collections in the platform announcement. >>So I think I think his collection starts to starts to grow on. Git brings out sort of the the simplicity of being pulled. It pulled playbooks and rolls on and pull that all in tow. One spot. We'll be looking at key scenarios that we pulled together that mean the most Terrell customers. Migration, of course, is one. We have other spaces, of course. Where we work with key ecosystem partners, of course, ASAP, Hana, running on rail has been a big focus for us in partnership with S A P. We have a playbook for installing ASAP Hana on Well, so this collaboration will continue to grow. I think collections offers a huge opportunity for a simpler experience to be able to kind of do a automated solution, if you will kind of on your floor >>automation for all. That's the theme here. >>That's what I >>want to get your thoughts on. The comment you made about analytical analytics keep it goes inside rail. This seems to be a key area for insights. Tying the two things together so kind of cohesive. But decoupled. I see how that works. What kind of analytical cables are you guys serving up today and what's coming around the corner because environments are changing. Hybrid and multi cloud are part of what everyone's talking about. Take care of the on premises. First, take care of the public cloud. Now, hybrids now on operating model has to look the same. This is a key thing. What kind of new capabilities of analytics do you see? >>Yes, that's it. So let me step you through that a little bit because because your point is exactly right. Our goal is to provide a single experience that can be on Prem or off Prem and provides value across both, as as you choose to deploy. So insights, which is the analytics engine that we use built upon our data. You can have that on Prem with. Well, you can have it off from with well, in the public cloud. So where we have data coming in from customers who are running well on the public cloud, so that provides a single view. So if you if you see a security vulnerability, you can skin your entire environment, Which is great. Um, I mentioned earlier. The more people we have participating, the more value comes so new rules are being created. So as a subscription model, you get more value as you go. And you can see the automation analytics that was announced today as part of the platform. So that brings analytics capabilities to, you know, first to be able to see what who's running what, how much value they're getting out of analytics, that the presentation by J. P. Morgan Chase was really compelling to see the value that automation is delivering to them. For a company to be ableto look at that in a dashboard with analytics automation, that's huge value, they can decide. Do we need to leverage it here more? Do we need to bring it value value here? Now you combine those two together, right? It's it, And being informed is the best. >>I want to get your reaction way Make common. Are opening student in our opening segment around the J. P. Morgan comment, you know, hours, two minutes, days, two minutes, depending on what the configurations. Automation is a wonderful thing. Where pro automation, as you know, we think it's gonna be huge category, but we took, um ah survey inside our community. We asked our practitioners in our community members about automation, and then they came back with the following. I want to get your reaction. Four. Major benefits. Automation focused efforts allows for better results. Efficiency. Security is a key driver in all this. You mentioned that automation drives job satisfaction, and then finally, the infrastructure Dev ops folks are getting re skilled up the stack as the software distraction. Those are the four main points of why automation is impacting enterprise. Do you agree with that? You make comments on some of those points? >>No, I do. I agree. I think skills is one thing that we've seen over and over again. Skills is skills. His key. We see it in Lennox. We have to help, right? Bridge window skills in tow. Lennox skills. I think automation that helps with skills development helps not only individuals but helps the company. I think the 2nd 2nd piece that you mentioned about job satisfaction at the end of the day, all of us want to have impact. And when you can leverage automation for one individual toe, have impact that that is much broader than they could do before with manual tasks. That's just that's just >>you know, Stew and I were talking also about the one of the key note keywords that kept on coming out and the keynote was scales scales, driving a lot of change in the industry at many levels. Certainly, software automation drives more value. When you have scale because you scaling more stuff, you can manually configure his stuff. A scale software certainly is gonna be a big part of that. But the role of cloud providers, the big cloud providers see IBM, Amazon, all the big enterprises like Microsoft. They're traveling massive scale. So there's a huge change in the open source community around how to deal with scale. This is a big topic of conversation. What's your thoughts on this? Sending general opinions on how the scales change in the open source equation. Is it more towards platforms, less tools, vice versa? Is there any trends? You see? >>I think it's interesting because I think when I think a scale, I think both volume right or quantity as the hyper scale ours do. I think also it's about complexity. I think I think the public clouds have great volume that they have to deal with in numbers of systems, but they have the ability to customize leveraging development teams and leveraging open source software they can customize. They can customize all the way down to the servers and the processor chips. As we know for most folks, right, they scale. But when they scale across on Prem in off from its adding complexity for them. And I think automation has value both in solving volume issues around scale, but also in complexity issues around scale. So even you know mid size businesses if they want a leverage on Prem, an off ramp to them, that's complexity scale. And I think automation has a huge amount of value to >>bring that abstracts away. The complexity automated, absolutely prized job satisfaction but also benefits of efficiency >>absolutely intimately. The greatest value of efficiency is now. There's more time to bring an innovation right. It's a zoo, Stephanie. >>Last thing I wondering, What feedback are you hearing from customers? You know, one of the things that struck me we're talking about the J. P. Morgan is they made great progress. But he said they had about a year of working with security of the cyber, the control groups to help get them through that knothole of allowing them toe really deploy automation. So, you know, usually something like answerable. You think? Oh, I can get a team. Let me get it going. But, oh, wait, no, Hold on. Corporate needs to make its way through. What is that something you hear generally? Is that a large enterprise thing? You know what? What are you hearing from customers that you're >>talking? I think I think we see it more and more, and it came up in the discussions today. The technical aspect is one aspect. The sort of cultural or the ability to pull it in is a whole separate aspect. And you think that technology from all of us who are engineers, we think, Well, that's the tough bit. But actually, the culture bit is just it's hard. One thing that that I see over and over again is the way cos air structured has a big impact. The more silo the teams are, do they have a way to communicate because fixing that so that you, when you bring in automation, it has that ability to sort of drive more ubiquitous value across. But if you're not structured toe leverage that it's really hard if your I T ops guys don't talk to the application folks bringing that value is very hard, so I think it is kind of going along in parallel right. The technical capabilities is one aspect. How you get your organization structure to reap the benefits is another aspect, and it's a journey. That's that's really what I see from folks. It is a journey. And, um, I think it's inspiring to see the stories here when they come back and talk about it. But to me the most, the greatest thing about it's just start right. Just start wherever you are and and our goal is to try and help on ramps for folks wherever their journey is, >>is a graft over people's careers and certainly the modernization of the enterprise and public sector and governments from how they procure technology to how they deploy and consume it is radically changing very quickly. By the way too scale on these things were happening. I've got to get your take on. I want to get your expert opinion on this because you have been in the industry of some of the different experiences. The cloud one Datta was the era of compute storage startups started Airbnb start all these companies examples of cloud scale. But now, as we start to get into the impact to businesses in the enterprise with hybrid multi cloud, there's a cloud. 2.0 equation again mentioned Observe Ability was just network management at White Space. Small category. Which company going public? It's important now kind of subsystem of cloud 2.0, automation seems to feel the same way we believe. What's your definition of cloud to point of cloud? One daughter was simply stand up some storage and compete. Use the public cloud and cloud to point is enterprise. What does that mean to you? What? How would you describe cloud to point? >>So my view is Cloud one Dato was all about capability. Cloud to Dato is all about experience, and that is bringing a whole do way that we look at every product in the stack, right? It has to be a seamless, simple experience, and that's where automation and management comes in in spades. Because all of that stuff you needed incapability having it be secure, having it be reliable, resilient. All of that still has to be there. But now you now you need the experience or to me, it's all about the experience and how you pull that together. And that's why we're hoping. You know, I'm thrilled here to be a danceable fast cause. The more I can work with the teams that are doing answerable and insights and the management aspect in the automation, it'll make the rail experience better >>than people think it's. Software drives it all. Absolutely. Adam, Thanks for sharing your insights on the case. Appreciate you coming back on and great to see you. >>Great to be here. Good to see >>you. Coverage here in Atlanta. I'm John for Stupid Men Cube coverage here and answerable Fest Maur coverage. After the short break, we'll be right back. >>Um

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. Keith, it's so great to see you. >> Lisa, good to be on the show with you again. >> So we're going to geek out the next two days. >> Oh isn't it so good? >> We've been geeking out already just coming from the keynote. This is ... >> Yeah This is, it was really good there was meat, there was announcements, there was news, partnerships. Citrix is a 30 year old company, who's done a lot in the last 12/18 months, to transform. From rebranding, product names, et cetera, lots of launches and announcements. And something that really peaked my interest as a marketer this morning, is hearing the influence of consumerization. Them talking about leveraging Citrix Workspace, and the things that they have done to beef it up which we'll talk about, to deliver a stellar employee experience, to delight the users. And those are words that we hear often in the marketing space, like customer lifetime value, they talked about the employee lifetime value because employee attraction, talent attraction and retention, is critical for every business. Really meaty stuff. What was some of your take on some of the announcements on Workspace? >> So I was really interested because as I'm coming off of SAP SAPPHIRE, where I'm accustomed to hearing terms like customer experience, employee experience, you know, the kind of X-data versus O-data conversation. We heard a lot of that here today. And it's weird coming from an infrastructure company. Citrix in the past I like to put into a box, it's about VDI, application virtualization and networking, and that's pretty much the conversation, it stayed at the IT infrastructure leader perspective. Today we heard a lot that broke out of that, and it was going into the C-Suite and delivering not just technology results, but business results. There was a lot about making transformation real. >> You're right it was about making it real, and if you think at the end of the day, I think I heard a stat the other day, that by 2020, which is literally around the corner, 50% of workers are going to be remote. You and I are great examples of that, we're on the road all the time, we have multiple devices we need to have connectivity that ... to all the apps, SAS apps, mobile apps, web, that allow us to be productive from wherever we are, done in a way that our employers, are confident there is security behind this. But delivering that exceptional employee experience is absolutely business critical. They gave some stats today about the trillions of dollars that are spent, or rather work that's lost, with employees that have so many apps each day that they're working with that really distract from their actual day to day function. >> Yeah I think one of the stats that they gave from an ambitious perspective, they want to give one day back to every employee, 20% of their time, back, I think the stat you referred to some seven trillion dollars of productivity is lost from just hunting and pecking inside of applications. Both of us work remotely, you work from your tablet, I work from a tablet or my phone a lot. Because I just, you know, it's low power to, it lasts the day, but yeah I still need to edit video, I need to sign invoices, I need to create statements that worked. I need to be just as creative on the road as I am at home. It helps me to compete against larger competitors, but more importantly, offer a different customer experience and this is what Citrix was talking about today, was more than just VDIs, about picking up any device asking basic logical questions like what is the status of the latest deal, the big deal, and getting that status from Salesforce without again hunting and pecking, from whatever device you're on. >> Which is critical, especially to have that seamless experience going from desktop to mobile. I think they also said ... there was a lot of stats this morning, which I really geek out on. But that the average person is using seven to 10 apps a day and I loved the video that they showed this morning that really brought that to life. Looking at a senior marketing manager for some enterprise company, who, as she starts her day, there's 10 minutes that goes by which is lie, oh, I forgot I got to log into Workday and request my PTO, oh, one of my employees needs me to approve an expense report, and oh, my boss wants to know about this big deal that's closed. And the time that is spent logging into different applications is really as you mentioned that number seven trillion dollars lost, what they're doing with Citrix, with the intelligent, the workspace intelligence experience is bringing all of that to the end user. So it's much more an activities focus rather than an app focus experience. And I loved what you said that they're very ambitiously aiming to give each person back one day a week, yes please. I will take that. In any organization. >> So I was at a government conference a few weeks ago and they talked very much about this CFO of GSA presented to a crowd of fellow government workers, and they were talking about eliminating waste, they were talking about automating processes, taking the PDF, taking a document and scanning it into a system, and then kicking off a real workflow. And this is done, the industry's been working on this problem for the past 10 years, it's called RPA, Robotic Process Automation. One of Citrix's partners and I guess now competitors in that space just received $560,000,000 in funding, in a single round, to enable artificial intelligence to do this. What I thought was interesting, is that Citrix didn't use the term bots, I think other than one time ... >> Lisa: That's right. ... on the stage. But these are essentially bots, that take redundant processes, automates them, to ultimately add value. I'm anxious to dive in and talk about how Citrix is taking stuff like, they mentioned Mainframe, AS/400 applications, integrating that in Salesforce without having this huge multi-million dollar project to re-write these core business applications and processes. So, you know it's a really exciting time in the industry Citrix has really stepped up in saying, you know what, we won't settle for just having a good business, and this application virtualization and network space, we're going to go all in. >> So one of the things I saw in Twitter this morning, is you and I are both tweeting during the keynote, which we just came from is you talked about PRA right away on Twitter and it's something that you heard instinctively with what they were saying. What are your thoughts as to why RPA as a term wasn't discussed? Did you think it's the type of audience that's here? Is it just not a term that resonates as well as AI and machine learning, which are buzz words at every event we go to? >> And I think a good portion of that is a mix. We're at a conference that's very IT-centric. Citrix is a you know, one of the core IT infrastructure vendors. So when you throw out a term like Robotic Process Automation you constantly, you instantly think, you know, gain of productivity from me or your level maybe, but from an IT infrastructure practitioner perspective, Robotic Processing Automation has a resonance with being equal to eliminating jobs. If, you know, you're going to automate the integration between VMware VSphere and Citrix desktop virtualization and that administration piece, which these solutions definitely can do that, what's left for me to do the work on. If you're going to automate the provisioning of DNS and IP addressing and all these mundane tasks that administrators probably spend 50-60% of their day doing, you know what, that's threatening. To say that you know what, we're going to give you the same tools that we give to make the workspace available today from an application perspective and to tackle that from the concept of this is just extending that ideal and you're a what, your job and what you do today to adding true business value, I think it was smart on their part to kind of avoid the bot conversation. >> Okay, I'm glad that you shared that insight, that makes perfect sense. So, PJ Hough was up there, the Chief Product Officer, who's going to be on tomorrow, talking about what Citrix is doing to distill apps and make this experience much more personalized. And of course he was joined on stage with a big Microsoft announcement today. I think I've been to so many shows this year I've lost count but I think Satya Nadella has either been on stage, he was at Dell Technologies World with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger, or in a video like he was today. So the partnership with Microsoft expanding here a little bit of a teaser at Microsoft Ignite a couple of months ago. Gimme your thoughts on what Microsoft, I should say what Citrix is doing to facilitate their users being much more proficient at using Microsoft Team, which I believe the gentleman from Microsoft said there's over 300,000 active users already. Fastest growing product in Microsoft's history. >> So when you talk about collaboration, you can't collaborate without these tools, whether Teams, Slack, whatever, it's become an integral part of how we communicate, how we interact, I know a lot of friends that I have are moving from Slack to Teams, just because of the integration with Office365 they can collaborate around, and I think here on theCUBE we talk about data as being the key. You have to talk about data. One of the things that was prepared to go kind of head on with Citrix today, and tomorrow about, was about data. You know it's great to present applications, but how are you helping to help users collaborate and use and access data and the combination of RPA with the intelligent experi- intelligent, it's going to take us some time to used to this ... >> I keep wanting to say enterprise. >> Yeah enterprise >> Intelligent experience >> Experience product, with Teams, with the Azure announcement, integration with Azure and full support of the Citrix platform inside Azure will just make the employee experience at least potentially seamless, a lot more seamless, I'm super excited about, you can't tell in my voice, I haven't gotten excited about Citrix in a long time. And this is the first time they've had theCUBE at Synergy since 2011, I think it was a great time to reignite that partnership, and this coverage is going to be an interesting two days. >> It is. So we talked about digital workspace, the other two areas of Citrix's business that you touched on a little bit, security and analytics. Let's talk about the security piece first as it relates to Microsoft Teams and Azure. SD-WAN is becoming more and more absolutely critical to ensure that because as people we are the number one threat vector in any organization. Not that we're all bad actors. >> Keith: Right. >> But because we need to get things done, as frictionless or seamless, as you said, as possible, and efficiently as possible. What did you hear today with respect to security, that might really make some of those IT folks take notice? >> Well, we want to work from any device. Like, I want to be able to, ideally if I say, you know what, I want to pick up a new Surface tablet, when I go to Atlanta I don't want to pack my iPad. I want to be able to pick that up, and work. If I go to a kiosk, I want to be able to, even if it's running Windows XP, I want to be able to do my work, I want to be able to do my work from any device. This is a nightmare for system administrators to say how do I control security, while making the experience frictionless? Those two things don't seem to go together. So Citrix, whether it's with this new announcement with Microsoft with Teams, it's traditional applications around SD-WAN, enabling access from remote locations, and Citrix is kind ... this is their bread and butter, offering remote access to applications securely and fast, this is you know, Citrix is starting to formulate a really great end to end story about making applications, data and more importantly, business answers and capability available anywhere securely, so it's a great story. >> It really is. So if you're excited, you already know how excited I am. I think we're going to have a fantastic day today, and tomorrow. We've got a whole bunch of the C-Suite from Citrix on, we're also going to be talking with some partners and customers, and interestingly as a marketer this peaked my interest as well, they have the innovation awards. There are three finalists, we will be talking with all three over the next two days, and this is a customer awards program, that anybody can vote on. So I haven't seen that before, so I'm excited to understand how Citrix is enabling them to have this great employee experience which is more and more critical as the shortages and the gaps are becoming more and more prevalence. And also, how these customers are reacting to just some of the news announced today, with Microsoft, the intelligent enterprise, and how they see their employees, and attracting and retaining top talent as actually really mission critical. So we're going to have fun Keith. >> I agree. >> All right, you're watching Keith Townsend and Lisa Martin live from theCUBE, we are on the show floor at Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Stick around, Keith and I will be right back with our first guest after a short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering .conf18, brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody, home of Disney World, and this week, home of theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante and he's Stu Miniman. Steven Hatch is here, he's the manager of Enterprise Logging Services at Cox Automotive. Steven, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So, you've been with Splunk for a while, we're here at conf18. Logging services, enterprise logging services. When you think of Splunk, their roots, Splunk go back to, sort of, log files, analyzing log files, it's in your title. (laughs) You must be pretty intimately tied to, as a practitioner, to this capability, but talk about your role and what you do at Cox. >> Primarily, the role is to be the evangelist, the enabler, and the center of excellence when it comes down to getting those best practices propergated within the enterprise. >> So people come to you for advice, council, you play, sort of, internal consultant. What qualified you to do that? You were a practitioner prior to this, so you got your hands dirty and you kind of now, elevated to-- >> My prior role was a Site Operations, or Site Reliability Engineer, and then Manager. And so, having that background, I've been in IT since '96, so I'm a little old in the game, but basically, having that operational knowledge, and knowing how to think big picture when things are happening or transpiring, or the reverse and go back and find that root cause analysis. >> '96, just a pup, my friend, okay? (both laugh) So, talking to Stu, we were talking off camera, about the number of brands that Cox Automotive has, Cox at Kelley Blue Book and at numerous others, like dozens, each of these is kind of it's own data silo. How do you guys go about using Splunk? Are you able to break down some of those silos? Maybe you could share that with us. >> Yeah, so we have been successful on a lot of the big three really, at Kelley Blue Book, Manheim, as well as Auto Trader, to really break in. A lot of that was because of our, already previous, relationships with team members and leaders. On the other side of the coin is the newly acquired companies that are not in Atlanta, Georgia. That are in places like Groton, Connecticut, South Jordan, Utah, Upstate New York, as well as the Toronto area in Canada. And so, WebEx joined me, email just won't cut it. You actually have to sit down with these people and really showcase your business case, your model, and what you're trying to bring to the table. But of course, the approach is always important. >> And are you using Splunk to do that? As a collaboration tool as well? >> Yes sir, yep. >> Explain that a little bit if you would. >> So, a lot of times, as you mentioned, the silos, as a bigger brand now, it's no longer an excuse for you to only be responsible for your data and not showcase it, or share that data. Because we're thinking about the entire life-cycle of Cox Automotive, and this entity of Cox Automotive, that's important to us now. So for you to hold tight, or to hoard your data, or your metrics and not share them, that's not good business anymore. >> Yeah, so Steven, we talked to a lot of companies that do M&A, and it's usually like, well, this is the products we use, these are the structures that we have. One of the things we hear from Splunk is that you can get to your data, your way. How does the Splunk modeling, and how you look at the data, fit into that M&A? Is that an enabler for you to be able to get that in. >> Yeah, and so, when you can showcase the ability of how the data comes in and, quickly. Key word, right? To showcase how that data can be very valuable to them, especially to their stakeholders, that's when light bolts will go off. And, again, it's the stakeholders, and then champions, that we need to bring to the table to make sure that we can get full adoption. >> Yeah, we've also-- Dave's been to the show a few times, it's my first time, and what I've really heard a bunch of is the people that know how to use Splunk, they're super valuable inside of the company. They get training, people inside the company, they look to get hired, tell us a little about what you've seen, what it means to your role inside the company, and as you network with your peers here. >> It's a lot of exposure. A lot of people are very anxious to get some type of insights into their world, their infrastructure, their applications, their business tools. A lot of times, there are people out there that are very savvy from a business perspective, that have a bunch of KPIs in their head, but no one has actually extracted that information from them, and so, our job is to align with their KPIs. You know, over the last couple of years, that's what we've-- the journey that we've been on, is to now revisit the data that we've just ingested. That's the basic foundation. We want to elevate now and really get more mature, and to align with those business KPIs. >> Meaning they got this tribal knowledge in their head, and you want to codify that so that it can be shared. >> Correct. >> How do you go about doing that? Is it sitting in a whiteboard and understanding that? >> It can be a whiteboard, it can be over a coffee. If I need to get on a plane and go see them in person, and to really just listen and ask the questions when it's time but, again, listen and really understand what's important to them, what is important to their business, to their function, to their silos? Cox Automotive has five, of what we call, pillars, where there's international, finance, marketing, retail, or media, and each one of those owners, over time, wants the specific value. >> So if you go and have a chalkboard session, whiteboard session, with one of these folks, how do you operationalize it? You got to figure out where the data exists, so that you can align with what's in their head? Is that right? And then, how do you do that? How do you scale it? >> Well, so, again, you have to start from the top. If you start from the bottom, you'll be in the weeds until the end of time. So that the more efficient manner is to start from the top and realize those KPIs from those leaders, those stakeholders, and then from there, a tool like ITSI, which is basically built around services, entities, and aligning to their service decomposition model, and that right there allows you to stay consistent and efficient on getting that information. >> So you start top down, but ultimately, people are going to want granularity. So you start-- is it top down, bottom up, type of approach? Where you actually drill, drill, drill, drill, drill, and then get to the point where you can answer all those granule questions? And then, by doing that, if I understand it correctly, it sums to the top line, is that fair? >> Yeah, yeah, there's a point in time where you say, you know what? I could really now enhance or enrichen the data by a dataset that I know where it is. So the keypal will get you to a certain point, and then, to find that happy medium, or that common denominator from the data that you already have on premise, or from your apps, wherever they reside, that's where you can meet the gap. >> Otherwise you're never get it done. You'll end up boiling the ocean. >> That's correct, yes sir. >> All right, so, when we talked to you two years ago, you were using Splunk Cloud, you know? And when we talked to practitioners it's-- the things that they're managing, a lot of times now, most of it's not what they own, and so, how do I get the right information? How do I manage that environment? Talk to us a little bit about what you've seen in the maturation of Splunk and Splunk Cloud, if there's anything in 7.2, or Splunk Next, that's exciting you, to help you do your job even better. >> Oh man, so of course, the keynote today, the DSP, the processing layer that's in front of the Cloud, or in front of the indexes now. Where in real time, I can now route data, specifically from a security standpoint. If there's some type of event, without having to go through all the restarts and configuration management and everything else, I can simply put something in there, right there, and move the data, or mask the data. The ability with the infrastructure app, that's exciting to me, as well as all the feature updates for ITSI, enterprise security, as well as the Cloud itself. >> Can we do a little Splunk 101 for my benefit? So I heard today, from one of the product folks, that it used to be when you added another indexer, you had to add storage and compute simultaneously, whether or not you needed the storage, you had to add it, or vise versa. So an indexer is what, is it, essentially, a Splunk node? >> No, it can be a, basically, a Linux host, that actually has the agent running as an indexer with the attached disk. >> Right, okay, and it used to be you had to buy that in chunks, kind of like HCI, right? And you couldn't scale storage independent of compute? >> That's correct. >> What that meant is you were paying for stuff that you might not need. >> Right. >> So, with 7.2, I guess it is, you can split those and you get more granule, or what does that mean for you? >> Well, being a, now four year customer of Splunk Cloud, and anytime we went to the next version of, or license, the next step up, currently we're on about six terabytes. When we go up to eight, that the entailed more indexes being added to the cluster, which meant more time for the replication of search factors to be met, which can take however long, and then, or if there's any kind of issue with the indexer, where one had to be pulled out and another one introduced. How long does that take? Now, with the decoupling of the compute from the storage, it's minutes, and so it's a fraction of the time. >> And if I understand, I understood it real well when it's an appliance, but it's the same architecture if it's done in the Cloud, is that correct? >> It's, essentially, actually, it's a new architecture in my mind, where now it's able to scale more, and then there's-- I'm not sure how much they talked about it, but there's a potential of the elasticity of it. And so, now, I don't have to be so fixed, I can, on certain times, expand the cluster, you know, for search performance, or bring it back down when it's not needed. >> Some of the promise of Cloud. >> Yes, sir, Splunk Cloud. >> So it's like the Billy Dean, the five tool star. You've got the cost, you've got availability, you got speed, you got flexibility, and you've got business value, ultimately, which is what's driving here. So, I take it, I'm inferring here, you'd expect to use this capability in the near future? >> Very much so. >> Great. What else is on your horizon? What are the cool stuff you're working on? And things you want to share with us? >> Well, in addition to our leveraging Splunk Cloud for four years, next year we plan to move away from our current sim tool, into enterprise security. So it's very exciting to hear that they're continually updating that product, and so our security team has been knocking on my door for the last six months to really get that started. So, once we get there, we'll start the migration efforts and get Splunk Cloud now, enabled with the enterprise security, to really empower our security team, and stay ahead of our threats. >> So, I've been around a long time, and, ever since I can remember being in this business, customers have wanted to consolidate the number of vendors with whom they work. But the allure of best of breed always sucks them in to, oh, lets try this, or you get shadow IT. It sounds like, with Splunk, you're approaching this as a platform that you can use for a variety of different use cases. >> That is correct. >> Now, whether or not you reduce the number of vendors is, maybe a separate conversation, but I guess the question I have is, how are you using Splunk in new ways? It sounds like its permutating a line of business, SecOps, etc, is that an accurate picture? If you could describe it. >> Yeah, so Splunk itself, the core is the platform for so many different other functions within the business. You have security, you have the development group, DevOps, where, from a CICD perspective, now they can measure the metrics or the latency in between, when they create a car, say in rally, all the way to the very end of the line, what are all those metrics that are there, that they can leverage to increase their productivity? Obviously, infrastructure. As we consolidate all of our data centers down, wouldn't it be nice to know if these specific low bouncers or switchers are still having traffic to verse them? And to actually get a depiction of the consolidation effort. From a virtualization standpoint, isn't it powerful to know how many devices E6 hosts are actually fully being utilized, and how many are actually vacant? And how much money can be saved if we were actually to turn down those specifics blades or hosts? Or VMs that aren't being leveraged, but they're sitting there, taking up valuable resources. >> I remember when Splunk, right around the time they went public, I remember two instances, maybe three. There was a MPP database company, there was a large three letter firm, and there was an open-source specialist, and I heard the same thing from each of them, was we have the Splunk killer, this was like, five, six years ago. It seems like this Splunk killer was Splunk. And it really never happened. Why is it? Why is Splunk so effective? You obviously see, you know, you're independent, you want to use the best thing for Cox Automotive. What is it about Splunk that sets them apart, puts them in the lead? >> The scale capabilities, having this type of environment with the conferences and the sales group and the support groups, very intentional about listening. Having workshops where they come on premise to help us out on our use cases, to really educate their users, because the more their users are elevated from a knowledge standpoint, the more they will then exercise the application. If they all stay basic, why would I need another component of Splunk? Why would I need enterprise security? Why would I need to expand my subscription into the Cloud? The more I can exercise it, the more I'll need. >> So this is kind of a give, get. They come in knowing that if they expose you to other best practices, you'll going to be more effective in the use of Splunk and you might apply it in to other parts of your business. >> My appetite will grow and my users appetite will grow. >> And these are freebies that they're doing? Services freebies, or are they paid for services? >> Oh yeah, they have no problem coming in, supplying the necessary ammunition, or food, to entice, to have folks come in, but it's powerful to have all the engineers in there to really show us how things work. 'Cause, again, it's a win, win. >> And you're a football fan, I understand? >> Oh, yes, sir. >> Chiefs are your team, right? >> That's correct. >> Were you a football player? >> For a little while, yes. Now I coach, so that's my-- >> And you coach, what? >> Little girls. >> Kiddie football, huh, awesome. Is that Pop Warner these days, still? >> I guess you call it that. >> Flag football or tackle? >> Tackle football >> Really? >> Yep. >> Eight years old? >> Yes, my son is eight and he's playing full back right now, I'm very excited, happy father. >> Is he a big boy, like his dad? >> He's going to be bigger, I think, than his father, yes, sir. (both laugh) >> That's awesome. Well, listen, thanks very much, Steven, for coming on theCUBE, it's really a pleasure meeting you. >> That's appreciated, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Splunk .conf18, you're watching theCUBE.

