(energetic music) >> Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of WiDS 2023. This is the eighth annual Women in Data Science Conference. As you know, WiDS is not just a conference or an event, it's a movement. This is going to include over 100,000 people in the next year WiDS 2023 in 200-plus countries. It is such a powerful movement. If you've had a chance to be part of the Livestream or even be here in person with us at Stanford University, you know what I'm talking about. This is Lisa Martin. I have had the pleasure all day of working with two fantastic graduate students in Stanford's Data Journalism Master's Program. Hannah Freitag has been here. Tracy Zhang, ladies, it's been such a pleasure working with you today. >> Same wise. >> I want to ask you both what are, as we wrap the day, I'm so inspired, I feel like I could go build an airplane. >> Exactly. >> Probably can't. But WiDS is just the inspiration that comes from this event. When you walk in the front door, you can feel it. >> Mm-hmm. >> Tracy, talk a little bit about what some of the things are that you heard today that really inspired you. >> I think one of the keyword that's like in my mind right now is like finding a mentor. >> Yeah. >> And I think, like if I leave this conference if I leave the talks, the conversations with one thing is that I'm very positive that if I want to switch, say someday, from Journalism to being a Data Analyst, to being like in Data Science, I'm sure that there are great role models for me to look up to, and I'm sure there are like mentors who can guide me through the way. So, like that, I feel reassured for some reason. >> It's a good feeling, isn't it? What do you, Hannah, what about you? What's your takeaway so far of the day? >> Yeah, one of my key takeaways is that anything's possible. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, if you have your vision, you have the role model, someone you look up to, and even if you have like a different background, not in Data Science, Data Engineering, or Computer Science but you're like, "Wow, this is really inspiring. I would love to do that." As long as you love it, you're passionate about it, and you are willing to, you know, take this path even though it won't be easy. >> Yeah. >> Then you can achieve it, and as you said, Tracy, it's important to have mentors on the way there. >> Exactly. >> But as long as you speak up, you know, you raise your voice, you ask questions, and you're curious, you can make it. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's one of my key takeaways, and I was just so inspiring to hear like all these women speaking on stage, and also here in our conversations and learning about their, you know, career path and what they learned on their way. >> Yeah, you bring up curiosity, and I think that is such an important skill. >> Mm-hmm. >> You know, you could think of Data Science and think about all the hard skills that you need. >> Mm, like coding. >> But as some of our guests said today, you don't have to be a statistician or an engineer, or a developer to get into this. Data Science applies to every facet of every part of the world. >> Mm-hmm. >> Finances, marketing, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, you name it, Data Science has the power and the potential to unlock massive achievements. >> Exactly. >> It's like we're scratching the surface. >> Yeah. >> But that curiosity, I think, is a great skill to bring to anything that you do. >> Mm-hmm. >> And I think we... For the female leaders that we're on stage, and that we had a chance to talk to on theCUBE today, I think they all probably had that I think as a common denominator. >> Exactly. >> That curious mindset, and also something that I think as hard is the courage to raise your hand. I like this, I'm interested in this. I don't see anybody that looks like me. >> But that doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. >> Exactly. >> Exactly, in addition to the curiosity that all the women, you know, bring to the table is that, in addition to that, being optimistic, and even though we don't see gender equality or like general equality in companies yet, we make progress and we're optimistic about it, and we're not like negative and complaining the whole time. But you know, this positive attitude towards a trend that is going in the right direction, and even though there's still a lot to be done- >> Exactly. >> We're moving it that way. >> Right. >> Being optimistic about this. >> Yeah, exactly, like even if it means that it's hard. Even if it means you need to be your own role model it's still like worth a try. And I think they, like all of the great women speakers, all the female leaders, they all have that in them, like they have the courage to like raise their hand and be like, "I want to do this, and I'm going to make it." And they're role models right now, so- >> Absolutely, they have drive. >> They do. >> Right. They have that ambition to take something that's challenging and complicated, and help abstract end users from that. Like we were talking to Intuit. I use Intuit in my small business for financial management, and she was talking about how they can from a machine learning standpoint, pull all this data off of documents that you upload and make that, abstract that, all that complexity from the end user, make something that's painful taxes. >> Mm-hmm. >> Maybe slightly less painful. It's still painful when you have to go, "Do I have to write you a check again?" >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Okay. >> But talking about just all the different applications of Data Science in the world, I found that to be very inspiring and really eye-opening. >> Definitely. >> I hadn't thought about, you know, we talk about climate change all the time, especially here in California, but I never thought about Data Science as a facilitator of the experts being