For Las Vegas, it's the cube covering vm world 2018, brought to you by vm ware and its ecosystem partners. Ladies and gentlemen, Vm ware would like to thank it's global diamond sponsors and it's platinum sponsors for vm world 2018 with over 125,000 members globally. The vm ware User Group connects via vmware customers, partners and employees to vm ware, information resources, knowledge sharing, and networking. To learn more, visit the [inaudible] booth in the solutions exchange or the hemoglobin gene vm village become a part of the community today. This presentation includes forward looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risk factors including those described in the 10 k's 10 q's and k's vm ware. Files with the SEC. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Pat Gelsinger. Welcome to vm world. Good morning. Let's try that again. Good morning and I'll just say it is great to be here with you today. I'm excited about the sixth year of being CEO. When it was on this stage six years ago were Paul Maritz handed me the clicker and that's the last he was seen. We have 20,000 plus here on site in Vegas and uh, you know, on behalf of everyone at Vm ware, you know, we're just thrilled that you would be with us and it's a joy and a thrill to be able to lead such a community. We have a lot to share with you today and we really think about it as a community. You know, it's my 23,000 plus employees, the souls that I'm responsible for, but it's our partners, the thousands and we kicked off our partner day yesterday, but most importantly, the vm ware community is centered on you. You know, we're very aware of this event would be nothing without you and our community and the role that we play at vm wares to build these cool breakthrough innovations that enable you to do incredible things. You're the ones who take our stuff and do amazing things. You altogether. We have truly changed the world over the last two decades and it is two decades. You know, it's our anniversary in 1998, the five people that started a vm ware, right. You know, it was, it was exactly 20 years ago and we're just thrilled and I was thinking about this over the weekend and it struck me, you know, anniversary, that's like old people, you know, we're here, we're having our birthday and it's a party, right? We can't have a drink yet, but next year. Yeah. We're 20 years old. Right. We can do that now. And I'll just say the culture of this community is something that truly is amazing and in my 38 years, 38 years in tech, that sort of sounds like I'm getting old or something, but the passion, the loyalty, almost a cult like behavior that we see in this team of people to us is simply thrilling. And you know, we put together a little video to sort of summarize the 20 years and some of that history and some of the unique and quirky aspects of our culture. Let's watch that now. We knew we had something unique and then we demonstrated that what was unique was also some reasons that we love vm ware, you know, like the community out there. So great. The technology I love it. Ware is solid and much needed. Literally. I do love Vmr. It's awesome. Super Awesome. Pardon? There's always someone that wants to listen and learn from us and we've learned so much from them as well. And we reached out to vm ware to help us start building. What's that future world look like? Since we're doing really cutting edge stuff, there's really no better people to call and Bmr has been known for continuous innovation. There's no better way to learn how to do new things in it than being with a company that's at the forefront of technology. What do you think? Don't you love that commitment? Hey Ashley, you know, but in the prep sessions for this, I thought, boy, what can I do to take my commitment to the next level? And uh, so, uh, you know, coming in a couple days early, I went to down the street to bad ass tattoo. So it's time for all of us to take our commitment up level and sometimes what happens in Vegas, you take home. Thank you. Vm Ware has had this unique role in the industry over these 20 years, you know, and for that we've seen just incredible things that have happened over this period of time and it's truly extraordinary what we've accomplished together. And you know, as we think back, you know, what vm ware has uniquely been able to do is I'll say bridge across know and we've seen time and again that we see these areas of innovation emerging and rapidly move forward. But then as they become utilized by our customers, they create this natural tension of what business wants us flexibility to use across these silos of innovation. And from the start of our history, we have collectively had this uncanny ability to bridge across these cycles of innovation. You know, an act one was clearly the server generation. You know, it may seem a little bit, uh, ancient memory now, but you remember you used to walk into your data center and it looked like the loove the museum of it passed right? You know, and you had your old p series and your z series in your sparks and your pas and your x86 cluster and Yo, it had to decide, well, which architecture or am I going to deploy and run this on? And we bridged across and that was the magic of Esx. You don't want to just changed the industry when that occurred. And I sort of called the early days of Esx and vsphere. It was like the intelligence test. If you weren't using it, you fail because Yup. Servers, 10 servers become one months, become minutes. I still have people today who come up to me and they reflect on their first experience of vsphere or be motion and it was like a holy moment in their life and in their careers. Amazing and act to the Byo d, You know, can we bridge across these devices and users wanted to be able to come in and say, I have my device and I'm productive on it. I don't want to be forced to use the corporate standard. And maybe more than anything was the power of the iphone that was introduced, the two, seven, and suddenly every employee said this is exciting and compelling. I want to use it so I can be more productive when I'm here. Bye. Jody was the rage and again it was a tough challenge and once again vm ware helped to bridge across the surmountable challenge. And clearly our workspace one community today is clearly bridging across these silos and not just about managing devices but truly enabling employee engagement and productivity. Maybe act three was the network and you know, we think about the network, you know, for 30 years we were bound to this physical view of what the network would be an in that network. We are bound to specific protocols. We had to wait months for network upgrades and firewall rules. Once every two weeks we'd upgrade them. If you had a new application that needed a firewall rule, sorry, you know, come back next month we'll put, you know, deep frustration among developers and ceos. Everyone was ready to break the chains. And that's exactly what we did. An NSX and Nice Sierra. The day we acquired it, Cisco stock drops and the industry realizes the networking has changed in a fundamental way. It will never be the same again. Maybe act for was this idea of cloud migration. And if we were here three years ago, it was student body, right to the public cloud. Everything is going there. And I remember I was meeting with a cio of federal cio and he comes up to me and he says, I tried for the last two years to replatform my 200 applications I got to done, you know, and all of a sudden that was this. How do I do cloud migration and the effective and powerful way. Once again, we bridged across, we brought these two worlds together and eliminated this, uh, you know, this gap between private and public cloud. And we'll talk a lot more about that today. You know, maybe our next act is what we'll call the multicloud era. You know, because today in a recent survey by Deloitte said that the average business today is using eight public clouds and expected to become 10 plus public clouds. And you know, as you're managing different tools, different teams, different architectures, those solution, how do you, again bridge across, and this is what we will do in the multicloud era, we will help our community to bridge across and take advantage of these powerful cycles of innovation that are going on, but be able to use them across a consistent infrastructure and operational environment. And we'll have a lot more to talk about on this topic today. You know, and maybe the last item to bridge across maybe the most important, you know, people who are profit. You know, too often we think about this as an either or question. And as a business leader, I'm are worried about the people or the And Milton Friedman probably set us up for this issue decades ago when he said, planet, right? the sole purpose of a business is to make profits. You want to create a multi-decade dilemma, right? For business leaders, could I have both people and profits? Could I do well and do good? And particularly for technology, I think we don't have a choice to think about these separately. We are permeating every aspect of business. And Society, we have the responsibility to do both and have all the things that vm ware has accomplished. I think this might be the one that I'm most proud of over, you know, w we have demonstrated by vsphere and the hypervisor alone that we have saved over 540 million tons of co two emissions. That is what you have done. Can you believe that? Five hundred 40 million tons is enough to have 68 percent of all households for a year. Wow. Thank you for what you have done. Thank you. Or another translation of that. Is that safe enough to drive a trillion miles and the average car or you could go to and from Jupiter just in case that was in your itinerary a thousand times. Right? He was just incredible. What we have done and as a result of that, and I'll say we were thrilled to accept this recognition on behalf of you and what you have done. You know, vm were recognized as number 17 in the fortune. Change the world list last week. And we really view it as accepting this honor on behalf of what you have done with our products and technology tech as a force for good. We believe that fundamentally that is our opportunity, if not our obligation, you know, fundamentally tech is neutral, you know, we together must shape it for good. You know, the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, right? It was used to create mass education and learning materials also can be used for extremist propaganda. The technology itself is neutral. Our ecosystem has a critical role to play in shaping technology as a force for good. You know, and as we think about that tomorrow, we'll have a opportunity to have a very special guest and I really encourage you to be here, be on time tomorrow morning on the stage and you know, Sanjay's a session, we'll have Malala, Nobel Peace Prize winner and fourth will be a bit of extra security as you come in and you understand that. And I just encourage you not to be late because we see this tech being a force for good in everything that we do at vm ware. And I hope you'll enjoy, I'm quite looking forward to the session tomorrow. Now as we think about the future. I like to put it in this context, the superpowers of tech know and you know, 38 years in the industry, you know, I am so excited because I think everything that we've done over the last four decades is creating a foundation that allows us to do more and go faster together. We're unlocking game, changing opportunities that have not been available to any people in the history of humanity. And we have these opportunities now and I, and I think about these four cloud, you have unimaginable scale. You'll literally with your Amex card, you can go rent, you know, 10,000 cores for $100 per hour. Or if you have Michael's am ex card, we can rent a million cores for $10,000 an hour. Thanks Michael. But we also know that we're in many ways just getting started and we have tremendous issues to bridge across and compatible clouds, mobile unprecedented scale. Literally, your application can reach half the humans on the planet today. But we also know that five percent, the lowest five percent of humanity or the other half of humanity, they're still in the lower income brackets, less than five percent penetrated. And we know that we have customer examples that are using mobile phones to raise impoverished farmers in Africa, out of poverty just by having a smart phone with proper crop, the information field and whether a guidance that one tool alone lifting them out of poverty. Ai knows, you know, I really love the topic of ai in 1986. I'm the chief architect of the 80 46. Some of you remember what that was. Yeah, I, you know, you're, you're my folk, right? Right. And for those of you who don't, it was a real important chip at the time. And my marketing manager comes running into my office and he says, Pat, pat, we must make the 46 a great ai chip. This is 1986. What happened? Nothing an AI is today, a 30 year overnight success because the algorithms, the data have gotten so much bigger that we can produce results, that we can bring intelligence to everything. And we're seeing dramatic breakthroughs in areas like healthcare, radiology, you know, new drugs, diagnosis tools, and designer treatments. We're just scratching the surface, but ai has so many gaps, yet we don't even in many cases know why it works. Right? And we'll call that explainable ai and edge and Iot. We're connecting the physical and the digital worlds was never before possible. We're bridging technology into every dimension of human progress. And today we're largely hooking up things, right? We have so much to do yet to make them intelligent. Network secured, automated, the patch, bringing world class it to Iot, but it's not just that these are super powers. We really see that each and each one of them is a super power in and have their own right, but they're making each other more powerful as well. Cloud enables mobile conductivity. Mobile creates more data, more data makes the AI better. Ai Enables more edge use cases and more edge requires more cloud to store the data and do the computing right? They're reinforcing each other. And with that, we know that we are speeding up and these superpowers are reshaping every aspect of society from healthcare to education, the transportation, financial institutions. This is how it all comes together. Now, just a simple example, how many of you have ever worn a hardhat? Yeah, Yo. Pretty boring thing. And it has one purpose, right? You know, keep things from smacking me in the here's the modern hardhat. It's a complete heads up display with ar head. Well, vr capabilities that give the worker safety or workers or factory workers or supply people the ability to see through walls to understand what's going on inside of the equipment. I always wondered when I was a kid to have x Ray Vision, you know, some of my thoughts weren't good about why I wanted it, but you know, I wanted to. Well now you can have it, you know, but imagine in this environment, the complex application that sits behind it. You know, you're accessing maybe 50 year old building plants, right? You're accessing HVAC systems, but modern ar and vr capabilities and new containerized displays. You'll think about that application. You know, John Gage famously said the network is the computer pat today says the application is now a network and pretty typically a complicated one, you know, and this is the vm ware vision is to make that kind of environment realizable in every aspect of our business and community and we simply have been on this journey, any device, any application, any cloud with intrinsic security. And this vision has been consistent for those of you who have been joining us for a number of years. You've seen this picture, but it's been slowly evolving as we've worked in piece by piece to refine and extend this vision, you know, and for it, we're going to walk through and use this as the compass for our discussion today as we walk through our conversation. And you know, we're going to start by a focus on any cloud. And as we think about this cloud topic, you know, we see it as a multicloud world hybrid cloud, public cloud, but increasingly seeing edge and telco becoming clouds in and have their own right. And we're not gonna spend time on it today, but this area of Telco to the is an enormous opportunity for us in our community. You know, data centers and cloud today are over 80 percent virtualized. The Telco network is less than 10 percent virtualized. Wow. An industry that's almost as big as our industry entirely unvirtualized, although the technologies we've created here can be applied over here and Telco and we have an enormous buildout coming with five g and environments emerging. What an opportunity for us, a virgin market right next to us and we're getting some early mega winds in this area using the technologies that you have helped us cure rate than the So we're quite excited about this topic area as well. market. So let's look at this full view of the multicloud. Any cloud journey. And we see that businesses are on a multicloud journey, you know, and today we see this fundamentally in these two paths, a hybrid cloud and a public cloud. And these paths are complimentary and coexisting, but today, each is being driven by unique requirements and unique teams. Largely the hybrid cloud is being driven by it. And operations, the public cloud being driven more by developers and line of business requirements and as some multicloud environment. So how do we deliver upon that and for that, let's start by digging in on the hybrid cloud aspect of this and as we think about the hybrid cloud, we've been talking about this subject for a number of years and I want to give a very specific and crisp definition. You're the hybrid cloud is the public cloud and the private cloud cooperating with consistent infrastructure and consistent operations simply put seamless path to and from the cloud that my workloads don't care if it's here or there. I'm able to run them in a agile, scalable, flexible, efficient manner across those two environments, whether it's my data center or someone else's, I can bring them together to make that work is the magic of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation. The vm ware Cloud Foundation brings together computer vsphere and the core of why we are here, but combines with that networking storage delivered through a layer of management and automation. The rule of the cloud is ruthlessly automate everything. We laid out this vision of the software defined data center seven years ago and we've been steadfastly working on this vision and vm ware. Cloud Foundation provides this consistent infrastructure and operations with integrated lifecycle management automation. Patching the m ware cloud foundation is the simplest path to the hybrid cloud and the fastest way to get vm ware cloud foundation is hyperconverged infrastructure, you know, and with this we've combined integrated then validated hardware and as a building block inside of this we have validated hardware, the v Sand ready environments. We have integrated appliances and cloud delivered infrastructure, three ways that we deliver that integrate integrated hyperconverged infrastructure solution. And we have by far the broadest ecosystem of partners to do it. A broad set of the sand ready nodes from essentially everybody in the industry. Secondly, we have integrated appliances, the extract of vxrail that we have co engineered with our partners at Dell technology and today in fact Dell is releasing the power edge servers, a major step in blade servers that again are going to be powering vxrail and vxrack systems and we deliver hyperconverged infrastructure through a broader set of Vm ware cloud partners as well. At the heart of the hyperconverged infrastructure is v San and simply put, you know, be San has been the engine that's just been moving rapidly to take over the entire integration of compute and storage and expand to more and more areas. We have incredible momentum over 15,000 customers for v San Today and for those of you who joined us, we say thank you for what you have done with this product today. Really amazing you with 50 percent of the global 2000 using it know vm ware. V San Vxrail are clearly becoming the standard for how hyperconverge is done in the industry. Our cloud partner programs over 500 cloud partners are using ulv sand in their solution, you know, and finally the largest in Hci software revenue. Simply put the sand is the software defined storage technology of choice for the industry and we're seeing that customers are putting this to work in amazing ways. Vm Ware and Dell technologies believe in tech as a force for good and that it can have a major impact on the quality of life for every human on the planet and particularly for the most underdeveloped parts of the world. Those that live on less than $2 per day. In fact that this moment 5 billion people worldwide do not have access to modern affordable surgery. Mercy ships is working hard to change the global surgery crisis with greater than 400 volunteers. Mercy ships operates the largest NGO hospital ship delivering free medical care to the poorest of the poor in Africa. Let's see from them now. When the ship shows up to port, literally people line up for days to receive state of the art life, sane changing life saving surgeries, tumor site limbs, disease blindness, birth defects, but not only that, the personnel are educating and training the local healthcare providers with new skills and infrastructure so they can care for their own. After the ship has left, mercy ships runs on Vm ware, a dell technology with VX rail, Dell Isilon data protection. We are the it platform for mercy ships. Mercy ships is now building their next generation ship called global mercy, which were more than double. It's lifesaving capacity. It's the largest charity hospital ever. It will go live in 20 slash 20 serving Africa and I personally plan on being there for its launch. It is truly amazing what they are doing with our technology. Thanks. So we see this picture of the hybrid cloud. We've talked about how we do that for the private cloud. So let's look over at the public cloud and let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. You know, we're taking this incredible power of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation and making it available for the leading cloud providers in the world and with that, the partnership that we announced almost two years ago with Amazon and on the stage last year, we announced their first generation of products, no better example of the hybrid cloud. And for that it's my pleasure to bring to stage my friend, my partner, the CEO of aws. Please welcome Andy Jassy. Thank you andy. You know, you honor us with your presence, you know, and it really is a pleasure to be able to come in front of this audience and talk about what our teams have accomplished together over the last, uh, year. Yo, can you give us some perspective on that, Andy and what customers are doing with it? Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with all of you. Uh, you know, the offering that we have together customers because it allows them to use the same software they've been using to again, where cloud and aws is very appealing to manage their infrastructure for years to be able to deploy it an aws and we see a lot of customer momentum and a lot of customers using it. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment in transportation. You see it with stagecoach and media and entertainment. You see it with discovery communications in education, Mit and Caltech and consulting and accenture and cognizant and dxc you see in every imaginable vertical business segment and the number of customers using the offering is doubling every quarter. So people were really excited about it and I think that probably the number one use case we see so far, although there are a lot of them, is customers who are looking to migrate on premises applications to the cloud. And a good example of that is mit. We're there right now in the process of migrating. In fact, they just did migrate 3000 vms from their data centers to Vm ware cloud native us. And this would have taken years before to do in the past, but they did it in just three months. It was really spectacular and they're just a fun company to work with and the team there. But we're also seeing other use cases as well. And you're probably the second most common example is we'll say on demand capabilities for things like disaster recovery. We have great examples of customers you that one in particular, his brakes, right? Urban in those. The brings security trucks and they all armored trucks coming by and they had a critical need to retire a secondary data center that they were using, you know, for Dr. so we quickly built to Dr Protection Environment for $600. Bdms know they migrated their mission critical workloads and Wallah stable and consistent Dr and now they're eliminating that site and looking for other migrations as well. The rate of 10 to 15 percent. It was just a great deal. One of the things I believe Andy, he'll customers should never spend capital, uh, Dr ever again with this kind of capability in place. That is just that game changing, you know, and you know, obviously we've been working on expanding our reach, you know, we promised to make the service available a year ago with the global footprint of Amazon and now we've delivered on that promise and in fact today or yesterday if you're an ozzie right down under, we announced in Sydney, uh, as well. And uh, now we're in US Europe and in APJ. Yeah. It's really, I mean it's very exciting. Of course Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world and, and it's pretty remarkable how fast European customers have started using the offering to and just the quarter that's been out there and probably have the many requests customers has had. And you've had a, probably the number one request has been that we make the offering available in all the regions. The aws has regions and I can tell you by the end of 2019 will largely be there including with golf clubs and golf clap. You guys have been, that's been huge for you guys. Yeah. It's a government only region that we have that a lot of federal government workloads live in and we are pretty close together having the offering a fedramp authority to operate, which is a big deal on a game changer for governments because then there'll be able to use the familiar tools they use and vm ware not just to run their workloads on premises but also in the cloud as well with the data privacy requirements, security requirements they need. So it's a real game changer for government too. Yeah. And this you can see by the picture here basically before the end of next year, everywhere that you are and have an availability zone. We're going to be there running on data. Yup. Yeah. Let's get with it. Okay. We're a team go faster. Okay. You'll and you know, it's not just making it available, but this pace of innovation and you know, you guys have really taught us a few things in this respect and since we went live in the Oregon region, you know, we've been on a quarterly cadence of major releases and two was really about mission critical at scale and we added our second region. We added our hybrid cloud extension with m three. We moved the global rollout and we launched in Europe with m four. We really add a lot of these mission critical governance aspects started to attack all of the industry certifications and today we're announcing and five right. And uh, you know, with that, uh, I think we have this little cool thing you know, two of the most important priorities for that we're doing with ebs and storage. Yeah, we'll take, customers, our cost and performance. And so we have a couple of things to talk about today that we're bringing to you that I think hit both of those on a storage side. We've combined the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Block store or ebs with ware is Va v San and we've provided now a storage option that you'll be able to use that as much. It's very high capacity and much more cost effective and you'll start to see this initially on the Vm ware cloud. Native us are five instances which are compute instances, their memory optimized and so this will change the cost equation. You'll be able to use ebs by default and it'll be much more cost effective for storage or memory intensive workloads. Um, it's something that you guys have asked for. It's been very frequently requested it, it hits preview today. And then the other thing is that we've worked really hard together to integrate vm ware's Nsx along with aws direct neck to have a private even higher performance conductivity between on premises and the cloud. So very, very exciting new capabilities to show deep integration between the companies. Yeah. You know, in that aspect of the deep integration. So it's really been the thing that we committed to, you know, we have large engineering teams that are working literally every day. Right on bringing together and how do we fuse these platforms together at a deep and intimate way so that we can deliver new services just like elastic drs and the c and ebs really powerful, uh, capabilities and that pace of innovation continue. So next maybe. Um, maybe six. I don't know. We'll see. All right. You know, but we're continuing this toward pace of innovation, you know, completing all of the capabilities of Nsx. You'll full integration for all of the direct connect to capabilities. Really expanding that. You're only improving licensed capabilities on the platform. We'll be adding pks on top of for expanded developer a capabilities. So just. Oh, thank you. I, I think that was formerly known as Right, and y'all were continuing this pace of storage Chad. So anyway. innovation going forward, but I think we also have a few other things to talk about today. Andy. Yeah, I think we have some news that hopefully people here will be pretty excited about. We know we have a pretty big database business and aws and it's. It's both on the relational and on the nonrelational side and the business is billions of dollars in revenue for us and on the relational side. We have a service called Amazon relational database service or Amazon rds that we have hundreds of thousands of customers using because it makes it much easier for them to set up, operate and scale their databases and so many companies now are operating in hybrid mode and will be for a while and a lot of those customers have asked us, can you give us the ease of manageability of those databases but on premises. And so we talked about it and we thought about and we work with our partners at Vm ware and I'm excited to announce today, right now Amazon rds on Vm ware and so that will bring all the capabilities of Amazon rds to vm ware's customers for their on premises environments. And so what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to provision databases. You'll be able to scale the compute or the memory or the storage for those database instances. You'll be able to patch the operating system or database engines. You'll be able to create, read replicas to scale your database reads and you can deploy this rep because either on premises or an aws, you'll be able to deploy and high high availability configuration by replicating the data to different vm ware clusters. You'll be able to create online backups that either live on premises or an aws and then you'll be able to take all those databases and if you eventually want to move them to aws, you'll be able to do so rather easily. You have a pretty smooth path. This is going to be available in a few months. It will be available on Oracle sql server, sql postgresql and Maria DB. I think it's very exciting for our customers and I think it's also a good example of where we're continuing to deepen the partnership and listen to what customers want and then innovate on their behalf. Absolutely. Thank you andy. It is thrilling to see this and as we said, when we began the partnership, it was a deep integration of our offerings and our go to market, but also building this bi-directional hybrid highway to give customers the capabilities where they wanted cloud on premise, on premise to the cloud. It really is a unique partnership that we've built, the momentum we're feeling to our customer base and the cool innovations that we're doing. Andy, thank you so much for you Jordan Young, rural 20th. You guys appreciate it. Yeah, we really have just seen incredible momentum and as you might have heard from our earnings call that we just finished this. We finished the last quarter. We just really saw customer momentum here. Accelerating. Really exciting to see how customers are starting to really do the hybrid cloud at scale and with this we're just seeing that this vm ware cloud foundation available on Amazon available on premise. Very powerful, but it's not just the partnership with Amazon. We are thrilled to see the momentum of our Vm ware cloud provider program and this idea of the vm ware cloud providers has continued to gain momentum in the industry and go over five years. Right. This program has now accumulated more than 4,200 cloud partners in over 120 countries around the globe. It gives you choice, your local provider specialty offerings, some of your local trusted partners that you would have in giving you the greatest flexibility to choose from and cloud providers that meet your unique business requirements. And we launched last year a program called Vm ware cloud verified and this was saying you're the most complete embodiment of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation offering by our cloud partners in this program and this logo you know, allows you to that this provider has achieved the highest standard for cloud infrastructure and that you can scale and deliver your hybrid cloud and partnering with them. It know a particular. We've been thrilled to see the momentum that we've had with IBM as a huge partner and our business with them has grown extraordinarily rapidly and triple digits, but not just the customer count, which is now over 1700, but also in the depth of customers moving large portions of the workload. And as you see by the picture, we're very proud of the scope of our partnerships in a global basis. The highest standard of hybrid cloud for you, the Vm ware cloud verified partners. Now when we come back to this picture, you know we, you know, we're, we're growing in our definition of what the hybrid cloud means and through Vm Ware Cloud Foundation, we've been able to unify the private and the public cloud together as never before, but we're also seeing that many of you are interested in how do I extend that infrastructure further and farther and will simply call that the edge right? And how do we move data closer to where? How do we move data center resources and capacity closer to where the data's being generated at the operations need to be performed? Simply the edge and we'll dig into that a little bit more, but as we do that, what are the things that we offer today with what we just talked about with Amazon and our VCP p partners is that they can consume as a service this full vm ware Cloud Foundation, but today we're only offering that in the public cloud until project dimension of project dimension allows us to extend delivered as a service, private, public, and to the edge. Today we're announcing the tech preview, a project dimension Vm ware cloud foundation in a hyperconverged appliance. We're partnered deeply with Dell EMC, Lenovo for the first partners to bring this to the marketplace, built on that same proven infrastructure, a hybrid cloud control plane, so literally just like we're managing the Vm ware cloud today, we're able to do that for your on premise. You're small or remote office or your edge infrastructure through that exact same as a service management and control plane, a complete vm ware operated end to end environment. This is project dimension. Taking the vcf stack, the full vm ware cloud foundation stack, making an available in the cloud to the edge and on premise as well, a powerful solution operated by BM ware. This project dimension and project dimension allows us to have a fundamental building block in our approach to making customers even more agile, flexible, scalable, and a key component of our strategy as well. So let's click into that edge a little bit more and we think about the edge in the following layers, the compute edge, how do we get the data and operations and applications closer to where they need to be. If you remember last year I talked about this pendulum swinging of centralization and decentralization edge is a decentralization force. We're also excited that we're moving the edge of the devices as well and we're doing that in two ways. One with workspace, one for human optimized devices and the second is project pulse or Vm ware pulse. And today we're announcing pulse two point zero where you can consume it now as a service as well as with integrated security. And we've now scaled pulse to support 500 million devices. Isn't that incredible, right? I mean this is getting a scale. Billions and billions and finally networking is a key component. You all that. We're stretching the networking platform, right? And evolving how that edge operates in a more cloud and that's a service white and this is where Nsx St with Velo cloud is such a key component of delivering the edge of network services as well. Taken together the device side, the compute edge and rethinking and evolving the networking layer together is the vm ware edge strategy summary. We see businesses are on this multicloud journey, right? How do we then do that for their private of public coming together, the hybrid cloud, but they're also on a journey for how they work and operate it across the public cloud and the public cloud we have this torrid innovation, you'll want Andy's here, challenges. You know, he's announcing 1500 new services or were extraordinary innovation and you'll same for azure or Google Ibm cloud, but it also creates the same complexity as we said. Businesses are using multiple public clouds and how do I operate them? How do I make them work? You know, how do I keep track of my accounts and users that creates a set of cloud operations problems as well in the complexity of doing that. How do you make it work? Right? And your for that. We'll just see that there's this idea cloud cost compliance, analytics as these common themes that of, you know, keep coming up and we're seeing in our customers that are new role is emerging. The cloud operations role. You're the person who's figuring out how to make these multicloud environments work and keep track of who's using what and which data is landing where today I'm thrilled to tell you that the, um, where is acquiring the leader in this space? Cloudhealth technologies. Thank you. Cloudhealth technologies supports today, Amazon, azure and Google. They have some 3,500 customers, some of the largest and most respected brands in the, as a service industry. And Sasa business today rapidly span expanding feature sets. We will take cloudhealth and we're going to make it a fundamental platform and branded offering from the um, where we will add many of the other vm ware components into this platform, such as our wavefront analytics, our cloud, choreo compliance, and many of the other vm ware products will become part of the cloudhealth suite of services. We will be enabling that through our enterprise channels as well as through our MSP and BCPP partners as well know. Simply put, we will make cloudhealth the cloud operations platform of choice for the industry. I'm thrilled today to have Joe Consella, the CTO and founder. Joe, please stand up. Thank you joe to your team of a couple hundred, you know, mostly in Boston. Welcome to the Vm ware family, the Vm ware community. It is a thrill to have you part of our team. Thank you joe. Thank you. We're also announcing today, and you can think of this, much like we had v realize operations and v realize automation, the compliment to the cloudhealth operations, vm ware, cloud automation, and some of you might've heard of this in the past, this project tango. Well, today we're announcing the initial availability of Vm ware, cloud automation, assemble, manage complex applications, automate their provisioning and cloud services, and manage them through a brokerage the initial availability of cloud automation services, service. Your today, the acquisition of cloudhealth as a platform, the aware of the most complete set of multicloud management tools in the industry, and we're going to do so much more so we've seen this picture of this multicloud journey that our customers are on and you know, we're working hard to say we are going to bridge across these worlds of innovation, the multicloud world. We're doing many other things. You're gonna hear a lot at the show today about this year. We're also giving the tech preview of the Vm ware cloud marketplace for our partners and customers. Also today, Dell technologies is announcing their cloud marketplace to provide a self service, a portfolio of a Dell emc technologies. We're fundamentally in a unique position to accelerate your multicloud journey. So we've built out this any cloud piece, but right in the middle of that any cloud is the network. And when we think about the network, we're just so excited about what we have done and what we're seeing in the industry. So let's click into this a little bit further. We've gotten a lot done over the last five years. Networking. Look at these numbers. 80 million switch ports have been shipped. We are now 10 x larger than number two and software defined networking. We have over 7,500 customers running on Nsx and maybe the stat that I'm most proud of is 82 percent of the fortune 100 has now adopted nsx. You have made nsx these standard and software defined networking. Thank you very much. Thank you. When we think about this journey that we're on, we started. You're saying, Hey, we've got to break the chains inside of the data center as we said. And then Nsx became the software defined networking platform. We started to do it through our cloud provider partners. Ibm made a huge commitment to partner with us and deliver this to their customers. We then said, boy, we're going to make a fundamental to all of our cloud services including aws. We built this bridge called the hybrid cloud extension. We said we're going to build it natively into what we're doing with Telcos, with Azure and Amazon as a service. We acquired the St Wagon, right, and a Velo cloud at the hottest product of Vm ware's portfolio today. The opportunity to fundamentally transform branch and wide area networking and we're extending it to the edge. You're literally, the world has become this complex network. We have seen the world go from the old defined by rigid boundaries, simply put in a distributed world. Hardware cannot possibly work. We're empowering customers to secure their applications and the data regardless of where they sit and when we think of the virtual cloud network, we say it's these three fundamental things, a cloud centric networking fabric with intrinsic security and all of it delivered in software. The world is moving from data centers to centers of data and they need to be connected and Nsx is the way that we will do that. So you'll be aware of is well known for this idea of talking but also showing. So no vm world keynote is okay without great demonstrations of it because you shouldn't believe me only what we can actually show and to do that know I'm going to have our CTL come onstage and CTL y'all. I used to be a cto and the CTO is the certified smart guy. He's also known as the chief talking officer and today he's my demo partner. Please walk, um, Vm ware, cto ray to the stage. Right morning pat. How you doing? Oh, it's great ray, and thanks so much for joining us. Know I promised that we're going to show off some pretty cool stuff here. We've covered a lot already, but are you up to the task? We're going to try and run through a lot of demos. We're going to do it fast and you're going to have to keep me on time to ask an awkward question. Slow me down. Okay. That's my fault if you run along. Okay, I got it. I got it. Let's jump right in here. So I'm a CTO. I get to meet lots of customers that. A few weeks ago I met a cio of a large distribution company and she described her it infrastructure as consisting of a number of data centers troll to us, which he also spoke of a large number of warehouses globally, and each of these had local hyperconverged compute and storage, primarily running surveillance and warehouse management applications, and she pulls me four questions. The first question she asked me, she says, how do I migrate one of these data centers to Vm ware cloud on aws? I want to get out of one of these data centers. Okay. Sounds like something andy and I were just talking exactly, exactly what you just spoke to a few moments ago. She also wanted to simplify the management of the infrastructure in the warehouse as themselves. Okay. He's age and smaller data centers that you've had out there. Her application at the warehouses that needed to run locally, butter developers wanted to develop using cloud infrastructure. Cloud API is a little bit late. The rds we spoken with her in. Her final question was looking to the future, make all this complicated management go away. I want to be able to focus on my application, so that's what my business is about. So give me some new ways of how to automate all of this infrastructure from the edge to the cloud. Sounds pretty clear. Can we do it? Yes we can. So we're going to dive right in right now into one of these demos. And the first demo we're going to look at it is vm ware cloud on aws. This is the best solution for accelerating this public cloud journey. So can we start the demo please? So what you were looking at here is one of those data centers and you should be familiar with this product. It's a familiar vsphere client. You see it's got a bunch of virtual machines running in there. These are the virtual machines that we now want to be able to migrate and move the VMC on aws. So we're going to go through that migration right now. And to do that we use a product that you've seen already atx, however it's the x has been, has got some new cool features since the last time we download it. Probably on this stage here last year, I wanted those in particular is how do we do bulk migration and there's a new cool thing, right? Whole thing we want to move the data center en mass and his concept here is cloud motion with vsphere replication. What this does is it replicates the underlying storage of the virtual machines using vsphere replication. So if and when you want to now do the final migration, it actually becomes a vmotion. So this is what you see going on right here. The replication is in place. Now when you want to touch you move those virtual machines. What you'll do is a vmotion and the key thing to think about here is this is an actual vmotion. Those the ends as room as they're moving a hustler, migrating remained life just as you would in a v motion across one particular infrastructure. Did you feel complete application or data center migration with no dying town? It's a Standard v motion kind of appearance. Wow. That is really impressive. That's correct. Wow. You. So one of the other things we want to talk about here is as we are moving these virtual machines from the on prem infrastructure to the VMC on aws infrastructure, unfortunately when we set up the cloud on VMC and aws, we only set up for hosts, uh, that might not be, that'd be enough because she is going to move the whole infrastructure of that this was something you guys, you and Andy referred to briefly data center. Now, earlier, this concept of elastic drs. what elastic drs does, it allows the VMC on aws to react to the workloads as they're being created and pulled in onto that infrastructure and automatically pull in new hosts into the VMC infrastructure along the way. So what you're seeing here is essentially the MC growing the infrastructure to meet the needs of the workloads themselves. Very cool. So overseeing that elastic drs. we also see the ebs capabilities as well. Again, you guys spoke about this too. This is the ability to be able to take the huge amount of stories that Amazon have, an ebs and then front that by visa you get the same experience of v Sign, but you get this enormous amount of storage capabilities behind it. Wow. That's incredible. That's incredible. I'm excited about this. This is going to enable customers to migrate faster and larger than ever before. Correct. Now she had a series of little questions. Okay. The second question was around what about all those data centers and those age applications that I did not move, and this is where we introduce the project which you've heard of already tonight called project dementia. What this does, it gives you the simplicity of Vm ware cloud, but bringing that out to the age, you know what's basically going on here, vmc on aws is a service which manages your infrastructure in aws. We know stretch that service out into your infrastructure, in your data center and at the age, allowing us to be able to manage that infrastructure in the same way. Once again, let's dive down into a demo and take a look at what this looks like. So what you've got here is a familiar series of services available to you, one of them, which is project dimension. When you enter project dimension, you first get a view of all of the different infrastructure that you have available to you, your data centers, your edge locations. You can then dive deeply into one of these to get a closer look at what's going on here. We're diving into one of these The problem is there's a networking problem going on in this warehouse. warehouses and we see it as a problem here. How do we know? We know because vm ware is running this as a managed service. We are directly managing or sorry, monitoring your infrastructure or we discover there's something going wrong here. We automatically create the ASR, so somebody is dealing with this. You have visibility to what's going on, but the vm ware managed service is already chasing the problem for you. Oh, very good. So now we're seeing this dispersed infrastructure with project dementia, but what's running on it so well before we get with running out, you've got another problem and the problem is of course, if you're managing a lot of infrastructure like this, you need to keep it up to date. And so once again, this is where the vm ware managed service kicks in. We manage that infrastructure in terms of patching it and updating it for you. And as an example, when we released a security patch, here's one for the recent l, one terminal fault, the Vmr managed service is already on that and making sure that your on prem and edge infrastructure is up to date. Very good. Now, what's running? Okay. So what's running, uh, so we mentioned this case of this software running at the edge infrastructure itself, and these are workloads which are running locally in those age, uh, those edge locations. This is a surveillance application. You can see it here at the bottom it says warehouse safety monitor. So this is an application which gathers images and then stores those images He said my sql database on top there, now this is where we leverage the somewhere and it puts them in a database. technology you just learned about when Andy and pat spoke about disability to take rds and run that on your on prem infrastructure. The block of virtual machines in the moment are the rds components from Amazon running in your infrastructure or in your edge location, and this gives you the ability to allow your developers to be able to leverage and operate against those Apis, but now the actual database, the infrastructure is running on prem and you might be doing just for performance reasons because of latency, you might be doing it simply because this data center is not always connected to the cloud. When you take a look into under the hood and see what's going on here, what you actually see this is vsphere, a modified version of vsphere. You see this new concept of my custom availability zone. That is the availability zone running on your infrastructure which supports or ds. What's more interesting is you flip back to the Amazon portal. This is typically what your developers are going to do. Once again, you see an availability zone in your Amazon portal. This is the availability zone running on your equipment in your data center. So we've truly taken that already as infrastructure and moved it to the edge so the developer sees what they're comfortable with and the infrastructure sees what they're comfortable with bridging those two worlds. Fabulous. Right. So the final question of course that we got here was what's next? How do I begin to look to the future and say I am going to, I want to be able to see all of my infrastructure just handled in an automated fashion. And so when you think about that, one of the questions there is how do we leverage new technologies such as ai and ml to do that? So what you've got here is, sorry we've got a little bit later. What you've got here is how do I blend ai in a male and the power of what's in the data center itself. Okay. And we could do that. We're bringing you the AI and ml, right? And fusing them together as never before to truly change how the data center operates. Correct. And it is this introduction is this merging of these things together, which is extremely powerful in my mind. This is a little bit like a self driving vehicle, so thinking about a car driving down the street is self driving vehicle, it is consuming information from all of the environment around it, other vehicles, what's happening, everything from the wetter, but it also has a lot of built in knowledge which is built up to to self learning and training along the way in the kids collecting lots of that data for decades. Exactly. And we've got all that from all the infrastructure that we have. We can now bring that to bear. So what we're focusing on here is a project called project magna and project. Magna leverage is all of this infrastructure. What it does here is it helps connect the dots across huge datasets and again a deep insight across the stack, all the way from the application hardware, the infrastructure to the public cloud, and even the age and what it does, it leverages hundreds of control points to optimize your infrastructure on Kpis of cost performance, even user specified policies. This is the use of machine language in order to fundamentally transform. I'm sorry, machine learning. I'm going back to some. Very early was here, right? This is the use of machine learning and ai, which will automatically transform. How do you actually automate these data centers? The goal is true automation of your infrastructure, so you get to focus on the applications which really served needs of your business. Yeah, and you know, maybe you could think about that as in the past we would have described the software defined data center, but in the future we're calling it the self driving data center. Here we are taking that same acronym and redefining it, right? Because the self driving data center, the steep infusion of ai and machine learning into the management and automation into the storage, into the networking, into vsphere, redefining the self driving data center and with that we believe fundamentally is to be an enormous advance and how they can take advantage of new capabilities from bm ware. Correct. And you're already seeing some of this in pieces of projects such as some of the stuff we do in wavefront and so already this is how do we take this to a new level and that's what project magnet will do. So let's summarize what we've seen in a few demos here as we work in true each of these very quickly going through these demos. First of all, you saw the n word cloud on aws. How do I migrate an entire data center to the cloud with no downtime? Check, we saw project dementia, get the simplicity of Vm ware cloud in the data center and manage it at the age as a managed service check. Amazon rds and Vm ware. Cool Demo, seamlessly deploy a cloud service to an on premises environment. In this case already. Yes, we got that one coming in are in m five. And then finally project magna. What happens when you're looking to the future? How do we leverage ai and ml to self optimize to virtual infrastructure? Well, how did ray do as our demo guy? Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Right. Thank you. So coming back to this picture, our gps for the day, we've covered any cloud, let's click into now any application, and as we think about any application, we really view it as this breadth of the traditional cloud native and Sas Coobernetti is quickly maybe spectacularly becoming seen as the consensus way that containers will be managed and automate as the framework for how modern APP teams are looking at their next generation environment, quickly emerging as a key to how enterprises build and deploy their applications today. And containers are efficient, lightweight, portable. They have lots of values for developers, but they need to also be run and operate and have many infrastructure challenges as well. Managing automation while patch lifecycle updates, efficient move of new application services, know can be accelerated with containers. We also have these infrastructure problems and you know, one thing we want to make clear is that the best way to run a container environment is on a virtual machine. You know, in fact, every leader in public cloud runs their containers and virtual machines. Google the creator and arguably the world leader in containers. They runs them all in containers. Both their internal it and what they run as well as G K, e for external users as well. They just announced gke on premise on vm ware for their container environments. Google and all major clouds run their containers and vms and simply put it's the best way to run containers. And we have solved through what we have done collectively the infrastructure problems and as we saw earlier, cool new container apps are also typically some ugly combination of cool new and legacy and existing environments as well. How do we bridge those two worlds? And today as people are rapidly moving forward with containers and Coobernetti's, we're seeing a certain set of problems emerge. And Dan cone, right, the director of CNCF, the Coobernetti, uh, the cloud native computing foundation, the body for Coobernetti's collaboration and that, the group that sort of stewards the standardization of this capability and he points out these four challenges. How do you secure them? How do you network and you know, how do you monitor and what do you do for the storage underneath them? Simply put, vm ware is out to be, is working to be is on our way to be the dial tone for Coobernetti's. Now, some of you who were in your twenties might not know what that means, so we know over to a gray hair or come and see me afterward. We'll explain what dial tone means to you or maybe stated differently. Enterprise grade standard for Cooper netties and for that we are working together with our partners at Google as well as pivotal to deliver Vm ware, pks, Cooper netties as an enterprise capability. It builds on Bosh. The lifecycle engine that's foundational to the pivotal have offerings today, uh, builds on and is committed to stay current with the latest Coobernetti's releases. It builds on Nsx, the SDN container, networking and additional contributions that were making like harbor the Vm ware open source contribution for the container registry. It packages those together makes them available on a hybrid cloud as well as public cloud environments with pks operators can efficiently deploy, run, upgrade their coopernetties environments on SDDC or on all public clouds. While developers have the freedom to embrace and run their applications rapidly and efficiently, simply put, pks, the standard for Coobernetti's in the enterprise and underneath that Nsx you'll is emerging as the standard for software defined networking. But when we think about and we saw that quote on the challenges of Kubernetes today, we see that networking is one of the huge challenge is underneath that and in a containerized world, things are changing even more rapidly. My network environment is moving more quickly. NSX provides the environment's easily automate networking and security for rapid deployment of containerized environments that fully supports the MRP chaos, fully supports pivotal's application service, and we're also committed to fully support all of the major kubernetes distribution such as red hat, heptio and docker as well Nsx, the only platform on the planet that can address the complexity and scale of container deployments taken together Vm Ware, pks, the production grade computer for the enterprise available on hybrid cloud, available on major public clouds. Now, let's not just talk about it again. Let's see it in action and please walk up to the stage. When di Carter with Ray, the senior director of cloud native marketing for Vm ware. Thank you. Hi everybody. So we're going to talk about pks because more and more new applications are built using kubernetes and using containers with vm ware pts. We get to simplify the deploying and the operation of Kubernetes at scale. When the. You're the experts on all of this, right? So can you take as true the scenario of how pks or vm ware pts can really help a developer operating the Kubernedes environment, developed great applications, but also from an administrator point of view, I can really handle things like networking, security and those configurations. Sounds great. I love to dive into the demo here. Okay. Our Demo is. Yeah, more pks running coubernetties vsphere. Now pks has a lot of cool functions built in, one of which is Nsx. And today what I'm going to show you is how NSX will automatically bring up network objects as quick Coobernetti's name spaces are spun up. So we're going to start with the fees per client, which has been extended to Ron pks, deployed cooper clusters. We're going to go into pks instance one, and we see that there are five clusters running. We're going to select one other clusters, call application production, and we see that it is running nsx. Now a cluster typically has multiple users and users are assigned namespaces, and these namespaces are essentially a way to provide isolation and dedicated resources to the users in that cluster. So we're going to check how many namespaces are running in this cluster and more brought up the Kubernetes Ui. We're going to click on namespace and we see that this cluster currently has four namespaces running wire. We're going to do next is bringing up a new name space and show that Nsx will automatically bring up the network objects required for that name space. So to do that, we're going to upload a Yammel file and your developer may actually use Ku Kata command to do this as well. We're going to check the namespace and there it is. We have a new name space called pks rocks. Yeah. Okay. Now why is that guy now? It's great. We have a new name space and now we want to make sure it has the network elements assigned to us, so we're going to go to the NSX manager and hit refresh and there it is. PKS rocks has a logical robber and a logical switch automatically assigned to it and it's up and running. So I want to interrupt here because you made this look so easy, right? I'm not sure people realize the power of what happened here. The developer, winton using Kubernetes, is api infrastructure to familiar with added a new namespace and behind the scenes pks and tardy took care of the networking. It combination of Nsx, a combination of what we do at pks to truly automate this function. Absolutely. So this means that if you are on the infrastructure operation, you don't need to worry about your developer springing up namespaces because Nsx will take care of bringing the networking up and then bringing them back down when the namespace is not used. So rate, but that's not it. Now, I was in operations before and I know how hard it is for enterprises to roll out a new product without visibility. Right, so pks took care of those dates, you operational needs as well, so while it's running your clusters, it's also exporting Meta data so that your developers and operators can use wavefront to gain deep visibility into the health of the cluster as well as resources consumed by the cluster. So here you see the wavefront Ui and it's showing you the number of nodes running, active parts, inactive pause, et cetera. You can also dive deeper into the analytics and take a look at information site, Georgia namespace, so you see pks rocks there and you see the number of active nodes running as well as the CPU utilization and memory consumption of that nice space. So now pks rocks is ready to run containerized applications and microservices. So you just get us a very highlight of a demo here to see a little bit what pks pks says, where can we learn more? So we'd love to show you more. Please come by the booth and we have more cool functions running on pks and we'd love to have you come by. Excellent. Thank you, Lindy. Thank you. Yeah, so when we look at these types of workloads now running on vsphere containers, Kubernedes, we also see a new type of workload beginning to appear and these are workloads which are basically machine learning and ai and in many cases they leverage a new type of infrastructure, hardware accelerators, typically gps. What we're going to talk about here is how in video and Vm ware have worked together to give you flexibility to run sophisticated Vdi workloads, but also to leverage those same gpu for deep learning inference workloads also on vsphere. So let's dive right into a demo here. Again, what you're seeing here is again, you're looking at here, you're looking at your standard view realized operations product, and you see we've got two sets of applications here, a Vdi desktop workload and machine learning, and the graph is showing what's happening with the Vdi desktops. These are office workers leveraging these desktops everyday, so of course the infrastructure is super busy during the daytime when they're in the office, but the green area shows this is not been used very heavily outside of those times. So let's take a look. What happens to the machine learning application in this case, this organization leverages those available gpu to run the machine learning operations outside the normal working hours. Let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into what the application it is before we see what we can do from an infrastructure and configuration point of view. So this machine learning application processes a vast number of images and it clarify or sorry, it categorizes these images and as it's doing so, it is moving forward and putting each of these in a database and you can see it's operating here relatively fast and it's leveraging some gps to do that. So typical image processing type of machine learning problem. Now let's take a dive in and look at the infrastructure which is making this happen. First of all, we're going to look only at the Vdi employee Dvt, a Vdi infrastructure here. So I've got a bunch of these applications running Vdi applications. What I want to do is I want to move these so that I can make this image processing out a application run a lot faster. Now normally you wouldn't do this, but pot insisted that we do this demo at 10:30 in the morning when the office workers are in there, so we're going to move older Vdi workloads over to the other cluster and that's what you're seeing is going on right now. So as they move over to this other cluster, what we are now doing is freeing up all of the infrastructure. The GPU that Vdi workload was using here. We see them moving across and now you've freed up that infrastructure. So now we want to take a look at this application itself, the machine learning application and see how we can make use of that. Now freed up infrastructure we've got here is the application is running using one gpu in a vsphere cluster, but I've got three more gpu is available now because I've moved the Vdi workloads. We simply modify the application, let it know that these are available and you suddenly see an increase in the processing capabilities because of what we've done here in terms of making the flexibility of accessing those gps. So what you see here is the same gps that youth for Vdi, which you probably have in your infrastructure today, can also be used to run sophisticated machine learning and ai type of applications on your vsphere infrastructure. So let's summarize what we've seen in the various demos here in this section. First of all, we saw how the MRPS simplifies the deployment and operating operation of Kubernetes at scale. What we've also seen is that leveraging the Nvidia Gpu, we can now run the most demanding workloads on vsphere. When we think about all of these applications and these new types of workloads that people are running. I want to take one second to speak to another workload that we're seeing beginning to appear in the data center. And this is of course blockchain. We're seeing an increasing number of organizations evaluating blockchains for smart contract and digital consensus solutions. So this tech, this technology is really becoming or potentially becoming a critical role in how businesses will interact each other, how they will work together. We'd project concord, which is an open source project that we're releasing today. You get the choice, performance and scale of verifiable trust, which you can then bring to bear and run in the enterprise, but this is not just another blockchain implementation. We have focused very squarely on making sure that this is good for enterprises. It focuses on performance, it focuses on scalability. We have seen examples where running consensus algorithms have taken over 80 days on some of the most common and widely used infrastructure in blockchain and we project conquered. You can do that in two and a half hours. So I encourage you to check out this project on get hub today. You'll also see lots of activity around the whole conference. Speaking about this. Now we're going to dive into another section which is the anti device section. And for that I need to welcome pat back up there. Thank you pat. Thanks right. So diving into any device piece of the puzzle, you and as we think about the superpowers that we have, maybe there are no more area that they are more visible than in the any device aspect of our picture. You know, and as we think about this, the superpowers, you know, think about mobility, right? You know, and how it's enabling new things like desktop as a service in the mobile area, these breadth of smartphones and devices, ai and machine learning allow us to manage them, secure them and this expanding envelope of devices in the edge that need to be connected and wearables and three d printers and so on. We've also seen increasing research that says engaged employees are at the center of business success. Engaged employees are the critical ingredient for digital transformation. And frankly this is how I run vm ware, right? You know, I have my device and my work, all my applications, every one of my 23,000 employees is running on our transformed workspace one environment. Research shows that companies that, that give employees ready anytime access are nearly three x more likely to be leaders in digital transformation. That employees spend 20 percent of their time today on manual processes that can be automated. The way team collaboration and speed of division decisions increases by 16 percent with engaged employees with modern devices. Simply put this as a critical aspect to enabling your business, but you remember this picture from the silos that we started with and each of these environments has their own tribal communities of management, security automation associated with them, and the complexity associated with these is mind boggling and we start to think about these. Remember the I'm a pc and I'm a Mac. Well now you have. I'm an Ios. I'm a droid and other bdi and I'm now a connected printer and I'm a connected watch. You remember citrix manager and good is now bad and sccm a failed model and vpns and Xanax. The chaos is now over at the center of that is vm ware, workspace one, get it out of the business of managing devices, automate them from the cloud, but still have the mentor price. Secure cloud based analytics that brings new capabilities to this critical topic. You'll focus your energy on creating employee and customer experiences. You know, new capabilities to allow like our airlift, the new capability to help customers migrate from their sccm environment to a modern management, expanding the use of workspace intelligence. Last year we announced the chromebook and a partnership with HP and today I'm happy to announce the next step in our partnerships with Dell. And uh, today we're announcing that Dell provisioning for Vm ware, workspace one as part of Dell's ready to work solutions Dallas, taking the next leap and bringing workspace one into the core of their client to offerings. And the way you can think about this as Literally a dell drop ship, lap pops showing up to new employee. day one, productivity. You give them their credential and everything else is delivered by workspace one, your image, your software, everything patched and upgraded, transforming your business, right beginning at that device experience that you give to your customer. And again, we don't want to talk about it. We want to show you how this works. Please walk to the stage with re renew the head of our desktop products marketing. Thank you. So we just heard from pat about how workspace one integrated with Dell laptops is really set up to manage windows devices. What we're broadly focused on here is how do we get a truly modern management system for these devices, but one that has an intelligence behind it to make sure that we're kept with a good understanding of how to keep these devices always up to date and secure. Can we start the demo please? So what we're seeing here is to be the the front screen that you see of workspace one and you see you've got multiple devices a little bit like that demo that patch assured. I've got Ios, android, and of course I've got windows renewal. Can you please take us through how workspace one really changes the ability of somebody an it administrator to update and manage windows into our environment? Absolutely. With windows 10, Microsoft has finally joined the modern management body and we are really excited about that. Now. The good news about modern management is the frequency of ostp updates and how quickly they come out because you can address all those security issues that are hitting our radar on a daily basis, but the bad news about modern management is the frequency of those updates because all of us in it admins, we have to test each and every one of our applications would that latest version because we don't want to roll out that update in case of causes any problems with workspace one, we saw that we simply automate and provide you with the APP compatibility information right out of the box so you can now automate that update process. Let's take a quick look. Let's drill down here further into the windows devices. What we'll see is that only a small percentage of those devices are on that latest version of operating system. Now, that's not a good thing because it might have an important security fix. Let's scroll down further and see what the issue is. We find that it's related to app compatibility. In fact, 38 percent of our devices are blocked from being upgraded and the issue is app compatibility. Now we were able to find that not by asking the admins to test each and every one of those, but we combined windows analytics data with APP intelligent out of the box and be provided that information right here inside of the console. Let's dig down further and see what those devices and apps look like. So knew this is the part that I find most interesting. If I am a system administrator at this point I'm looking at workspace one is giving me a key piece of information. It says if you proceed with this update, it's going to fail 84, 85 percent at a time. So that's an important piece of information here, but not alone. Is it telling me that? It is telling me roughly speaking why it thinks it's going to fail. We've got a number of apps which are not ready to work with this new version, particularly the Mondo card sales lead tracker APP. So what we need to do is get engineering to tackle the problems with this app and make sure that it's updated. So let's get fixing it in order to fix it. What we'll do is create an automation and we can do this right out of the box in this automation will open up a Jira ticket right from within the console to inform the engineers about the problem, not just that we can also flag and send a notification to that engineering manager so that it's top of mine and they can get working on this fixed right away. Let's go ahead and save that automation right here, ray UC. There's the automation that we just So what's happening here is essentially this update is now scheduled meeting. saved. We can go and update oldest windows devices, but workspace one is holding the process of proceeding with that update, waiting for the engineers to update the APP, which is going to cause the problem. That's going to take them some time, right? So the engineers have been working on this, they have a fixed and let's go back and see what's happened to our devices. So going back into the ios updates, what we'll find is now we've unblocked those devices from being upgraded. The 38 percent has drastically dropped down. It can rest in peace that all of the devices are compliant and on that latest version of operating system. And again, this is just a snapshot of the power of workspace one to learn more and see more. I invite you all to join our EOC showcase keynote later this evening. Okay. So we've spoken about the presence of these new devices that it needs to be able to manage and operate across everything that they do. But what we're also seeing is the emergence of a whole new class of computing device. And these are devices which are we commonly speak to have been at the age or embedded devices or Iot. And in many cases these will be in factories. They'll be in your automobiles, there'll be in the building, controlling, controlling, uh, the building itself, air conditioning, etc. Are quite often in some form of industrial environment. There's something like this where you've got A wind farm under embedded in each of these turbines. This is a new class of computing which needs to be managed, secured, or we think virtualization can do a pretty good job of that in new virtualization frontier, right at the edge for iot and iot gateways, and that's gonna. That's gonna, open up a whole new realm of innovation in that space. Let's dive down and taking the demo. This spaces. Well, let's do that. What we're seeing here is a wind turbine farm, a very different than a data center than what we're used to and all the compute infrastructure is being managed by v center and we see to edge gateway hose and they're running a very mission critical safety watchdog vm right on there. Now the safety watchdog vm is an fte mode because it's collecting a lot of the important sensor data and running the mission critical operations for the turbine, so fte mode or full tolerance mode, that's a pretty sophisticated virtualization feature allowing to applications to essentially run in lockstep. So if there's a failure, wouldn't that gets to take over immediately? So this no sophisticated virtualization feature can be brought out all the way to the edge. Exactly. So just like in the data center, we want to perform an update, so as we performed that update, the first thing we'll do is we'll suspend ft on that safety watchdog. Next, we'll put two. Oh, five into maintenance mode. Once that's done, we'll see the power of emotion that we're all familiar with. We'll start to see all the virtual machines vmotion over to the second backup host. Again, all the maintenance, all the update without skipping a heartbeat without taking down any daily operations. So what we're seeing here is the basic power of virtualization being brought out to the age v motion maintenance mode, et cetera. Great. What's the big deal? We've been doing that for years. What's the, you know, come on. What's the big deal? So what you're on the edge. So when you get to the age pack, you're dealing with a whole new class of infrastructure. You're dealing with embedded systems and new types of cpu hours and process. This whole demo has been done on an arm 64. Virtualization brought to arm 64 for embedded devices. So we're doing this on arm on the edge, correct. Specifically focused for embedded for age oems. Okay. Now that's good. Okay. Thank you ray. Actually, we've got a summary here. Pat, just a second before you disappear. A lot to rattle off what we've just seen, right? We've seen workspace one cross platform management. What we've also seen, of course esx for arm to bring the power of vfx to edge on 64, but are in platforms will go no. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Now we've seen a look at a customer who is taking advantage of everything that we just saw and again, a story of a customer that is just changing lives in a fundamental way. Let's see. Make a wish. So when a family gets the news that a child is sick and it's a critical illness, it could be a life threatening illness. The whole family has turned upside down. Imagine somebody comes to you and they say, what's the one thing you want that's in your heart? You tell us and then we make that happen. So I was just calling to give you the good news that we're going to be able to grant jackson a wish make, which is the largest wish granting organizations in the United States. English was featured in the cbs 60 minutes episode. Interestingly, it got a lot of hits, but uh, unfortunately for the it team, the whole website crashed make a wish is going through a program right now where we're centralizing technology and putting certain security standards in place at our chapters. So what you're seeing here, we're configuring certain cloud services to make sure that they always are able to deliver on the mission whether they have a local problem or not is we continue to grow the partnership and work with vm ware. It's enabling us to become more efficient in our processes and allows us to grant more wishes. It was a little girl. She had a two year old brother. She just wanted a puppy and she was forthright and I want to name the puppy in my name so my brother would always have me to list them off a five year old. It's something we can't change their medical outcome, but we can change their spiritual outcome and we can transform their lives. Thank you. Working together with you truly making wishes come true. The last topic I want to touch on today, and maybe the most important to me personally is security. You got to fundamentally, when we think about this topic of security, I'll say it's broken today and you know, we would just say that the industry got it wrong that we're trying to bolt on or chasing bad, and when we think about our security spend, we're spending more and we're losing more, right? Every day we're investing more in this aspect of our infrastructure and we're falling more behind. We believe that we have to have much less security products and much more security. You know, fundamentally, you know, if you think about the problem, we build infrastructure, right? Generic infrastructure, we then deploy applications, all kinds of applications, and we're seeing all sorts of threats launched that as daily tens of millions. You're simple virus scanner, right? Is having tens of millions of rules running and changing many times a day. We simply believe the security model needs to change. We need to move from bolted on and chasing bad to an environment that has intrinsic security and is built to ensure good. This idea of built in security. We are taking every one of the core vm ware products and we are building security directly into it. We believe with this, we can eliminate much of the complexity. Many of the sensors and agents and boxes. Instead, they'll directly leverage the mechanisms in the infrastructure and we're using that infrastructure to lock it down to behave as we intended it to ensure good, right on the user side with workspace one on the network side with nsx and microsegmentation and storage with native encryption and on the compute with app defense, we are building in security. We're not chasing threats or adding on, but radically reducing the attack surface. When we look at our applications in the data center, you see this collection of machines running inside of it, right? You know, typically running on vsphere and those machines are increasingly connected. Through nsx and last year we introduced the breakthrough security solution called app defense and app defense. Leverages the unique insight we get into the application so that we can understand the application and map it into the infrastructure and then you can lock down, you could take that understanding, that manifest of its behavior and then lock those vms to that intended behavior and we do that without the operational and performance burden of agents and other rear looking use of attack detection. We're shrinking the attack surface, not chasing the latest attack vector, you know, and this idea of bolt on versus chasing bad. You sort of see it right in the network. Machines have lots of conductivity, lots of applications running and something bad happens. It basically has unfettered access to move horizontally through the data center and most of our security is north, south. MosT of the attacks are eastwest. We introduced this idea of microsegmentation five years ago, and by it we're enabling organizations to secure some networks and separate sensitive applications and services as never before. This idea isn't new, that just was never practical before nsx, but we're not standing still. Our teams are innovating to leap beyond 12. What's next beyond microsegmentation, and we see this in three simple words, learn, imagine a system that can look into the applications and understand their behavior and how they should operate. we're using machine learning and ai instead of chasing were to be able to ensure good where that that system can then locked down its behavior so the system consistently operates that way, but finally we know we have a world of increasing dynamic applications and as we move to more containerize the microservices, we know this world is changing, so we need to adapt. We need to have more automation to adapt to the current behavior. Today I'm very excited to have two major announcements that are delivering on this vision. The first of those vsphere platinum, our flagship vm ware vsphere product now has app defense built right in platinum will enable virtualization teams. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let's use it. Platinum will enable virtualization teams you to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise. You could see whatever vm is for its purpose, its behavior until the system. That's what it's allowed to do. Dramatically reducing the attack surface without impact. On operations or performance, the capability is so powerful, so profound. We want you to be able to leverage it everywhere, and that's why we're building it directly into vsphere, vsphere platinum. I call it the burger and fries. You know, nobody leaves the restaurant without the fries who would possibly run a vm in the future without turning security on. That's how we want this to work going forward. Vsphere platinum and as powerful as microsegmentation has been as an idea. We're taking the next step with what we call adaptive microsegmentation. We are fusing Together app defense and vsphere with nsx to allow us to align the policies of the application through vsphere and the network. We can then lock down the network and the compute and enable this automation of the microsegment formation taken together adaptive microsegmentation. But again, we don't want to just tell you about it. We want to show you. Please welcome to the stage vj dante, who heads our machine learning team for app dispense. Vj a very good vj. Thanks for joining us. So, you know, I talked about this idea right, of being able to learn, lock and adapt. Uh, can you show it to us? Great. Yeah. Thank you. With vc a platinum, what we have done is we have put in everything you need to learn, lock and adapt, right with the infrastructure. The next time you bring up your wifi at line, you'll actually see a difference right in there. Let's go with that demo. There you go. And when you look at our defense there, what you see is that all your guests, virtual machines and all your host, hundreds of them and thousands of virtual machines enabling for that difference. It's in there. And what that does is immediately gets you visibility into the processes running on those virtual machines and the risk for the first time. Think about it for the first time. You're looking at the infrastructure through the lens of an application. Here, for example, the ecommerce application, you can see the components that make up that application, how they interact with each other, the specific process, a specific ip address on a specific board. That's what you get, but so we're learning the behavior. Yes. Yeah, that's very good. But how do you make sure you only learn good behavior? Exactly. How do we make sure that it's not bad? We actually verify me insured. It's all good. We ensured that everybody these reputation is verified. We ensured that the haven is verified. Let's go to svc host, for example. This process can exhibit hundreds of behaviors across numerous. Realize what we do here is we actually verify that failure saw us. It's actually a machine learning models that had been trained on millions of instances of good, bad at you said, and then automatically verify that for okay, so we said, you. We learned simply, learn now, lock. How does that work? Well, once you learned the application, locking it is as simple as clicking on that verify and protect button and then you can lock both the compute and network and it's done. So we've pushed those policies into nsx and microsegmentation has been established actually locked down the compute. What is the operating system is exactly. Let's first look at compute, protected the processes and the behaviors are locked down to exactly what is allowed for that application. And we have bacon policies and program your firewall. This is nsx being configured automatically for you, laurie, with one single click. Very good. So we said learn lock. Now, how does this adapt thing work? Well, a bad change is the only constant, but modern applications applications change on a continuous basis. What we do is actually pretty simple. We look at every change as it comes in determinant is good or bad. If it's good, we say allow it, update the policies. That's bad. We denied. Let's look at an example as asco dxc. It's exhibiting a behavior that they've not seen getting the learning period. Okay? So this machine has never behave this This hasn't been that way. But. way. But again, our machine learning models had seen thousands of instances of this process. They know this is normal. It talks on three 89 all the time. So what it's done to the few things, it's lowered the criticality of the alarm. Okay, so false positive. Exactly. The bane of security operations, false positives, and it has gone and updated. Jane does locks on compute and network to allow for that behavior. Applications continues to work on this project. Okay, so we can learn and adapt and action right through the compute and the network. What about the client? Well, we do with workplace one, intelligence protect and manage end user endpoint, but what's one intelligence? Nsx and actually work together to protect your entire data center infrastructure, but don't believe me. You can watch it for yourself tomorrow tom cornu keynote. You want to be there, at 1:00 PM, be there or be nowhere. I love you. Thank you veejay. Great job. Thank you so much. So the idea of intrinsic security and ensuring good, we believe fundamentally changing how security will be delivered in the enterprise in the future and changing the entire security industry. We've covered a lot today. I'm thrilled as I stand on stage to stand before this community that truly has been at the center of changing the world of technology over the last couple of decades. In it. We've talked about this idea of the super powers of technology and as they accelerate the huge demand for what you do, you know in the same way we together created this idea of the virtual infrastructure admin. You'll think about all the jobs that we are spawning in the discussion that we had today, the new skills, the new opportunities for each one of us in this room today, quantum program, machine learning engineer, iot and edge expert. We're on the cusp of so many new capabilities and we need you and your skills to do that. The skills that you possess, the abilities that you have to work across these silos of technology and enabled tomorrow. I'll tell you, I am now 38 years in the industry and I've never been more excited because together we have the opportunity to build on the things that collective we have done over the last four decades and truly have a positive global impact. These are hard problems, but I believe together we can successfully extend the lifespan of every human being. I believe together we can eradicate chronic diseases that have plagued mankind for centuries. I believe we can lift the remaining 10 percent of humanity out of extreme poverty. I believe that we can reschedule every worker in the age of the superpowers. I believe that we can give modern ever education to every child on the planet, even in the of slums. I believe that together we could reverse the impact of climate change. I believe that together we have the opportunity to make these a reality. I believe this possibility is only possible together with you. I asked you have a please have a wonderful vm world. Thanks for listening. Happy 20th birthday. Have a great topic.

>> Voiceover: Live, from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by, IFS. >> Rebecca: Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It's been a great day here. >> Jeff: Yes. >> We've had a lot of wonderful conversations, great panels. Last one to go, you can tell the atmosphere is getting... >> They're wheeling out all the alcohol I think... >> Exactly. Exactly. >> ...for the reception this evening. >> But we have saved best for last. We have Dan Matthews, who is the CTO of IFS and Bas De Vos who is the Director of IFS Labs. So Bas and Dan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> So, when I talked, we've heard a lot about IFS Apps 10, and this is the big news, but what we haven't talked about too much is Arena. Can you describe to our viewers this new user experience, and what it means? >> Alright, well, IFS Arena, like you said, it's a new user experience via past applications, and that's something that's really important to us because it's important to our customers. Because what they want to do is, they want to put great tools in the hands of the people, right? And we all know when it comes to software, how great a tool is is a large part down to the user experience, so that's why we've done it. And what we've done is create something that we think is more inspired by really well-designed consumer software, but we've adapted that for these big enterprise applications like we are doing. >> It's pretty amazing in your keynote because you showed, I think five different UI's based on different devices in the prior versions, where now you're coming to kind of a standardized single (mumbles) experience across various platforms or across various devices to actually interact with the applications. That's got to be, feel good to get that down to kind of one responsive design. >> And to a degree, that's just rescinding to reality because you used to think about, you had your PC and you had a way of doing that. And then you go to your mobile app, or maybe, I mean, people are using so many different kinds devices today. So if we were to purpose build something just for your iPad, something for your phone, something for this, something for your TV, we'd be stuck forever, right? So what we did instead, is we said, "Let's build one experience that actually adapts "to all these different environments, "and get that really, really well." It's not that easy, but in the end, it's a much better way of approaching it. >> Right, and I thought the part that I liked was as when you're new to something, you don't necessarily want a high density of information in a screen or whatever, 'cause you're just not sure, you're learning, whatever, it's new. But then as you become more experienced, obviously your comfort zone goes up, you want a lot more dense information, and really, in your work platform you demoed earlier today, you have a lot of options whether you want kind of the more consumery, more picturey, less efficient way, or do you want the "I know this well, "and I want the thick content." >> And what we basically does, we flipped it upside down, 'cause if you look at Enterprise Software, and ERP, and has to management this kind of stuff, it always used to be designed for the professional, right? And then you would try to simplify it for the newbies that're coming into the business. Can we remove some things, hide some things away, configure some things? Now we've done it the other way around. So the default is it's designed for the novice person that's just coming in seeing this for the first time. And then as you learn, as you say, you can expand and grow, and they get sort of more rich in the data you're seeing. And this is really, really important right? Because people aren't staying that long in the jobs anymore. So if you think about people moving around, they know the business, but they might not know the business applications, so they basically come in, I'm a purchasing guy, come in, pick up the purchasing system directly, that's really really important. >> Needs to be intuitive? >> Yeah, make it intuitive first, and then progressively let people discover more, rather than give all the options and all the complexity and then expect them to simplify it. That's harder. >> So, Bas, I want to talk to you a little bit about the development process and how you come up with these kind of things. Can you describe how it works at IFS Labs, what approach you take? >> Yeah of course, and then perhaps Dan can add to this a little bit later as well. But because IFS Labs is just a part of the process, right? But if you look in our general development process, for us, it's very important to stay close to our customers, right? What do our customers need today? What do they need tomorrow? And we have to basically be able to deliver functionality they need for their problems right on time. And IFS Labs plays a part in that. We are basically (mumbles) for sending before that. So we approach it a little bit the other way around. So instead of looking at a customer problem and trying to find a solution for that, we basically look ahead. We look a couple of years in the future. What kind of technologies are coming up? What kind of possibilities are there, and can we find a problem for it? And that sounds strange, right? Because we're known in the business of finding problems. But it does allow us to experiment and come up with innovative solutions that might work for tomorrow. But before we actually move that into production, or hand it over to regular R&D development, well we do step back and go to our customers and say, "Hey wait a minute, this is what we are thinking Labs, "what do you think about that? "Does it work for you, does it help you?" and validate it with them. >> So it's an interesting challenge for Labs, for looking down the road, because, and Steve Jobs' famous quote, that we don't necessarily deliver just what our customers ask for. They're not asking for things that are down the road, so you got that responsibility to look down the road. On the other hand, nobody likes technology that doesn't have a problem to solve. So you got to be delicate. Because if you just build something for the sake of building something, maybe there's some ancillary value. But at the end of the day, someone's got to use it and they got to drive direct values. So how do you kind of play that balance beyond, "Yes we listen to customers, "but there's this other stuff coming "that maybe they're not too aware of"? >> Yeah that's true, totally true, I completely agree with you. And I think that is the role of IFS Labs, right? So if we look in the overall process, the fact that we have a Labs, we don't... A license to experiment with trying out stuff, validating it with our customers, we can basically... Try it out before we actually take a decision to build something that our customers are not waiting for. So exactly the problem you just sketched, I think that our interest, IFS Labs, to resolve that. >> We have seen this happening throughout history, right? So if you look at how IET started, for us, it started with a product in IFS labs, when together we want a customer learning and understanding how they should be applied to the kind of businesses and industries that we serve. And then it went into mainstream R&D development and then we have real solutions, and now we have customers, who've been live for years, using this kind of stuff. So that is exactly the process you want to have. Try it out, and when we have a grasp on how this relates to our customers, then we up the next level of investment and take it further. >> And then, similarly, we had a project in IFS Labs that, well we tried out, and after a couple of months or even longer we said, "This is not going to work "for our customers, it's actually not helping them today. "Might be a couple years from now, but today let's stop it." >> So was this how your kind of integration of AI and machine learning into the applications took place? You looked forward, this is a cool new thing we need to play, but at the same time, we're not going to name it after a smart dead guy. (group laughing) But really bake it into the applications where it makes the most sense. And that sounds like it's kind of your execution strategy. >> Yeah definitely and AIs are a very, very, very big topic, right? It's an umbrella for so many different types of applications. Dan was talking this morning about three main areas where we think AI makes most sense for our products. It's basically human-machine interaction, predictive maintenance and service, an automation. But each of those areas, they basically have their own... Own life cycle, right? So if you look at human-machine interaction, at the morning. This morning we were talking about the IFS Arena bot. We're actually in a proper development phase. So that's much further ahead in that cycle, while other AI related topics like doing mass-automation, only your (mumbles), that's earlier in the cycle and that's still in Labs. So although AI is a big umbrella topic, the different topics in there follow that same approach. >> Can you be a little more specific about the projects you're working on, or is it top secret? >> At the World Conference everybody wants to know our secrets, but luckily, at World Conference we share them. >> Jeff: This is between us four. >> Yeah nobody's listening, right? Or watching? (laughs) So yeah at this World Conference we're hosting an innovation area. And in the innovation area, we're showcasing a wide range of basically possible technologies and how you could apply them to future business. We basically took the approach of depicting an end-to-end automatous business. So basically go all the way from mining stuff, in a mine in the ground, to using that in a factory, to producing products for the customer. And we basically build all kinds of technologies in there to make that completely automatous. Might not all be possible today, but it's really there to inspire our customers to look ahead. Some examples of the things we're using, a block chain inside enterprisesque management, mixed reality with Microsoft HoloLens to do service repairs, digital twins in virtual reality, automatous vehicles. So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. >> That's great, those are the great buzzwords but you put them all within application, and they're just standalone. >> Dan: What it does really well, is it kind of illustrates how these technologies are used in context... >> Right. >> Dan: With all of these things. >> That's super. >> You are an IFS veteran, >> Yes. >> You came as a developer and now here you are, CTO. Tell our viewers a little bit about how the company has changed in your opinion, and also now as you are sort of making a bigger push into North America, what we can expect. >> Well, what else changed, if I go back and I've not been with this company for more than 20 years. But what I've seen is we've got a lot more professional. Of course, we're a big organization now, and the way we run things and the way the business is run is a lot more professional. If you go back to the late '90s, this was before the dot-com boom, everybody was pouring money into the IT industry, so that was not an objective. So we were doing R&D but we were also burning money. And I think after that bubble burst, we all learned to become proper business people as well. I'll tell you one that hasn't changed, though, and that really is the kind of atmosphere that is within the company, right? How close we are to our customers, and how the customers reality always comes first and how we all help each other support. That really hasn't changed despite the fact we're so much bigger and we're 20 years old and all that kind of stuff. >> So why do you think is it 'cause maintaining culture is really, really difficult and we go to a lot of shows and we often talk about if it's a founder-led, and if they're a good CEO to double benefit, to keep that culture, but when you got turned over at the top, how do you maintain the culture that you guys have built? >> I think in the beginning, I think it was a lot of that founder-led, right? It was really led by the founders and one of the founders was our CEO for many, many years. But then it kind of got ingrained a little bit, between the Scandinavia culture. That it's quite open, quite sort of friendly, helpful, lots of hierarchical. And that then sort of spread out as the business expanded into nationally. And we kept it also on the R&D side. We do a lot of R&D in Chalinka for example. Which has a surprisingly similar feeling in the culture, actually. So I think it just got so big and so strong in the company, that it just naturally, new people come in and naturally sort of carry on with that same way of being that we've had it before. >> Rebecca: They adopted and embraced it. >> Because that was the end, Dan said when he was doing his due diligence, right? The culture was a huge piece of why he came to the company. >> I think if they were the other way around, we have seen that when we brought businesses in as well, that is, right, these guys have a similar culture to us, great, fantastic business to bring into to the IFS family. >> Jeff: Sir, you were going to say? >> I was going to say, in the end also, you're attracting people to your company and the people that are staying are also the people that feel at at home, and that feel comfortable, and that feel, I'm a little bit shorter than Dan inside the company for two years now. But basically, I feel the same with the culture, right? And it fits me as a person, and therefore I think I'm inclined to stay longer at IFS than if the culture would not fit me. And as you attract people with the same mindset together. It only gets stronger. >> Right, well Dan and Bas, thank you so much. This has been really fun last panel of the day, so we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Good luck on your keynote on Thursday. >> Bas: Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. This has been IFS World Conference 2018. We will have more after this. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference here in Atalanta, Georgia. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It is late in the day here, the reception is about to start, the drinks are flowing, but we are still interviewing guests, and we've got a great panel right now. Joining us is Scott Helmer. He is the Senior Vice President at the Aviation and Business Defense Unit at IFS, and Henry Canaday, who is a contributing editor at Aviation Week. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I wonder if you could walk our viewers a little bit through the idea, where does aviation and defense sit within the IFS business strategy? >> I'm happy to answer that. I think our new CEO of IFS, Darren Roos, has been very clear that there are three things that IFS will be best at. Number one, we will be best at mid-market ERP in those vertical markets that we care about. We will be number one in field service management. And we will be number one in maintenance management solutions in aviation and defense. So aviation and defense is one of the pillars on which IFS's strategy is currently based, and we have formed a global business unit inside of IFS that is specifically responsible, it's a 300 person strong team that is responsible for distributing a comprehensive portfolio of A and D solutions to the A and D market globally. >> What are the some of the biggest challenges that you're setting out to solve for your customers? >> Also a good question. We address the full range of management solution capability across A and D. So whether you're an operator in commercial or defense sector, or whether you're an inservice support provider, we provide solutions and support, all of your MRO capabilities, some of your performance-based logistics requirements, some of your supply chain requirements. Basically leveraging the core processes that IFS is differentiated around. Those being manufacturing, asset and service management, supply chain and project management. >> What's special about aviation and defense that's not been marketed or service delivery, which captures a lot of industry verticals, but the fact that you guys got carved out as a separate vertical, what are some of those unique challenges? >> What is chiefly unique about aviation and defense is the overall complexity in the marketplace. You're talking about very very complex capital intense of mobile assets, where managing the maintenance obligations in order to maintain the availability of the aircraft is under the scrutiny of compliance and is required to be done efficiently, without compromising safety. >> Not to mention the fact, your assets are flying all over the world, so they might not necessarily be able just to roll into the maintenance yard at the end of a bad day. >> And they're large and expensive, that's for sure. >> (laughs) Large and expensive. >> Henry, you've been covering the aviation industry for more than 20 years now. What do you see as the biggest trends, biggest concerns that a company like IFS is trying to grapple with right now, in terms of servicing its clients? >> Well the interesting thing about the airline industry is that it technically in many areas it's extremely advanced and very fast moving industry. In selling tickets, the industry has been going through a continual IT revolution for the last 20 years. Things like giving you notices about when your planes arrive and stuff like that. Very fast moving, changing all the time. But this is stuff, it's just money. There's no safety involved, so they can take chances, if they get it 99% right, they make enough money, they can solve the one percent errors. The problem with maintenance is it's messy, it's complex as Scott says. It's also safety critical. They can't screw it up one tenth of one percent of the time. They've been very, very cautious and very, very slow, and they look sluggish and stagnant on the maintenance side. But fortunately, now, especially the U.S. airlines are making some good money, so there's actually an opportunity for companies like IFS to come in here and really reform the maintenance program. >> We cover a lot of autonomous vehicle shows. Autonomous vehicles are coming. Obviously, a big element of autonomous vehicles will ultimately be safety. One of the things that comes up over and over again, if you look at the number of accidents, the fatalities that happen on our streets, compared to what happens in aviation, if a week on the streets happened at a week in the aviation industry, the planes would be shut down. >> Scott: There'd be no aviation. >> The threshold that you guys have to achieve in terms of safety is second to none. I don't know if there's anything even close, especially in terms of volume of people, and then, oh by the way, everyone globally is getting richer, so the amount of passenger flow. I don't know if you can speak to that in terms of the growth of passenger miles, I imagine is the metric, continues to explode. >> You've had basically 18 straight years without a fatal crash by a major American airline. That's unheard of, that's unheard of. We used to have one crash a year up till around 2000. Every time somebody annoys me with customer service in an airline, I think of this, they're doing the important stuff right, so I don't care. (laughs) >> Very well. >> Right. >> And, then do you think the efficiency, right? At least here domestically, I always think of Southwest, 'cause they were the first ones that really had fast turns, and they raced to the gate, they raced back out of the gate, in terms of really trying to get the maximum efficiency out of those assets. The pressure there, in translating to the other airlines is pretty significant to make sure you're really getting a high ROI. >> That's absolutely right. Again one of the levels of complexity that we were discussing. Certainly airlines are being forced to finally introduce some change into their maintenance operations, as the increasingly complex assets are part of the re-fleeting, as that faster traffic continues to grow. It's about both achieving greater efficiency in maintenance operations, not only without compromising safety, but ensuring the availability of that asset. Because revenue dollars still matter greatly, and those assets are your revenue producing assets that an airline has. >> Can you describe your approach in terms of of how you work together with your clients, the airlines, in terms of developing new products and new features. >> One of the unique characteristics about aviation and defense is not only the size of the client, but the length and duration of the relationships. So, we have a long and rich history, both at IFS and through the acquired MXI technologies, of working with our partners in their programs over the very long term. As much as we have domain expertise and a sizable team of domain experts inside of our business, we're able to recognize our partners that are visionaries in the industry, and we have established multiple levels of collaboration to involve them in the shaping of solution capability to support their businesses going forward. We are just launching today two new planning applications that were not only being launched with American Airlines and LATAM Airlines respectively, but were co-developed with subject matter experts at each. So they're tremendously valuable inputs into shaping our vision of what solutions are going to best drive business value for our customers over a very long relationship horizon. >> So, what have you unpack at MXI acquisition, what did that give you that you didn't have before and what's the total solution now? >> Certainly, I joined IFS through the MXI acquisition. I was previously it's Chief Operating Officer. MXI was focused on best of breed MRO capability for both defense and service port providers, as well as commercial airlines. In combining with IFS, that had a rich history in A and D, we now have the most comprehensive solution portfolio available on the market today. We are the only vendor that can provide best of breed capability, integrated into an end to end enterprise landscape, and we've got the team of subject matter experts or domain experts that are capable of delivering that value, not just the product, but the solution to the customers across all the segments of A and D. >> Just to be clear, your defense is more than aviation. I saw a military truck over on the expo hall, so it's assets beyond just airplanes when it comes to defense. >> Correct, we support on the defense side of things. We support multiple platforms, whether they're fighter jets, whether they're cargo carriers, whether they tanks, whether they're ships, we support for the operators, the offset optimization, performance based logistics, security, et cetera. For the in-service port providers, we similarly support supply chain requirements, MRO requirements, et cetera. >> Henry, as you look forward, you've been covering this space for a while, what are some big, new things coming down the road in the aviation industry that we should be looking for, 'cause we haven't seen a lot of big things from the outside looking in. I guess we had the next generation fighter planes, and then we had obviously the A380 and the 787 on the commercial side. What's new and coming that you're excited about? >> Well, technology changes slowly in commercial aviation, because of the safety aspect. The big, new things are the new aircraft, the 787 and the A350. They are really new generation aircraft, lot more composites, plastics if you will. They're using that instead of aluminum. The other things that's happening is additive manufacturing, this whole printing parts. That's real big, and I've been telling everybody the new Boeing 787 has two printed parts, one made by GE, $120 billion a year. The other made by a company called Norsk Titanium, with 140 people coming out of Norway, which is not exactly the center of innovation in aerospace programs. >> Jeff: With a printed part, like a 3D printed part? >> Yeah a printed part. Those are the two big changes in the aircraft. I mean, customers aren't going to see it, but these planes are now made largely of plastics and the metal parts are going to be more and more printed. Much more efficient way, lighter aircraft, less fuel use, more efficient, less environmental effects, etc. That's a big deal. More important than a huge airplane. >> Right, well I can imagine, we hear about the impacts of 3D printing. I haven't really seen it yet, but this vision where your ability to print parts on demand will have significant impacts on supply chains and inventory and huge, huge impacts down the road. >> And the airline industry is the most demanding. They've go to go through really massive proofs of concept and proof of materials, and it's starting to happen. >> Henry, what would you say is the most important area that IFS should focus on. If they can solve one problem in the airline industry, what do you think it should be? >> Availability would be one. Just aircraft availability, that's what. The airlines are concerned about two things. Dollar cost per flight hour to maintain and what they call a technical dispatch reliability. They want to get that plane launched 99.99% of the time. Get rid of the unpredictive maintenance problems. Schedule everything, make it quick, I want to get the planes off on time. >> It's amazing that unscheduled maintenance, regardless of industry, still continues to be such a bug-a-boo to productivity and profitability. It's one of these things that just has huge impact. >> I would completely agree with Henry. I think asset availability is the number one focus for commercial operators. Our focus has certainly been around trying to remove the impacts of unscheduled maintenance. One of the applications that we launched today allows you to react very, very quickly to unplanned or unscheduled maintenance events, and to do some what-if modeling, so that you can implement the best plan for your fleet, in order to maximize the availability of that asset. Not just in terms of bolstering or producing a better plan. We're attempting to do that even with line planning, where we're adjusting the traditional planning perimeters away from what must be done to what should be done in order to maximize the availability of that aircraft. Of course, as Henry said, everybody's focused on faster, tighter turnaround times. All of our software is designed to try and drive tighter turnaround times and greater efficiency. >> What percentage is scheduled versus predictive versus prescriptive? Maintenance. >> I think it varies by airline. The great majority of maintenance is scheduled, I mean, there's no doubt about that. They put these aircraft down for a week or a month. It's a massive amount of money. It's not the amount of maintenance, it's when unscheduled maintenance happens, it really throws things off. It may only be one or two percent of the maintenance tasks are unscheduled, but that's what throws the aircraft off the schedule. That's what leaves passengers sitting in the departure lounges, ticked off. Not getting there till the next day or the next week, whenever, so it's a very, very small percentage, these unscheduled maintenance events, but it's crucial to the airlines' economics. >> Exactly. Crucial to our itineraries, as well, as the economics. Exactly. >> Making sure that the airlines continue to do what they do best, which is get us from place A to place B. >> Precisely. Well, Scott Henry, thank you so much, it's been a really fun conversation. >> I enjoyed being here, thank you. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> Thanks, Henry. >> Thanks. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference just after this. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2018 brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018, here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a three panel guest with us today. We have Eric Schaeffer, the Senior Managing Director of Accenture, Paul Maher, GM Industry Experiences at Microsoft, and Yasushi Yagyu, Assistant Manager at NEC Corporation. Thank you so much for joining me. >> Guests: Thank you. >> So you're on this panel because you are all platinum sponsors and close partners of IFS. We've heard a lot today about IFS's passion for customers. It's a customer-centric, customer-focused company. I'd love to hear from you, your experiences as being partners with IFS. If you could describe a little bit about what you've experienced. I'm going to start with you. >> Thanks, Rebecca. I think, we've been, Accenture and IFS have been partners for many many years, and what I've appreciated in the relationship is the customer focus, but really the focus on delivering value to both IFS and Accenture customers. It's a value-driven approach, very industry specific. So understanding the industry issues, leveraging IFS products and solution to best meet these, having Accenture come in and help tailor the solution to the industry imperatives, and also leveraging digital technologies and combining these with the IFS foundation, which I think was a key term used this morning. >> Yeah, I mean so... Microsoft and IFS have had a very long and prosperous partnership over the last 20 years or so. What's great here, from the keynote this morning is obviously the announcement of IFS Applications 10. And so Microsoft obviously, being a Cloud provider, we've most recently been working very closely with IFS on their move to the Cloud and moving their solutions to the Cloud. So you know, this thing called digital transformation is really, sort of the boss and it's great to see, you know, as you had probably this morning in the keynote, you know, really disruption is really driving new innovation and so we're really glad to partner with IFS in response to that disruption, thinking about Cloud and bringing the IFS Solutions to the Cloud, and really delivering innovation to really address the digital transformation needs of industry. >> And I'd love to talk about you, Yasushi, about innovation. I mean, I ask all of you, but this is a company that really is known for having a history of innovation. How do you come together and collaborate and come up with new creative solutions? >> Uh huh. For example, we have independently, we have AI engine. Namely HML is our engine. And our customer has already implemented that kind of AI solution to predict the demand forecast. And then... Our solution is connect to the IFS Production Control Module, or master schedule module. And then, now our AI can generate forecast data and send it to the master schedule module. >> I know that Accenture has innovation centers around the world. Can you talk a little bit about how you innovate with IFS? >> Well, so we have four innovation centers across the world. We have one in Detroit, one in Munich, Shanghai, and Tokyo. And what we do with IFS is look at industry use cases. And then by combining IFS solutions, plus some of the digital assets, which are proprietary to Accenture, combining the two to deliver new levels of efficiency. And so helping out clients, walking through these innovation centers, they get the "Wow" moment where they see how IFS plus Accenture combined can deliver more value and unlock the value which is trapped in their enterprise. >> Can you talk a little bit about that "Wow" factor? I mean, what are sort of... What are a lot of the challenges that your clients are facing, that you're partnership with IFS has helped them solve? >> Well, many of our clients and I think the term digital transformation of industry was mentioned, it is how is digital transforming the industry. I think the question is not the why. Everybody's convinced and has understood that it is happening. The question is more of the how to. And this is where the combination of IFS plus Accenture really focusing on the how to, how to leverage these technologies on very pragmatic use cases, demand forecasting we heard. It's all about artificial intelligence and visual and computer vision for visual quality inspections, analytics on the shop floor. So it's working with IFS and our clients, the team of three, to identify these use cases and see how to leverage digital to respond and provide a solution. >> At Microsoft, what kind of benefits have you seen with some of the IFS products? >> Yeah, I mean so, from a Microsoft perspective, of course, you know, we are the vendor, the technology vendor. Most recently we've been working very closely with IFS around the move to the Cloud. So I mean, certainly as I think about the partnership that we've had, it really is multi-faceted in terms of, of course we work very closely around how do we think about driving new opportunities and sales motions. And IFS is one of our highest ranked managed partners so we partner very closely there. But suddenly if I was to focus on the technology innovation perspective, what we're really excited about is really that digital disruption and using the new IFS applications, in particular, IFS Applications 10 that's been announced at the conference, working in partnership there to really look to see how do we start to move the needle and move new customers to really achieve to their digital transformation needs and demands, in partnership with the IFS solution running on the Microsoft digital Cloud. >> What are some of the most exciting new features in IFS 10 that you're most excited about? >> Yeah, I mean you mentioned before about the buzz words and the on-trend technologies and I'll kind of quote the keynote this morning, but what really excites me and excites our joint customers, IFS and Microsoft, is things like artificial intelligence, so what that can do around things like machine learning, cognitive services, things like IoT and making that a reality, so thinking about things like predictive maintenance and really being able to integrate the IFS solutions on the Microsoft digital platform, leveraging IoT to really help in those sort of scenarios is great. And then, really super excited about some of the new innovation opportunities. So thinking about things like block chain and what that can do, as you think about the broader opportunity around supply chain and payments and so on. So I think that closer together of the platform but also we've had such a close partnership with IFS, so thinking about really sort of a business problem-led approach, followed by how can the technology and innovation help our joint customers, I think is really helping us as we're looking to innovate in the world of digital transformation. >> And I know that NEC has recently come out with an announcement about AI and heterogeneous, mixed learning technology. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that, Yasushi? >> Yes, we have an engine, engine model. And our customer has implemented that kind of AI solution to demand forecast or machine failure prediction operations. And some of our AI solutions do collaborate with IFS predictions. For example, at NEC booth we can demonstrate our demand forecast solution. And information from each product comes from IFS master schedule or inventory transaction as input data into AI engine. And then AI generates forecast data automatically and sends it back to that module, yeah. >> So here, IFS, we've heard a lot today too, about the metrics, how it measures its success, and we've heard that it has very high NPS score, its Gartner Insights score is far above competitors, and yet it is kind of this best kept secret in the industry. What would your advice be to IFS in terms of getting the word out about its products? >> Yeah, I mean I think everyone's looking for opportunities to further their market share and drive that new innovation and sales pipeline. I think the best guidance I would give is that IFS really is a first-class company and has first-class products. I think it's continued to innovate and be true to the core and you know, just work with partners like good friends here to really get the word out. But it's really not about doing unnatural acts. I think it's really about building an empathy and understanding of what's needed in the industry and I think the story telling and brand awareness will grow. And I think, from what I was hearing this morning, I mean the conference even this year has already grown by 20 percent, so I think you'll see those sort of leading integrators of the word getting out and the brand profile out there. So I think it's a cautious approach, a strategic approach by using partners and not doing unnatural things. Let the innovation that's happening at IFS and with those partnerships, almost do the story telling and the brand awareness, and just be true to the competency and listen to the customers. >> Well when you think ahead at what we're going to be thinking about and talking about at WoCo 2019, 2020, what are sort of the big trends that you see? I mean we've hit a lot of the buzz words with AI and machine learning. What else do you see on the horizon? What's keeping you up at night or are you thinking about? >> Well what I do see is that, so we mentioned all these digital technologies, they will force manufacturers, I believe, to completely reinvent their products and services. And so the products of tomorrow will be with a lot of AI, a lot of digital technologies inside of products, also outside of the products. So products will be very different from today. And so you can easily imagine that the way you engineer, the way you manufacture, the way you support these products, will also be completely different. So I think next year, 2019, will be a lot about how digital is reinventing the products and services of the manufacturers. >> Right, we keep thinking about how it's reinventing our workforce and changing the way we're doing things, but it's actually going to be reinventing what's coming out, too, of these processes. >> Yeah I mean, you've touched upon some of the buzz words. I think it's also the maturity of the technologies. So I mean, I think that's certainly what excites me, is that the maturity and the capabilities has grown. So things like machine learning isn't necessarily new but with breakthroughs around the algorithms, that's kind of bringing the pragmatic reality of it being able to drive the innovation needed, you know? Capabilities such as the Cloud is providing that ability to scale up, scale down, the ability to provide processing power that wasn't there, previously possible in their price-performance way. So I think it's great to focus on some of the shiny things that are coming up, but I think it's also important to look at saying the things that are of yesterday isn't that far off, it's the maturity that they're reaching and so it's really making sure that they are taken advantage of and really taking that pragmatic approach of, it's got to be business-led versus technology-led, bringing that innovation into industry. >> Yasushi, do you see any big trends on the horizon that you're thinking about at NEC? >> I'm sorry? >> Big technology trends? Things that you're thinking about, maybe you're worried about, concerned about? >> Ah yes, I think IoT technology is helping reach to early maturity stage already. And at this rate, many users successfully gather, collect biased kind of data and revitalize the data to improve actual business operations. As a next step, I believe AI technologies will be widely applied for demand forecasting or that kind of failure prediction and that case of success in each industry will become solution models or templates, which will accelerate the progress of AI introduction. >> Great, well thank you so much. I really appreciate Yasushi, Eric, Paul, I really appreciate your time. It's been a great conversation. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from IFS WoCo 2018 just after this. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Host: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018, brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a three-guest panel with us today. We have Amy Eager. She is the technical solution architect APS10 evangelist. Mark Large, the head of business systems at Volac, and Jay Gnuse, who is the information technology director at Chief industries. Jay, Mark, Amy, thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks. >> So, tell me Amy, you are an evangelist. I love that you have that in your title, very cool. Tell me a little bit about what you do as a technical solution architect. >> So, I really have sort of a dual role. And technical solution architect is something very important to me, because I have the luxury of working with our prospective customers. So folks that haven't joined the IFS family yet, as well as our existing customers. So, for example I've known Jay for over 10 plus years, and we've worked on various technology aspects together. When customers upgrade and they need new hardware, and all those types of things I provide advice on that. But being a product evangelist, which is my second time. I'm very honored I was the APS9 evangelist, and the applications 10 evangelist, and that means that I get to go out and spread the word about all the benefits that IFS Applications 10 is going to bring to our customer base. So it's very exciting. >> So, you were on the main stage this morning, you're going to be back this afternoon. What are some of your favorite features that you sing from the rooftops? >> Well, I think really we got to see a great look at some of that this morning. The fact that you can interact with a business application simply by typing a few words in, and talking to the arena bot. I think that is really next generation, and going to take us to the next level. Obviously we see more and more of our users wanting to interact with their business applications the way they do with their phones and their consumer apps. So I think that's really very exciting, that certainly would be one feature, and just continuing to extend our user experience through what you saw this morning and the IFS arena client. Really putting the information right in the hands of the users. >> And then in an intuitive way, an easy way. >> Yes, absolutely, if it's not easy they're not using it so. >> That's a very good point, good point. So you both have these buttons on that says, "I'm an early adopter of IFS Applications 10". >> Yes. >> I want to hear from both of you, why were you an early adopter? We'll start with you Mark. >> Well, we were on Apps8 before we joined Apps10, and we did a lot of development work with IFS on Apps8, and it sort of came to fruition within nine, so within nine, a lot of the work we did was available. We didn't upgrade to nine, so when the opportunity with ten came along, we said let's go for it. We have a very good relationship with IFS, so we trust each other, which is key to any upgrade program. And there's so many new features that we can really benefit from as a business. >> And do you feel almost a little bit of an ownership in the sense that you, because you were with Apps9, and you may have even helped IFS sort of think about what could be next. >> Yes, yeah, so we definitely own the system. And in working with R&D they listened to what we're saying, so that, you know, for a software provider, that's a real key thing that they listen to their customers. IFS has definitely done that on Apps10, especially with the arena client, which launched today, and the arena bot, which I was one of the first people to use, so it's a very good tool. >> Very cool. Jay, how about you, why did your company choose to be an early adopter? >> Yeah, we've really got a great team at Chief, so we knew that we could find the problems and create the cases accordingly that are needed, so that IFS could fix them. And then we also have some very creative people on our team that can come up with enhancements, or small tweaks to the program to help and shape it for the future. So that was one of the reasons. We also are really excited about the training that we received, and that was something we were looking forward to, and sure enough we did get a lot of training, lot of questions asked, so we feel like we know IFS better now than we did before thanks to all the training with it, especially with R&D. >> So what are some of the benefits that you're already seeing? So, IFS Apps10 is going to be out to the general market later this year, or early next? >> Amy: Just shortly following the conference. >> Oh, excellent, okay. But you've been playing around with it for a while now, what are some of the benefits that you're seeing? >> One of the features that we like is the ability to edit customer order lines. Multiple lines at the same time, that's a nice new features that makes it a little quicker for our end users. Another one is the part cost history details. We should be able to save some data space by using that one. We also like the ability to move functional objects in the equipment object navigator. That's easier now, before we had left over objects sitting out there, and now we can move them. So that's nice. I really like the ability to pin records on the detail screen. It's kind of hard to describe how it works, but once you see it, it's easy and it's a very nice feature. And then, of course, the manufacturing visualizer is huge for us. With it, our customers have to make changes, and may be late in the game, and with that, we can see what's going on on the shop floor, and we can adjust accordingly. >> Yeah. >> How about you, Jay? I mean, sorry, Mark. (laughing) >> Yeah, so we, that's been a gamechanger for the business, we've gone from the webportal for booking holidays to the arena client, you can do it in the pub, or anywhere on the go, basically. Which is really good. >> I like being in the pub. >> Yeah, the pub's good. >> That works for me. >> And then um, Wadaco, which is the warehouse data collection system, which is all about scanning and handling units, and we manufacture lots of different products for the human and animal markets, and we have a sashay and then a box and an outer box and then onto a pallet, that's lots of transactions, but in Wadaco now, handing an issue you can do it as one transaction, so instead of ten transactions, you've got one transaction. That's a massive gamechanger for the way in which we use the system. >> One of the things we've heard a lot in the keynote, and also just in these interviews that I'm doing here, is just how customer-centric IFS is. And you're customers, so can you tell us a little bit about how, how has this company, earned your trust? What is it, what is it doing that's so special than other companies, that its competitors aren't? >> It's the relationship, it's all down to relationships. We have four values in our company, performance, ambition, collaboration, and trust. And actually, if you take all those four key values, IFS follows them, we work together well with best of breed system, we collaborate well. We're both ambitious businesses, and we trust each other. So if you've got all those four things, you've got a win. >> Right, right, right. So what do you want to see out of the next Woco. So we're at Woco 2018, I know it's only day one, but when you think about, you are valued and dear customers to IFS, so what do you want to see with this relationship going forward? >> Well I think the title this year, the what's coming next, is really important, and it's so great to be able to see all the new features that they're rolling out, and what they're doing, so looking forward to that again next time. >> And it's also the expansion of the arena client, you know, it's quite small at the moment, and there's all the updates coming, we're getting to see them firsthand, but this time next year or in 18 months, the arena client will be massive. And it will be the future. >> It's true, it's true. And how much are you talking with each other? I mean, that's one of the things that we've heard, too, is that customers, you know, it's almost like companies don't want their clients talking to each other but that's not so at Woco, that we want the feedback, want the interaction. What's the experience, can you describe what it's like? >> Well, to me, I mean, it really is sort of the foundation of IFS. I really believe that, I see that, I think we all do. The relationships that we have with our customers, that is something unique. This is not a vendor supplier customer type relationship. We are partners in this, and I think another unique aspect that I would love to point out is the fact that, not only do we want our customers talking to each other, we have perspective customers here. This is not a situation where it's all just long-term customers, we've all known each other. We have perspective customers here that are really gaining insight into what it means to be part of the IFS family. And that's certainly, I'm very proud to say, I've been with IFS for over 20 years, and that's something that has always been the case with our organization, and it means a lot to us for our customers to feel that way as well. >> So, now that the software has been deployed, how are you keeping, how can customers keep it up to date? >> Well, this is another aspect that we, we really introduced this in IFS Applications 9, but it continues on with IFS Applications 10, of course, which are quarterly updates. So, through the lifecycle of a release, an update will come out every quarter, they are cumulative updates, excuse me, so if you see update four comes out, and there isn't anything that you need, then you skip that, maybe you skip the next one, but six comes by and you say, there's something there that I want to apply, it's like applying a patch. So they can really stay current, and that's our driver. And another unique thing about this is not only are we introducing fixes and corrections, we know those exist in software, but we also try and introduce little feature, functional enhancements in these updates as well. So there could be a new feature available to you, or a new lobby, or something new with the bot perhaps coming in an update, so, it's very important to us to not only, of course, deliver fixes and patches when needed, but also functional enhancements throughout the lifecycle of the product. >> And have you experienced this yet? >> Yeah, even on the beta version, we've been taking updates, so we're on update four at the moment, so, uh, and update five's ready. We're going to make the decision if we want to take it now or we wait til RTM which is July for us. Which is quite soon. >> Right, right, no, it's just around the corner. Exactly. And so, I assume you'll be early adopters of Apps 11, too. >> Mark: Maybe. (laughing) There's no reason why not. >> Right, exactly. Well, Jay, Mark, Amy, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a really great conversation here. >> Amy: Thank you so much, thank you guys. >> Jay: Thank you. >> Mark: Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from IFS WOCO 2018 just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's the Cube. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a three-guest panel with us today. We have Mark Boulton who is the CMO, Antony Bourne, vice-president Global Industries Solutions, and Brian Sommer who is an analyst at TechVentive. Thank you so much for joining us, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. >> Happy to be here, thank you. >> Happy to be here, yeah. >> So this is a big, big event for IFS, WOCO, as it's known. So talk a little bit about what you're hearing already from customers and feedback that you're getting. >> Sure, well the first thing is that everyone's told us Atlanta was a great choice of venue. >> Rebecca: This time of year in particular. >> Well, just flown in actually, from London where the weather is not this good. But, we've had really good feedback so far and still only at the end of the first morning. But the opening keynotes and the reveal of IFS Apps 10 went really well. I think most people have been really pleased with the content that they're seeing on the whole. So feedback is good. We know it's a big investment in time and time out of the office for our customers to come here. So we need to make sure that it's time well spent, that they get value. And so far, the feedback is really good. They're learning stuff, they're seeing things for the first time. They're meeting their peers and connecting. So it's good. >> And before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about the customers interacting with each other. Not only just you and telling you how they're using your product, but also interacting with each other and talking about things that they have learned and sites that they have gleaned. So can you describe a little bit about what's happening? >> And that's a key thing because we love our customers, we love getting them together, we love them talking to each other. It's not just taking it from our words and taking it for granted, we want them to share the experience, we want them to say, okay, what to do in this scenario? How did you overcome this? So these events are fantastic. I've just been talking to a customer, now, before lunch, about how they want to upgrade based on what they've already seen. And we're only halfway through day one. And it's just like, I want to talk to my account manager, I want a meeting about what we're going to do and when we're going to be doing it. So it's a fantastic event, fantastic. >> So, how about you? What are you seeing in terms of this new release with IFS 10. I mean, what interests you most as an analyst? >> Well, I've got some clients who specifically ask me to be on the lookout for some things over here at today's show. And one of them was around the new user experience on release 10 product. They're looking for something that's a richer web-based kind of mobile type of experience, or consumer-user interface experience for them. And I think they'll be happy with what's been announced over here today. It will come out in phases, obviously, but it works on everything now. Every kind of device and that's what the client wanted to see. And I'll report that back. >> Just to echo what Brian said, we've had customers already contacting us about because there is a certain functionality which we've introduced to IFS Applications 10, which they really, really want so they've actually said okay even before we announced it, which we let them have some indication of what was happening and they said, we need that, we want that. So its future is looking really good for upgrades, as well as new customers. >> One of the things that we keep hearing a lot of how customer-focused, how customer-centric IFS is as a company. The metrics speak for themselves in terms of your NPS scores and the Gartner insights. So how, as CMO, how are you going to get the word out, really? Because IFS is kind of known one of the best kept secrets in the industry. >> And it's true that we don't have quite the brand recognition that maybe some of the huge, massive competitors have. But, within our industries, we are very well known and we're known for all the right things. Great products, well-implemented and well-supported. We are leaders in a lot of the markets in which we play. Events like this is actually one of the key objectives for us. Is to have a good presence from analysts and journalists, the influencers, we call them. We like to think we look after them very well. They get the inside track on things that we're working on. So we use a lot of tools to actually spread the word. But, our biggest advocates are our customers. The people that have our software and have worked with us, they genuinely do love the products. And for those that were in the main room this morning when we launched-- Dan Matthews, our CTO, he said one of our core objectives is to design a product that people love. And so literally our customers will go out, as our NPS scores indicate as you mentioned, they will do the job for us. They tell people; they tell them very positive things about their experience. We did some studies. The majority of our customers actually are more profitable than people than use our competitor products. They're must faster time to solution and things like that. So these are the things that our customers are saying about us and these are good things to be talked about for. >> Right. Brian, what would you say should be keeping companies up at night. I mean, IFS is doing a lot of the right things. As you said, you're going to report back, the customer will probably be happy with what they hear. But what are some of the things that maybe customers are saying or customers are needing that you're hearing? That kind of feedback that maybe IFS-- what would be sort of your best advice for the future? >> Well, I think IFS plays in a bunch of different parts of the world. There is no single answer that will solve every customer in every part of the planet. And there are some very realistic problems that some companies have in areas where there's spotty electric power, or spotty internet access, and the like. They're going to probably continue to want a non-premise kind of solution. There are others in developing countries where they've clearly bypassed an entire generation, or two, of technology and they want to straight into cloud. And I know these guys, they've got a number of different cloud modules, or applications, in field services, one of those areas. And field service is a great one for the cloud, simply because that's what business is all about. It's about a bunch of people carrying tablets, and cell phones, smart phones, whatever, in and out of customer locations. That's fine. But by-and-large, what do the clients want? Well, I think what they want more than anything nowadays, they want to get out of the data-center business and more and more clients are looking at utility computing. And they're expecting vendors, eventually, to get them out of maintaining and running data centers because they have more confidence that vendors, and or partner technology provider can do a better job at web-security, maybe, than they could in-house by themselves. >> Just to echo that. >> I think one of the key differentiators from the IFS offering is the fact that we give our customers choice. We say, what do you want? We have the solution for you. Do you want it on prem? Do you want is SAS? Do you want it in the cloud? What is best for you? So that's where we can offer the customers something different than what some of competition may offer. >> Right. >> And just one more thing on that topic. And Darren mentioned it in his keynote this morning. But in North America, 50% of their customers are deploying on cloud, now. And that's core ELP. But in FSN, it's not quite 100%, but it's almost. And that's not dependent on the geography. Wherever we sell that product in the world, most people are choosing to deploy on cloud. So that is really real now, that trend. People see the benefits. I think, obviously, the majority of the industry and markets, and cloud solutions, now. But there really are tangible benefits and I think the customers have got it, now. And the move is real. >> If I can add on, I think one of the big things that is changing, is that customer after customer, client, client, I go to, they got a name for a project they want to take on. It can be the factory, the future, it could be a modernization, ERP modernization, or IT modernization. It could be a process transformation, digital transformation, business process redesign, whatever. They've all got a name for something. They don't know quite what it is, they really have a hard time defining it. But, they're on this journey and what they're looking for is more than just a basic transaction processing ERP product. They want something that will handle, like, IOT technology. They want connectors that connect up things beyond the four walls of the enterprise. They want to connect up to their assets as well as to assets that are out in the field, either with customers, what have you. And that's really where the future of this base is going right now. >> One of the things that we've also heard about in the keynote was the real emphasis on time-to-value. The customer really wants to be able to see a return on investment almost immediately. Is it difficult to keep up? It's almost an unrealistic expectation to see that value right away. >> I think it's down to what solution they're trying to solve and the ease of use; the implementation. And as we've said, from an IFS point of view, we want users to love the application. That means it needs to be easier to use. With what we've introduced today, with IFS Applications 10, does make it easier for customers and users to actually get the benefits out of their solution as quickly as possible. >> And are you able to keep up with the pace of change? How do you keep up, I mean to say? >> There are a number of different ways. Because we focus on our core industries, we belong to industry organizations, we often have customer advisory meetings at customer premises. Because we invite all the customers to it, or as many as we can so that we can talk to them, they can give us feedback about what they want to see in a product going forward, and we can channel that, in addition to the trends that we see in the industry. Because we have a lot of people that have come from the industry, they have that experience embedded in them. So they know what the industry wants. But we need to keep up with the trends to ensure we give them that benefit once they implement the solution. >> And one of the things I would add is that time-to-value is improved if the product is a good fit in the first place. If you've got to do a lot of modifications-- first you're adding in cost, you're also adding time, and complexity and risk to the project. And the industry expertise that Andy talks about, which comes in from a number of directions into our RND and it's reflected in our product. At least we've done a number of charts over the last few versions of our software. And if you go back like 10 or 15 years, you'd see that maybe, 25%, 30% of the project was going into modifying the software to make it do what the customer needed before they could even turn it on live. Today, we have a lot of clients who've upgraded from eight to nine, or now nine to ten, and they've literally-- they're running standard software. And so there, your time-to-solution is really rapid. It's as quick as you can move data and so on. But if you're not modifying it, that's key. >> That's the key, exactly. Well, Mark, Antony, Brian, thank you so much for joining us, it's been a great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> No problem. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have much more from IFS World Conference just after this. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCUBE covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. (upbeat pop music) >> Rebecca: Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Jeff Frick. What you're seeing right now are the hordes of people here at IFS World, and we are here to talk to our two guests Sumair Dutta, who is an analyst at the Service Council, and Mark Brewer, who's the Global Industry Director of Service at IFS. Thanks so much for joining us! >> Well thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah absolutely. >> Jeff: How did we draw you away from the cappuccino machine of there? The-- >> I know, I know. >> Jeff: The baristas are workin' hard. >> Rebecca: It's very buzzy, it's very exciting. So talk to us a little bit about FSM six which is, which is going to be released at the end of this year. What's new, what's exciting? Right, so IFS field service management six, you know I think the first point to make is that we already have what is recognized as the most complete solution in field service management, so this release was really focused on improving the user experience. It's a common theme throughout this conference, I think you'll hear. So how do, not only our customers, but our customers customers, their partners, all stakeholders get the most intuitive user experience out of this solution, to derive the value that encapsulated in there. I think another thing that goes along with that is, we're moving to a zero customization goal. That is to say, you'll still have, you know, ultra levels of configurability in this product from a workflow perspective, from a user interface perspective, from a business rule perspective. But instead of doing that through customization, you're doing that through configuration. Which means, you can sit on an evergreen model, you're not restricted on your upgrades. You can start on the latest and greatest, in other words, our customers are able to encapsulate an excellent experience and their business rules all within a standard offering. >> Field service management you don't really necessarily think of as inside the ERP suite, right? Kind of a hang off, I dunno what the right term is. So how does that make this offering different within all the offerings that IFS has? >> Mark: Yeah, it's a great question. So one of the uniques about the IFS FSM solution, is that it is complimentary to whatever back-end systems you already have, so let's say you have something from one of our peers in the business, so you're not runnin' IFS apps for your ERP, you're runnin' somethin' else, that doesn't matter. You can still derive best in class field service management from the FSM solution, it integrates with pretty much any other back-end. So if you truly are a service focused operation of which many companies, you know, 70% of their revenue derive from service, you can get that, if you like best-in-class service capability, without throwin' anythin' out that you're already got. And that's why FSM is somewhat different to the majority of other portfolio applications at IFS. >> So talk a little bit about how closely you work with your customers, I mean that is a real point of pride for IFS is how customer focused, how customer centered you are. So describe your process, in how you collaborate with customers, in terms of what they want the end product to look like. >> Really glad you asked that question, and it's incredibly timely for this event because, when the event closes on Thursday, we actually have a day dedicated to what we call our customer advisory council. So we have 12 of our strategic field service customers gathering in Atlanta to effectively help plan the roadmap. So we're not talkin' about tomorrows feature functions, we're talkin' about a three to five year strategy from their business. So this is not, if you like, the users asking for features, it's actually C-level, and executive management level from our customers that are actually giving us insights into where their taking their service operation in the future. Not really a technology discussion, but a business strategy discussion. We can then take that away, that involves our R&D organization as well, by the way, we take that away, we augment that with our own roadmap goals, technology that is obviously, you know, within the field service space already, AI, AR, IOT, and so forth, and, you know, bringin' those three things together, that's how we ensure that we are building applications, not just for today, but for what's next, as per the conference tag-line, you know? So heavily customer centric. Just on Friday, all those customers in the room, tellin' us where they want to go. >> Sumair, what are you seeing as sort of trends in this field service market, and how are you seeing IFS responding to those? >> Yeah that's a great question. You know field service as a whole wasn't something that was talked about previously, and we see so much more interest in the field of field service and the overall equation of aftermarket service and support. You know, previously that was a bi-product of being a business, we have a product, we need to support it, so we need to maybe throw some resources, but let's do that at the lowest cost. Now you'll see more and more companies talk about you know, service as a profit center, that we need to make money as a service. And this is primarily being driven by three major themes, three major disruptors: you have technology of course, and all of the new tools, AR, AI, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, IOT, and that's driving companies to figure out what is there story in each one of those solutions? We're not all there, no one's solved the problem, but we're all trying to figure out where do those fit into the way we deliver service, and the way our customers consume service? Then you have in field service specifically, workforce related challenges, disruptions. In our research we find about 70% of companies are going to face a talent shortage in the next five to 10 years. And this is research that's done across manufacturing and other disciplines as well. So your capacity in the sense of the number of workers you have is not going up, and you have to bring in new workers, you have to attract new talent, but then you have that outgoing flow of workforce and knowledge that's leaving your organization. So you're trying to balance all of those needs. And then eventually customers are demanding more, and you might say what does that mean you know, in an industrial setting? Well we're all consumers in some form, and we have consumer experiences, you know, the Amazons of the world, the Ubers of the world, who give us an element of convenience and access to information. And that is beginning to translate more and more so into the B to B service environment. So as a service organization you're balancing: customer needs which are rising, you've got a talent pool or a labor pool that's probably declining, and all of these disruptive technologies that you have to incorporate into your business, and so as a company as IFS that has been very customer centric, IFS has done a lot around field service management to improve some of the workforce capacity challenges with their solutions around FSM, they are taking a greater stake in some of the customer engagement solutions, with the acquisitions of MPL systems, and potentially future acquisitions down the road, and then from a technology point of view, I like IFS' approach, they've been, they're not quick to jump to the end, to say, you know, here's our AI solution per se, but they're essentially trying to establish those steps for companies to get from point A to point B to point C, to say here's where analytics can help you, here's where mobility can help you, it's a little bit more of a pragmatic approach as opposed to a marketing first approach, and so IFS has done a really good job in terms of the workforce elements, the technology elements, and now moreso on the customer engagements side as well. >> You know what really strikes me, as we're having this conversation is: the way that customers engage with companies has changed dramatically, right? Certainly on a consumer side, and a business side, so much now the engagement is via an electronic interface. And I can see where the increasing importance of the field sales person in that truck is actually the face of the company, and probably quite often the only person that the customer actually engages. So that's a really different type of service level requirement not to meet an SLA delivery because of a contractual obligation, but in terms of actually being the face in the engagement, in the touch point of your company, with an actual customer. It's probably happening more and more in the field as a percentage of the total than it ever has. >> That's a great observation, you know we actually, many of our customers today regard that field engineer as the trusted advisor of the customer, he's the trusted advisor, you know. They don't see him as a salesperson, they see him as their, you know confidant, their trusted advisor. He's not only going to be the hero to fix their problem, he's actually going to tell them how they can prevent such a problem in the future, and he's also going to try and offer them, you know, I can fix this problem today, but actually if you bought into a wider service contract, you wouldn't need to care about how many visits, and how many parts you consume, it will actually cover you completely with a gold contract. He upsells and cross-sells at the same time as becoming the hero, so, perfect observation. >> So are they actively, you know, kind of retraining those folks to really start to think of themselves more as a kind of a customer engagement representative versus just a field service person? You see that in the real world? >> Most definitely, most definitely. Because more and more, we've got an educated buyer, the buyer's savvy, you know, he's done a lot of his own work before actually committing to a purchase these days, much the same in this space, so, you know, rather than be sold to, they want to be advised. And it's a different experience again, to use that phrase, from a technology perspective, you know, that mobile application that used to be about, here's your jobs, go visit these locations, it actually now is when you're there, maybe you should talk about this particular offering, we have a promotion on that particular unit, these customer uses X, Y, and Z features, talk to them about another incremental gain from that, so the intelligence has moved from just fix the problem, to actually become their trusted advisor, like I said. >> And I would add to that, it's not just about training, it's about hiring, so it's the profile of who you bring in as a field service technician, you're not only bringing someone who's technically savvy, or mechanically savvy, or digitally savvy, you're bringing someone who can communicate with customers, someone who can work as a team, so internally, your internal customers and then your external customers who can communicate, who can provide solutions, who can provide guidance. We've done some studies of field service engineers, and they say, you know, our work is 10% fixing things, and 90% of solving customer problems. So it's having that empathy, having that knowledge of what the customer's going through, and potentially what the customer might go through in the future and being able to preempt some of that with advice, potentially selling, potentially guiding your customers with information, and so it is a much more wholistic experience because they are the face of the organization. >> And as a consequence, expectations have raised in the customer base. They want more than just a fix. >> It's so wild right, this whole, this conversation about machines taking our jobs, and yet everyone that we talk to, there's not enough people to do the jobs, and so it just: A reinforces that we need the help, but B, more importantly, that it's the combination of a machine helping do the scheduling, helping decide where to go, helping to know what the opportunity is for that particular engagement with the person who's empathetic, has history with the company, history with the problems. That actually is a much better solution than either one, or the other. >> Yeah, to talk about artificial intelligence again, you know, we see, there's a couple of things: one it allows scaling of the human, if you will, not replacement of the human, we won't have sufficient, no skilled employees, secondly I think it all bends the human experience, because, I'll give you an example. We got to customer that's in, like the, breakdown recovery service for vehicles, in the US in fact, today a call center agent in their contact center they'll take a call, but the virtual assistant is actually listening to the conversation, kind of like a Siri in the background, and they pick up on phrases like tow-truck, automatically pops up on the agents screen, the nearest tow truck is 10 miles away, it's Steve, you know, in this location to the customer. They'll pick up on emergency, we can get there with a closer engineer, we can pull him off another job. That's actually going in the ear of the agent, and it's going on the screen of the agent, they are providin' a level of service, you know, that the customer is pretty, you know, impressed by, as a consequence. That's a great example of: it's not just the human experience, or the AI experience, it's a combined experience. >> It's the human empathy along with the automated knowledge that you're combining there, that's great. Well Mark and, thank you so much for joining us Mark and Sumair, I really appreciate it, it's been a great conversation. >> Sumair: Well thank you very much. >> Mark: Thank you, thanks. >> Jeff: Thanks! >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we'll have more from IFS World Conference just after this. (gentle dance beat)

(synth music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's the Cube. Covering IFS World Conference 2018, brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of IFS World here at Georgia World Conference here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm you host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We're joined by Tobias Persson. He is the IoT Services lead here at IFS. Thanks so much for joining us, Tobias. >> Thank you, it feels really nice to be here. >> So, I want to start out by having you explain to our viewers what you do at IFS as an Innovation Service Lead. >> Yes, I'm heading up the IFS Innovation Services Team that came to official existence in May last year. It's there because of the fact if we want to get the IoT message out there, we want to be out there to mission about IoT. Actually helping our sales and presales to do the business discussions with people, with our customers, that is. As well as actually implementing solutions, rolling them out. So, we're kind of like from idea, talk to the customer, to real roll out, that's what my team does. >> So, you said you want to get the IoT message out there. >> Yeah. >> And what is the IoT message, from the IFS vantage point? >> Well, coming from a tech background myself, I've been involved in IoT space for quite some years, and the biggest challenge or difference between normal IoT and IFS IoT is the fact that you can actually do something with the data itself. Typically, when you're talking about IoT historically, it's driven by R and D. It's not a strategic effort at all. It's mainly done to figure it out. And IoT has taken some steps since then. And we're providing a way to actually short cut your IoT data directly into your most business critical system. And doing something with it, providing huge efforts and benefits off the bat. >> And you guys are really integrating IoT into the existing applications, existing workflow, so trying to grab that value, not as a stand alone science project, or something that's on the side-- >> Tobias: Yeah. >> But really integrating it into your existing applications and the existing work-- >> Tobias: Correct. >> That those existing applications are managing. >> Tobias: Yeah, that's true. >> What are some of the impacts that you've seen? Or, I guess, some of the customer impacts that they've seen? >> Well, it's all about automate step, in a sense. At least, that's the first step. I mean, we have seen customers just taking the data out and getting the running rs out, for example. That has huge implications on the amount of time you spend entering stuff, as well as having the data with quality so you can do something with it. But the biggest thing is, really, to automate stuff. Like send out a work order, for example, automate that. Or send out the replenishment for some consumable or whatever it is. So, anything you can run or post or trigger in IFS applications, field service management is actually triggerable by IFT observation. >> So, can you describe to our viewers how the process works. I mean, I know that IFS really prides itself on being so customer centric. >> Tobias: Yeah. >> So, how do you work closely with customers, from the very beginning, from the idea to the actual product and implementation. >> Well, taking it from the start and from the top, we obviously have a full set of IoT industry directors that are really skilled and seeing what's next for the market, being out there to communicate the message. Serve the station is obviously one. Digitalization is another one. So, we're talking about this in all kinds of places, right? My team comes in, kind of like the second stage, where the sales and presales have done a demo with the generic tools that we're providing them with and taking the discussion from there. And we're usually building something that is quite specific for the customer, using their data, really any kind of data to prove the point. Some kind of power BI dashboard, some kind of of actual IT observation going out. And the thing is, when we do that, they tend to really get it when they see things coming in from the physical world into their, this will be your FSM or applications environment. And they see an observation comes in and suddenly, boom, that's an action going on. So, that's what we're trying to do. And we're involving ourselves quite heavily in how to define what's your IT use cases, running workshops with customers, and pinning it down. It's not rocket science or anything, but it's kind of our own methodology to pin down what's your first step? What's your IoT use case that you aim for? And how do you plan to get there? That's what we're trying to achieve with our team. >> Has it been an integration challenge to go to devices and sensors and kind of the IoT world and to plug that back into the application? >> Well, that depends a bit. I mean, our application, our solution is really dependent that it's getting sent the data. Or actually picking up the data from a API or a database. We haven't seen a project yet where we're actually picking up stuff directly from the assets. >> Jeff: Okay. >> What we usually see, though, is that the customer has taken that step already, so they're getting data into some kind of... It could be a printer management system, it could be a whatever management system, and we're getting it from there. We are talking to partners that would allow us to get the data strictly from an industrial context, and industrial protocol, a specific machine, whatever it is. But as of now, we are reliant on the fact that somebody is sending stuff to the IoT hub-- >> Jeff: Right. >> Which is the official usher component. >> So, you're just really taking advantage of that data flow that's already there and really adding an extra layer of value-- >> Tobias: Yeah. >> That they can extract by pumping that into your application. >> Operation allows the whole thing, yes. >> But that is really the key-- >> Yeah. >> The differentiation, is that you're not just seeing the data, you're now saying, okay, what is this data telling us and now what do we do next? What do we do with it? >> Tobias: Yeah. >> So, can you give us a real specific example with Anticimex, and what-- And this is the rodent control, pest control company. And how this company is using your product. >> Yeah, I mean. >> Rebecca: And seeing a real return. >> Yeah, from what I know, Anticimex Finland has deployed this, they have about 3,300 traps in effect out there, at the moment. And they're using this for, well, the traps are connected, obviously, so they send the data, for shots fired, how full it is, battery levels, stuff like that, to do the IoT solution. >> Rebecca: Shots fired, I love it. >> Shots fired, yes. (laughs) So, it's not like a single off, you have to empty it directly, it's kind of a pressurized air container, doing all kinds of killings in a row, if you will. And you need to know how are my traps doing? >> So, it's really, again, just a another layer of efficiency improvement-- >> Yeah. >> By, not just setting and coming back after so much time, but actually having the data for the activity in those traps. >> Yeah, no, they are really, in a sense, they have opened their eyes. They know how their assets are doing. They know when they're full, they know when to pick it up and even if they don't have to go there today. That's also good information for which they need. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So, they're doing this to optimize their service visits and doing like a full automated work order flow. I think the statements from Jussi Ylinen, the managing director of Anticimex Finland that will be here as well later on, they have been doing something like 6,000 automated work orders in the last six months. Which is a huge productivity advantage. >> Jeff: 6,000 automated ones. >> Yes. >> So these are ones coming directly out of the system, based on the feedback from the IoT. >> Tobias: Yeah, not passing any employee at all. >> Wow, that's a huge number. >> How revelatory is that, for a company to have all of the service visits be automated? How much of a change is that? >> I think it's huge, actually. I think it's quite easy to imagine that would be a good idea. However, until now, it's been kind of a hassle to get there. I personally do think that there our solution provides that gap and services as a short cut, as I mentioned before, to get there. >> But I'd imagine, too, it's a process flow on the customer's side, too. Because they got to, now, accept the fact that they don't know exactly what the schedules are going to be for the next several weeks or for those days because they have to allocate some portion to the automated process, or they're feeding that in at some level, upstream, to make sure that gets integrated into all the rest of the activity. >> Well, you could have, if you wanted to, manual intervention in all stages, if you want to. You need to, probably, if you need, if you're on an oil rig or something, that you have a critical part, automated order coming in, that should be accepted by someone along the way, that's perfectly fine, as well. So, it doesn't have to be fully automated if you don't want to. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> But it can be. >> So, I know that you're not only an IoT evangelist within IFS, you're an IoT evangelist in general and in your professional life. >> Yeah I hope so. (all laughing) >> So, can you talk to us, big picture, big strategy, where you see IoT going in the world but then also as it relates to IFS? What does the future hold? >> Well, the easy answer is, you may have seen the old commercial where they state, well, we need to be on the web. Why? It doesn't say. Well, that kind of, you know that you need to consider this. But you don't really know how to get there. That kind of approach is somewhere along the line where we are right now with IoT. I mean, we used to be something like a buzz word. People tried to figure it out. Nowadays, it's more like people have taken steps, they have the data somewhere. It's usually stored somewhere in some database or some system or whatever. But it's the actionable part that's missing. I don't think people actually tend to look for the actionable part in a ERP company. But that's actually what we're providing. So, I think in a few years to come, it will be seen as suspicious not to have your stuff connected, not to have your open data. Instead of being the other way around. I think this will be a very natural part of not being blind to how your assets are doing. >> Jeff: Right. >> Why would you like that? That's the old fashioned style. So, I think this will be a very natural step in any kind of of product development of all service centric company in years to come. >> And do you think it's indicative of people accepting a lot more data sources into their decision making processing? >> Yeah. >> And adding that layer of automation? 'Cause a piece you didn't talk about, that's obviously part of that, is AI in some point in time, right? >> Yeah. >> 'Cause now, you got the automation, you got all this stuff coming in, you can't send the entire fleet out tomorrow if you only have x number of vans and you got x number, 6,000 service requests. So, then you add that AI component, the machine learning component, the prioritization component in, again, moving more of this manual scheduling process or routine, scheduled maintenance-- >> Yeah. >> Into a much smarter way to execute the details. >> Yeah, it's all in the step of going from data collection, data acquisition, figuring out the technical stuff behind connectivity, getting the data out. And now with the next step when the revolution comes. How do we approach that? With AI, with machine learning, with actionable insights, whatever. And to be quite frank, I don't think people necessarily don't want to see that. They want to see what comes out of it, but they don't want to see behind the curtains on that. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So maybe, just maybe, in the near future, people will need to bring in someone that knows machine learning from A to Z in the companies. Or at least use someone that does their insights for them. >> Jeff: Right. >> So, how will IFS expand it's IoT offering, at the next World Congress next year? >> Well, as you know, we have had a few early adopters adopt the program for IoT, yeah. And they seem excellent and they're actually being the first ones out, they're live right now. They have a really good story to tell. So, that's good. In a sense, we are taking it from the heavy asset centric, from our rig, that's one part. We have taken some steps. Service is the next one, being Anticimex in Kucera. We believe that connected field service is the main thing to go for. The real good IoT use cases is for connected field service with assets, or sending data throughout. And, to me, the next strategic step, since we are having a whole lot of revenue coming from manufacturing, is actually connected manufacturing, or connected manufacturing lines. Industry four point zero, whatever you like to call it. That's our next strategic move with IoT, as I see it. >> The lines have been connected for giving data, but not necessarily for actionable data back into the lines, right? That's where the really big change is. >> Yeah. >> For the automation, automation back into it. >> Yeah. Automation, you have the full scale automation, pyramid where you have the POC that runs the low level control system. Then you have the scale down, the many systems as well. The thing with IoT is not only do you get the data for specific assets, you also get the full picture of like, how are my factories doing? On this level to this level? So, we come small, like a less operator, more kind of strategic view on the whole thing. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> But you need to be able to get the data out from different levels. And actually access it and make sense of it. >> Jeff: Right. >> Which factory is doing best? For example. >> Jeff: Right, and what are you managing, too? You're managing to the device you're managing to the whole output. >> Yeah. >> So, maybe based on economic factors, you want to run things hard, which is maybe not optimal for maintenance but because of the economic situation-- >> Yeah. >> You're going to press it. So it's really, that variable management opportunity-- >> Absolutely. >> Is a very different way of kind of looking at your output. >> And one way, one view really-- >> Jeff: Right. >> A scalable view, really. There is a stand just behind us, where we'll show a an industrial demo, together with Accenture, which will actually trigger a service request from a physical device, an engine, in this case. That goes into the system, the IFS system, that is actually scheduled, sent the repair guy that comes out, wearing a whole lens and fix the issue. >> Jeff: Right. >> So, that's an end to end thing. It's actually manageable and doable with our solution. >> Jeff: Great. >> And that was one of the things that the CEO talked about during the keynote too, is that it is automating certain tasks, but then really leaving the more unique tasks up to the human and the human connecting. With machines and also with other humans. >> Tobias: Hmm. >> So, tell me a little bit about differences that you've seen in the market. So, IFS, based in Sweden, many of its senior leaders in London, but of course, you have places all over the world. Do you see any differences, in terms of the customers in Europe versus the US? And how you're thinking about maybe making a bigger push into the US? >> That's a really good question. I'll have to think about that for a while. (All three laugh) I think what we are seeing in my team, at least, that's kind of on our horizon, is that Germany in general are heading toward industry four point zero, that's kind of a really hard driving fact. That's stated even by the government. So, we need to get into that, as well as pushing for field service management as a solution. US, I think, we should be doing more in. Let's put it that way. >> Great, great. Well, we look forward to hearing more about what you are doing in the US. (All three laugh) >> Jeff: More. >> Exactly. >> Jeff: That's a good thing. >> Tobias, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. We've had a great time with you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> It was a pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from IFS World here in Atlanta, Georgia just after this. (low energy techno)

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, rom Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference 2018 here in Atlanta, Georgia, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Jeff Frick. We are joined by Darren Roos. You are the CEO of IFS. Thanks so much for joining us Darren. >> Great to be here, thanks for making time. >> So the conference is buzzy, we're really picking up a lot of excitement here. But I wanted to talk about you, just starting as CEO in April, brand new to the role. What what drew you to the role? >> You know as I did my due diligence on IFS what you found was there was a customer base that was super engaged with what we were doing. If you look on Gartner Peer Insights' website as an example, we're the top-ranked ERP solution amongst our peers. If you look at our NPS scores, we have a 34% bump on our top five competitors. So, when you have the opportunity to lead a business, of scale, we're half a billion Euros in revenue, with a super happy customer base, that's a great opportunity, so you know, I couldn't pass it up. >> And this is something that you also talked a lot about in your in your keynote. And and the number, the metrics speak for themselves- >> Absolutely. >> but it's the customer focus, the relentless customer focus, how do you maintain that? What is the secret sauce? >> Yeah, you know, I think it's not one thing, it's loads of different things. You can think about the business model that we have, but another data point that I love about the business, that the average tenure of our employees is nine years, right. And to really understand ERP, to understand how our customers are using the technology, you have to have tenure, you have to have account managers, and pre-sales people, and consultants, who've had the time to engage with the business, to go on this journey with them, to understand how the technology works, how the industry works, and really be able to move the needle in a meaningful way. And you know, most of our peers just don't have that tenure. They're focused on other things. And I think that the fact that we're able to bring in young talents, like we saw Tyler on stage this morning, talking about the technology, but with great people like Amy on stage, who have had great experience with our customers. That balance of tenure, and experience, and innovation, is really how we've managed to drive those results. >> It's really hard thing to maintain, because they've got to feel engaged obviously, with their customers and feel good about helping their customers, but they've also got to feel really good about the management and the company behind them, that enables them to deliver the innovation, to be engaged, and have that institutional knowledge. If you lose the institutional knowledge, both the customer's institutional knowledge, as well as your own organization, it's really hard to replicate and expensive. >> Yeah, it's difficult to do, and the reality is, it might be expensive to replace the people, but you can't replace the knowledge, right. You just can't do it. So you know we've been nominated as a great place to work for the last nine years, I think it is. So you know the fact that we were able to maintain that status, together with the customer satisfaction scores, are really the reason why we have the buzz that we do here today. >> So this is your first World, WOCO, World Conference, as you're calling it. What do you hope attendees come away with? >> Yes, we're not as big as some of our our peers, and I think it's really important that our customers come away from this understanding that they've bought the best technology that there is in the market. And really, when when we talk about the Gartner Peer Insights rankings, that's the validation for me. I'm not talking about some nebulous metric that I invented. If our customers say we're the best, or the customers in the market say we're the best, that's a good validation for me. So the customers that come here, and the partners that come here, can be proud of the fact that we are the number one in this industry, when it comes to the quality of solution that we deliver. So that's one thing that I want them to know. And then another thing that is really unique about IFS, is that we don't sell software. We sell an outcome. When we engage with the customer, they have a specific business benefit that they're wanting to derive, and we stick with them, we really partner with them to deliver that outcome. And again, I say that in a very meaningful way, because a very large proportion of our business are the services to implement our own software. So we work very closely with our ecosystem of partners in order to deliver it, but we're always on the hook to deliver that customer's success too. So you know, those two messages for me are, you have great technology, be confident in what you've bought, it's recognized as the best on the market, and know that IFS will always be in your corner. >> Go ahead. >> I was just going to ask about the culture, because you also talked about that being one of the things that really drew you to IFS, and then the need for candor too. So how do you make sure that customers are telling you things, even sometimes things you don't necessarily want to hear? Because you also made a point of saying that on stage, come up, talk to me, I want to hear it. >> Yeah, look I think, you know, how you encourage that and this is my leadership style, is not to become defensive, and to show customers that when they give you that feedback, that you value it and you take action. And I think that's a very self-fulfilling approach to take. So you know, I'm a straight shooter, I always have been. It's what my reputation is. And I think that it's a good match with the IFS culture because that just, tell it how it is approach, is how IFS typically does things. I think it comes from the fact that we're a Swedish company, and you know, it's a very open culture, a very straightforward and honest culture. It's not hierarchical, and that's a good fit with the way I like to run the business. >> It's still hard though, 'cause nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, right. So, I mean the fact that you have that, and it's, the right thing is to actively search out the negative right. >> No one, no one told them that they don't like to tell the boss bad news. >> They didn't know. >> People are quite happy to tell me the bad news when there's bad news tell me, no no. >> Well, that's the only way you can fix it right? >> Absolutely. >> So I want to kind of talk about digital transformation, and I could probably drop about 100 buzzwords, with IOT, and cloud, and AI, and dead smart people that get branded interesting things. But really it comes down to something you talked about in the keynote, and that's getting closer to the customer. Getting close to the end user. Whether that's you and your customers, or your customers and the consumers of their products. How do you see, I mean is that really the essence of digital transformation? Is the enablement of getting closer to the end customer? >> I think that proximity to the customer is a major trend that we see in, whether it's through servitization or product, or whether it's through, the example that I gave on stage this morning, with just you know, all companies, whether they're B2B or B2C, getting to know their customers better, I think it's a trend that we see. But really, the IFS philosophy is, don't worry about the buzzword. Don't think about AI, or about IOT, or about any of these things. Think about the business problem. Think about the business pain that you're experiencing and then let's figure out a way to leverage technology to solve that problem. When you have the business pain in mind, whether that's an inflated cost base, or whether you're trying to drive incremental revenue, trying to launch a new product, whatever it is, then it's much easier to come up with a tangible benefit that you're trying to achieve, and specific metrics. And that's what IFS is focused on. So on the on the Did You Know slides before the keynote started this morning, we spoke about the incredible, tangible benefits, that our clients have recognized, in terms of their improvements in profitability, their improvements in revenue, and these are specific metrics. And we track them, because we're engaged with customers focused on that outcome. So you know I think from my perspective, forget about the buzzwords, really focus on what the business pain is that you trying to solve, and then leverage technology to solve that problem, and measure whether you've managed to solve the problem. And that's how they should focus. And very often today, in a disproportionate number of cases, that's about somehow getting closer to the end user customer. Understanding what they're looking for, how they want to transact, and we see that in every industry. >> I'm just curious from a historical perspective, you've been in ERP for a long, long time, and I remember when kind of the first big ERP wave hit, I don't know 30 years ago, 40 years ago, you know better than I, right, there was this huge leap in productivity and efficiency. Are you amazed still today, that there are these giant opportunities for efficiency improvements? It just staggers my mind that there's still so many big opportunities, to squeeze so much more value out of processes and assets. >> I think the reality is that technology, while it is the enabler, it's also very often the inhibitor. So you know, what we see is, we see as these new technologies come on board, that we're able to unlock new capabilities that the technology just simply didn't enable before. We have a great customer, Anticimex, who are in the pest control market. And the way pest control companies, Anticimex are an example, is that they would put rodent traps out and then they'd have to send field service agents around to go check whether the traps had been activated. And now they put sensors in the traps, the traps report back when they've been triggered, and they only send field service agents out to go and check when a trap has been triggered. Clearly, that's a level of efficiency when, pre-sensors, and pre the IOT connectors that we have today, simply weren't possible. So it's really about the way in which innovation is, technology is enabling us to do things that simply weren't possible before. So now it's, you know, you can understand why happens. >> Yeah, and then the other piece that you talked about there, is really kind of this API economy, with you know, connecting the very disparate databases. So that's a big piece. Then the other pieces we're surrounded here, is the ecosystem. I wonder if you can speak a little to, you know, how the ecosystem plays in helping you deliver value to your customers. >> So IFS, as I've said before, have always had an approach which is, that we want to own the value, the outcome for the customer, the value delivery, the value assurance. And I think now what we're looking at, is how do we leverage the ecosystem to do a bit more of the work so that we can make sure that we can scale? Because as we win bigger and bigger customers, with global footprints, doing bigger roll-outs, they're wanting to engage with partners who perhaps have a bit more experience from an industry perspective or from a horizontal, functional perspective. So you know, as we engage with partners like Accenture, or like PWC, or other partners like that, it really gives us the ability to scale the business to a greater extent. So the ecosystem are critical for us in doing that, but for us, we can't compromise on the quality. It is always quality first. It's always a case of making sure that our customers will still realize the benefits while we give them some more options on how they can deploy. >> So the theme of this conference is Connect to What's Next. So we want to know what is next for IFS. Particularly as you were talking about doing your due diligence, and it has these great metrics, it's kind of this best kept secret, really, in this industry. >> It is an incredibly well kept secret. >> So how are you going to get the secret out? >> Look, I think, from my personal planning perspective as CEO, we have some work to do around standardizing our operating model. At the moment we're a fairly fragmented business. We have eight regions, and those eight regions don't all run in the same way. So we have some internal homework to do, and we'll get through that pretty quickly. After that it's really about leveraging the global partnerships that we have. You know Microsoft are here as an example, Accenture are here as an example, as platinum sponsors. And leveraging those partners, to get better known in the market, and those are some of the discussions that we've kicked off. And I think there's lots of ways for us to, to try and leverage the secret, to try and kind of open, open the box a little, and show people the power of what we've got. But I think we're going to, we're a relatively small business still, and we're going to have to leverage those partnerships as a springboard to get to more people. >> And this is your first US world conference, right? You guys have had other conferences in North America, but not your big one. >> Darren: I think they've done one here before. >> Darren and Jeff: I think there was one in Boston a couple years ago. >> But I don't know, I think that was more kind of a North American one, maybe or Americas, then the world conference. >> What I'm saying is that when we nearly twice as big this year at the World Conference as we were at the last one. And I anticipate the next one will be twice as big again. So you know, we're seeing phenomenal growth, we're seeing strong growth in our revenues strong both in our headcounts, and we're seeing strong growth in the number of people who are interested in our technology, so, you know, things are good. >> Great, well Darren thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We've had a great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from IFS World Conference 2018 in just a little bit. That was terrific. (techno music)

>> Live, from Atlanta Georgia, it's the Cube. Covering IFS World Conference, 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to the the Cube's live coverage of IFS World 2018 here at the Georgia World Conference Center in Atlanta. I'm you're host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Peter Scheltus, I hope I'm saying that correctly. He is the global strategy and sales director enterprise operational intelligence here at IFS. Thanks so much for joining us, Peter. >> Yeah, thank you for having me over here. >> So let's start this interview by having you tell our viewers a little bit about what you do at IFS. >> Well, our product actually is a very cool product if you want to improve your business. And, I'm talking business, not IT. We use an IT tool for doing that, but we are supporting managers to make better and faster decisions. 'Cuz in the current environment, current world, change is everywhere and change is coming more rapidly than ever, whenever. And what we do with IFS here, why we create a kind of a digital twin of your organization and to support all the managers in your organizations to make better and faster decisions, connected to each other. >> It's interesting the digital twin concept 'cuz we see it a lot, like G.E. uses it a lot. We make a digital twin of say a 737 because one of those operating say out of Dubai is very different than one of them operating out of Alaska, so they can run tests and stuff. I've never heard anyone say a digital twin of an organization. That's really a novel approach. So, how do you do that and what are some of the benefits that come out of doing that. >> Well, yeah, that's a good question. When you talk about a digital twin, there's a reason for having that. And you think about complex assets, and what you'd like to do is not only look at the asset, but would like to do predictive and even prescriptive. And the question mark if you're looking to organizations, they are complex as well, but they are not that visible. And they are not tangible. It's about people, it's about organization, it's organization charts, it's about processes, it's about systems, it's about risks, it's compliance, finance, whatever. Everything, projects, programs, so I can continue with that. But the question mark there, and all those elements are connected to each other. But how can you as a manager, if you have to manage that all, how can you make a good decision then? If you don't know how it looks like? And, what we do is, I actually visualize those complexities and bring that to the end-user, and the end-user in this case is the business owner or actually a business guy working in an organization, so he's capable of making those better decisions. >> That's the enterprise operational intelligence, or the EOI. >> Yeah, this is how we call it. >> That's what we call it. And then when you're looking at this complex organization, the digital twin model, can you kind of switch what you're optimizing for, 'cuz that's always the big question, too. What are you optimizing for, because then you might turn your levers very differently depending on profitability, speed, there's a short-term opportunity, a lot of complexity. in what are you actually optimizing for? >> Yeah, for sure. I mean there are so many elements connected to each other, so it is complex. And what you do see is that you have the classic BI tools and the classic data discovery tools, and what they do is they create pictures out of the data, because there are so many sources, where's so many data, but we do it a different way. We do it a different way for a reason because it's not about the target to make the data better, it's about making your business model better or your company better. And then we start actually modeling your organization, and plotting actually the data, not only financial, but also strategic and operational data, and even also risk and compliance data to the business model. And then, we have the platform, with having included three different engines, which is actually a model engine to create the model of the company. We have a data engine to work with all the data coming from all the different sources, and we have an execution engine, but it's all embedded in one platform. And it is integrated by design, And with sorry, but one more thing to add, which is realLy cool, is in the end, it's not only backwards looking, but due to the fact that we have the execution engine, you can even put basis rules on top and algorithms to go to predictive and even to prescriptive decisioning. >> I'm reacting because you keep talking about the visualizations. I'm always struck by the beautiful visualizations that come out of a lot of these tools. And they're pretty pictures, and they're kind of complicated, but so often you look at them, and you're like, so what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do now based on this beautifully complex picture, and it's not usually very obvious, so delivering actionable incites is very different than just creating a beautiful visualization of a bunch of data. So, what are some of the ways you help people actually make decisions? >> Well, there are two elements in and one element is of course, I'm talking about role-based cockpits, so per role is different, so you get actually what you see. I mean if you are the CEO or the CFO or you are team leader or whatever, you know what your work is, I assume. Then you give them the picture they want to see, so we have multiple pictures we can show. That's one thing. But in the end, it's about people. People have to do something, and people have to change. And what we have experienced over the past years is if you give somebody a tool, just a cockpit, and nothing hasn't really changed. So what we are a big supporter of is also to bring in and kind of a performance coach. And a performance coach is different role, and sitting next to whatever, a manager, and explaining and working with him together, what is it what we see? What can we do about it? How can we improve? Where can we lower costs? Where can we improve value? Where can we find it, so, kind of a performance coach is really important in the implementation approach. >> Do you see that there will always be a need for a performance coach? Or does the performance coach help the user understand, oh these are the questions I should be asking when I see data that looks like this? I mean, what's the evolution there? >> Yeah, it's really interesting. It's not always necessary. Of course every organization does have it's own majority, and if organizations is already quite performance centric and know how to work with metrics, the performance coach is not even needed. But you have all kinds of different organizations. So most of the time we just advise to use it as well. But again that's step by step. Think big makes more steps. So it's a agile approach as well. >> I'm sure the performance coach will eventually get baked into the software where it tells you if you tweek this lever here, it's going to that impact. If you tweek that lever here, it's going to have this impact. We see some of that in kind of the sports fitness devices where now there adding a smart, software driven coach beyond just telling you that you ran four miles or whatever. So, I would imagine that's got to be something you guys will implement because you've got the data. You know what the factors are, you've got the digital plan. So any good examples that you can share of customers who are starting to put this into practice and some of the results that they're getting. >> Well, we have quite some customers over the world, actually all kinds, well not every country in the world, but or region, yeah, definitely. We have them from power plants up to financial institutions, up to airlines and everything in between from manufacturing, et cetera. What we do see is that when you start with the EOI concept, we start most of the time with the board, because if you want to improve your organization from strategy to operation, that should be really bundled so that people do the right things. But if we don't get a clear view on strategy, how can you expect that all the operational people can do the right things? So that's how we start and you work with that and you have those first benefits, which is already after a couple of hours. While having the most nice example, if I have board, and I give them all a white piece of paper, and ask them, can you write down the strategy of the company and I get five different back. And we just say, it is important to have strategy connected to operations, how can we start change there? So, that's the way we start it. And then you already see benefits there. But during the process, and with the model capability of the platform, by bringing more and more into the connect cockpits, the more you see and the more benefits you'll have. So we have examples of total productivity of a company in a power plant of increasing 20% productivity. >> 20%, wow! >> Yeah, absolutely. And we even have performance where we have 90% savings, 90% savings of getting all the reports in place. Yeah, that's a really interesting numbers, I can tell you. >> It's amazing how much inefficiency there is still in so many places that can be wrung out with the right kind of application and the right focus. >> Yeah, definitely. And there is a reason why there is that possibility because when organizations grow, they will be impacted on different, how do you say it? >> Departments? >> Departments, yeah, different departments. So, then you're lacking an in twins view, if everybody is looking in his own silo, which is a common nature of grow, but while having the connected cockpits and connecting the dots there, you find really money. >> That's what were lookin' for. >> I know one of the big objectives is for customers to be able to see results right away and to see benefits right away and that was also a point that was made in the keynote by CEO Darren Roos, is this real time to value the customers are looking for. Do customers have almost unrealistic expectations though because of this 24/7 world that we live in, that they are going to see something right away, this return on investment. And is that ever a challenge that you're trying to meet? >> Well, not really. You can expect it, but up so far, and we're quite busy for several years right now, it was always the other way around. So, the customer was like, "Uh? Wow! Ooh!" (hosts laugh) >> So, they didn't expect us, and that's what I like then see you coming, and then bang, the result is there. But as I said earlier, "Think big, but make small steps". And then the old implementation approach, and the model-driven nature of the product, gives us the opportunity to work work in sprints, because I don't believe in waterfall approaches, or blueprinting organizations because what happens today or tomorrow, we don't know, and well, how can I handle if I have to do blueprinting up months, you don't know what's happening. So that's why we have a very agile approach and the sprint methodology in the implementation, and every sprint is actually a business case in itself. As one example, we have now, with a service customer in the UK, we even have a cost-savings of 27 million pounds over a couple of years, and it's not my mats, but there were their own figures. So, they figured out like that, so that's good. >> It's a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. >> It is isn't it? >> It's such a simple concept of a lot people are still baked into this, "I need to define it, I need an MRG, "and a PRD, and we're going to put this big implementation" and that's just not it. Just do, right? Just move a little further, 'cuz you're never there anyway, right? >> Exactly, it's a transformation path, but it's a daily transformation. >> I'm wondering if you've observed any ancillary benefits of this digital twin concept in the sense of encouraging more experimentation in companies? As Jeff was talking about, "If I move this lever this way, "and this this way, if I make this tweek, tinker here or there, are you seeing that in the sense of companies, and individual employees, just being more willing to try things? >> Yeah, but it's very depending on the type of organization. I have to be honest. But yes, I do see, of course, people are used to get their information. The early newspapers, less and less newspapers on paper are there, and so, which is helping to use cockpits on a digital way. But the thing is, and that's very interesting, if we all walk the same way, and that's the funny thing is if you do it on the approach like the EOI approach, from a strategy to an operation approach, instead of making pictures out of data, then you direct everybody in the same way. And in every organization, you have people, they walk like this, people they do like this, and it's a combination, but the interesting thing is, if you all walk the same direction, then the benefit is bang, it's massive. And that's really interesting because if you have people that walk the other way around, yeah. And that's actually the digital twin, and I think EOI in this case, if you talk about digital transformation. For digital transformation, you need a digital twin, you need IFS EOI. >> I need a digital twin. (hosts laugh) >> It's a great concept, again we hear it all the time in industrial devices as a really interesting way to model and test, and like you said, "Be predictive and prescriptive", but I've never really heard it applied to the application of an organization which is at least as complex as a jet engine. >> It is, it is! For people it's the blue worker and the white worker, and the color in this case, and now this is the next step. And it sounds logic, isn't it? >> Yeah! >> Absolutely! >> Yeah, especially when you start testing and tweeking things. >> And in the end, you have reality, and reality is changing. And then you have the digital twin. And of course, so the digital twin should be changing of course. If the real world is changing, and this digital twin should be changed. They're both connected, but if want to make scenarios and predictive elements in the digital twin, then the real organization has to change. And that's absolutely the next step, and we're just good at it. >> Well, thanks so much for joining us, Peter. It's been a really great conversation. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, We will have more from the Cube's live coverage of IFS World in a little bit.

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IFS World here at Georgia here at World Congress Center I'm your host Rebecca Knight and along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We are joined by Cindy Jowden, she is the CEO North America a position she has held since 2004. Thanks so much for joining us Cindy. >> Good morning, how are you? >> Good, I'm good. >> Great. >> Good. >> It's our first IFS World, it's quite a show you guys have. >> Yeah, we're very excited, you know it's such a great opportunity for us to, you know, connect with so many of our great customers. >> So, tell us a little bit about the theme of this year's conference which is Connect to What's Next. What, what is that all about? >> Well, it's about connecting to what's going on next in technology, and in business, and in the economy. You know, we've got many, you know great customers who are, you know, medium to large size industries and they're having you know, all different kinds of things come toward them around business transformations, you know, their customers are becoming more demanding, consumers are becoming more demanding, and so this conference really helps them see not only what they're facing today but what they're facing for the future. You know, we've got many levels of people that come to this conference you know, we've got CFO's, CIO's to power users and so there's something here really for everyone. So, you know if you want to talk about trends in the industry, you want to talk about what's going on with our new versions of products, that's available. If you are a power user and you're in finance and you just want to go connect with a industry expert to find out how you can do your job easier, it's all here. >> So, it's not only what is next in the technology, it's also connecting human to human. >> Oh. >> I mean that's really what the congress is about. >> Oh, most definitely, you know it's really fun because you'll see you know, customers that maybe haven't seen each other in person since the last world conference. But, they connect and they talk all the time you know via the phone or Skype or whatever, but they see each other and they run and they hug each other and they say, "oh it's so good "to be able to see what's going on" and you know our customers share so much and so that's really just a great opportunity and also for our customers to connect with our experts and you know, the people that they work with, you know from day to day as well. >> Man: So you're CEO of North America. >> I'm the president of the Americas. >> President of the Americas. >> Yes. >> Which includes the southern hemisphere, right? >> Yes, you don't want to forget our friends in Latin America. >> That's right. So it's a Swedish, founded in Sweden, so how are things going in North America or South America, excuse me the Americas, and what kind of values and things that you take from a Swedish based company that you're applying here in the Americas that's maybe a little bit different than a company that was founded in Silicone Valley or someplace like that. >> That's a great question, you know at IFS we've got you know strong you know, Swedish roots and Swedish heritage which says, you know, do what's right, work hard, stay close to your customer and you know, say what you can do and if you can't do something, make sure you say that as well. So, it's setting that right expectations, and we've taken that and that's really pervasive through all that we do. And, you know, we want to make sure that we, you know, can do, you know, say what we do, deliver on what we do, and then, you know, our employees love working with our customers and I think our customers feel you know, feel that we're partners and it's not something that you know, we're not just saying something to get the next deal. It's not unusual for us to say well, I'm sorry, you know, we shouldn't work together because what you want to do Mr. Prospect, is something different and it's not really in our focus and you know and sometimes it's hard to do especially if you're in sales is to walk away from somebody who's ready to buy business, right? >> Right, right. >> But, we want to make sure that you know, the customers that we work with are really good fits for where we're going because these are really long term relationships. >> Right, and how about that, it probably increases your probability of customer success pretty dramatically if you can actually deliver you know, what they want. >> Oh, most definitely, most definitely and you know certainly we also, I don't have the largest marketing budget depending on you know, my competitors that I deal with and so I really depend on great customer satisfaction and great customer references to help, you know, bring the next prospect on as part of the IFS family. And, you know, and our customers I think are some of our best sales people out there. It's really, it's really great. >> One of the things that the CEO talked about in the key note was really about building trust and you were just talking about your marketing budget. He also said, we're not going to market nonsense. Can you talk a little bit about how you build that trust, being honest with customers, obviously, sorry we can't do that, we can't deliver that, but we can deliver this. How, what else, what other kinds of ways do you make sure that you are building the kind of trusting, collaborative relationship with customers that you want? >> Well, it starts with listening. I mean, when you meet with a customer you got to step back, you have to listen, you have to be willing to listen to what you're doing well, and what you're, you know, what you need to improve on. And then you need to be able to take that in and then you know, synthesize it and then, you know, figure out how you're going to improve, you know and at IFS we're always striving to improve, not just with our products and you can see you know, we just released Applications 10 and that's exciting and many many things that are in Apps 10 came from feedback from our customers and from the user group. But, it's also listening with how we do service or how we work with our partners or do we need more partners? You know, we, you know, we have to just, you know be very open and communicative with our customers and I think everybody says that, you know, but you know, you don't say and say oh, I'm not going to listen to my customer. But, you really have to listen and then put it into action. >> Right, right. And, it's not easy to be maniacally focused on your customers, a lot of people say they are but when you peel back just a little bit they're more focused on their products, they're more focused on the competition, they're more focused on a lot of stuff so it is hard to be really singularly focused but you guys are kind of in services management management business so you work with those types of businesses that they themselves are really active in managing that client relationship. >> Oh, most definitely and when they're involved in that business they have very high expectations of what they expect, you know, on the other side when they're the customer as well. And I think we've learned some things from them, too and you know and how they, their service levels and things that they expect from that particular area. I also think it has something to do with the fact that, when we, you know IFS has been in the U.S. for, 20 some years now. But, we didn't come as the biggest player and so we really had to listen. We really had to work directly with those customers and you know we really needed to make sure that every one of those implementations was successful because we needed to you know have that customer ground swell of you know this is the greatest you know greatest software out there to help us continue to grow. >> Right. >> Really prove yourself. >> Exactly, exactly because I can. >> We're number two, we try harder right? >> Exactly, yeah. >> I mean it's a great its a great person to get together with versus we're number one and we're cocky and arrogant and don't care what you say. >> Exactly, exactly, exactly, yeah. >> So, so what is next, I mean we've seen the introduction of IFS 10 and I know we have some early adopters that it's already live with. You've got great scores, your NPS score, your Gartner insight scores are very high. What are some of your ambitions for growth? >> Well, certainly we want, you know, I would look to have the Americas be the largest region for IFS. I mean, that's, I think that you know we've got a great opportunity here. We've got a large market, we've got a great product and you know certainly we just want to continue to grow and so you know right now we are a large percentage of the IFS revenue but we want that to be even larger here in North America and in the Americas, so I think that's certainly very important to us. And we want to grow not only with what we're doing with IFS applications in its core, but also as we're adding new pieces with IFS, new add on products, new technologies to be able to make sure that our customers understand what we're doing there and how that can help their business. You know, I think it was interesting Dan's keynote today was talking about cloud which was a few years ago and now it's mainstream for us. Last time it was talking about IOT and now we've got more and more customers doing that, and so certainly we're looking about artificial intelligence and everybody is talking about that but at IFS we don't just want to say these buzz words. We want to really figure out as a customer what you need, how can you use this technology and monetize it, right because no one implements technology just to implement it. You want to have it help your business. And, so you know those are the kinds of things we're working on what's next and then there's going to be the next thing after you know, artificial intelligence and the next thing and that's why we depend on labs so we're always ahead of the curve and we can be bringing what our customers need. >> I thought it was interesting on Darren's keynote the other thing really is function versus experience, which he talked about time and time again and then with the Arena demonstration, kind of getting to a unified UI experience across all the different platforms. Looks like in nine you had kind of a different hodge podge of five and then you showed how Arena slowly replacing all of them so you'll have this unified experience. But, that's an interesting point of view, really to focus on the experience ahead of really the function and that seemed to be a pretty clear message in his keynote. >> Well, we've been focusing on user experience, that's been one of our you know, core things for the product road map for many years and I think Dan talked about that as well. Certainly it's a balance because if you don't have the feature and function it doesn't matter what your user experience is, you're not going to use it. But, IFS is a very feature rich product and then you need to make sure that you can make it easier to use and so certainly it is focusing on that user experience but continuing to add the functionality that we need to support that as well. And you know, millennials today, they expect to be able just to sit down, they don't want to go to days of training, they don't want to have to. It just should be intuitive and that's our, you know, really what we're trying to do is just to make sure that it's as intuitive to use as a consumer product but really has the depth that you need to get your job done because you know, our customers they have complex businesses and complex business problems that they need to solve and so we need to make sure that we can develop, you know use both and have both of them for our customers to use. >> But, historically in the ERP space was always function over experience and a lot of the historical companies had a pretty bad rap for the user experience so you know, to really prioritize that and then to add some of the automation and the AI to hide certain levels of that detail that you just don't need to see under the UI. I thought that was pretty impressive. >> Yeah, I think it is, I think it is and I think it's very special for where we're going and if you don't, people never really get to implement all the features and functions underneath it. And what my hope is, is that with a good user experience people will use more of the product and then they'll be able to use more of the features and functions that are there today and that we're adding for the future, and they can use that to make their businesses even better. >> So are you working with the customers in the labs, too? I mean, how, how, at what point, 'cause you said that's why you have the labs so you can experiment and iterate and then, but then how do you know what the customer, what is intuitive to the customer and then what the customer needs, how closely? >> Well we'll bring customers into the labs. We will do a labs tour, we did last year that we did that and you let some customers see that. Then our customers know that everything that we do in the labs doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to come out, right? Because you know, we want, we don't want them to fail, but they have the right to fail in the labs because you learn a lot about, you know, what didn't work as well. So, it's making sure that when we have events like this, you know, there's the innovation center over there and making sure that, you know, getting feedback on what they're doing there and letting customers see there and get their input. It's all, once again, about we've got ideas, we need to bring those ideas to the customer, listen to them, get their feedback, listen, and then take it back, synthesize it and go to the next step. >> Deliver it. >> You talked about growth, being a big objective. Are there any particular market segments that you're, that you're looking at? >> Well IFS has had an industry focus for quite some time and we don't expect to change that industry focus. You know, we're very focused on customers who make products and who can, you know, maintain and service assets and so you know right now we're very strong in aerospace and defense, we're extremely strong in service. You know we're ranked highest on those. We've got a great customer base in industrial manufacturing and process and in those particular industries and so we're going to continue to focus on those. I don't see that we're going to go outside those industries because there is more than enough market here in the Americas for us to focus on those and to be very good at it and we need to focus and be extremely good at what we do. Therefore, we can keep the good customer satisfaction. >> All right, and then we just had Tobias on too talking about IOT and really starting to integrate multiple data sources you know a lot more stuff into your existing application to expand on your capabilities. >> Cindy: Oh, most definitely, that's certainly the point. >> You don't need to build a bunch of new stuff necessarily. >> Cindy: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> Great, well Cindy thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. We've had a great time talking to you. >> Cindy: Great, it was a pleasure, thank you. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we will have more from IFS World, theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (techno music)