able to make sense of what's going on historically and in real-time, or the application of Data Science in police violence. We see far too many cases of police violence on the news. It's an epidemic that's a horrible problem. Data Science can be applied to that to help us learn from that, and hopefully, start moving the needle in the right direction. >> Absolutely. >> Exactly. >> And especially like one sentence from Guitry from the very beginnings I still have in my mind is then when she said that arguments, no, that data beats arguments. >> Yes. >> In a conversation that if you be like, okay, I have this data set and it can actually show you this or that, it's much more powerful than just like being, okay, this is my position or opinion on this. And I think in a world where increasing like misinformation, and sometimes, censorship as we heard in one of the talks, it's so important to have like data, reliable data, but also acknowledge, and we talked about it with one of our interviewees that there's spices in data and we also need to be aware of this, and how to, you know, move this forward and use Data Science for social good. >> Mm-hmm. >> Yeah, for social good. >> Yeah, definitely, I think they like data, and the question about, or like the problem-solving part about like the social issues, or like some just questions, they definitely go hand-in-hand. Like either of them standing alone won't be anything that's going to be having an impact, but combining them together, you have a data set that illustrate a point or like solves the problem. I think, yeah, that's definitely like where Data Set Science is headed to, and I'm glad to see all these great women like making their impact and combining those two aspects together. >> It was interesting in the keynote this morning. We were all there when Margot Gerritsen who's one of the founders of WiDS, and Margot's been on the program before and she's a huge supporter of what we do and vice versa. She asked the non-women in the room, "Those who don't identify as women, stand up," and there was a handful of men, and she said, "That's what it's like to be a female in technology." >> Oh, my God. >> And I thought that vision give me goosebumps. >> Powerful. (laughs) >> Very powerful. But she's right, and one of the things I think that thematically another common denominator that I think we heard, I want to get your opinions as well from our conversations today, is the importance of community. >> Mm-hmm. >> You know, I was mentioning this stuff from AnitaB.org that showed that in 2022, the percentage of females and technical roles is 27.6%. It's a little bit of an increase. It's been hovering around 25% for a while. But one of the things that's still a problem is attrition. It doubled last year. >> Right. >> And I was asking some of the guests, and we've all done that today, "How would you advise companies to start moving the needle down on attrition?" >> Mm-hmm. >> And I think the common theme was network, community. >> Exactly. >> It takes a village like this. >> Mm-hmm. >> So you can see what you can be to help start moving that needle and that's, I think, what underscores the value of what WiDS delivers, and what we're able to showcase on theCUBE. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I think it's very important to like if you're like a woman in tech to be able to know that there's someone for you, that there's a whole community you can rely on, and that like you are, you have the same mindset, you're working towards the same goal. And it's just reassuring and like it feels very nice and warm to have all these women for you. >> Lisa: It's definitely a warm fuzzy, isn't it? >> Yeah, and both the community within the workplace but also outside, like a network of family and friends who support you to- >> Yes. >> To pursue your career goals. I think that was also a common theme we heard that it's, yeah, necessary to both have, you know your community within your company or organization you're working but also outside. >> Definitely, I think that's also like how, why, the reason why we feel like this in like at WiDS, like I think we all feel very positive right now. So, yeah, I think that's like the power of the connection and the community, yeah. >> And the nice thing is this is like I said, WiDS is a movement. >> Yes. >> This is global. >> Mm-hmm. >> We've had some WiDS ambassadors on the program who started WiDS and Tel Aviv, for example, in their small communities. Or in Singapore and Mumbai that are bringing it here and becoming more of a visible part of the community. >> Tracy: Right. >> I loved seeing all the young faces when we walked in the keynote this morning. You know, we come here from a journalistic perspective. You guys are Journalism students. But seeing all the potential in the faces in that room just seeing, and hearing stories, and starting to make tangible connections between Facebook and data, and the end user and the perspectives, and the privacy and the responsibility of AI is all... They're all positive messages that need to be reinforced, and we need to have more platforms like this to be able to not just raise awareness, but sustain it. >> Exactly. >> Right. It's about the long-term, it's about how do we dial down that attrition, what can we do? What can we do? How can we help? >> Mm-hmm. >> Both awareness, but also giving women like a place where they can connect, you know, also outside of conferences. Okay, how do we make this like a long-term thing? So, I think WiDS is a great way to, you know, encourage this connectivity and these women teaming up. >> Yeah, (chuckles) girls help girls. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> It's true. There's a lot of organizations out there, girls who Code, Girls Inc., et cetera, that are all aimed at helping women kind of find their, I think, find their voice. >> Exactly. >> And find that curiosity. >> Yeah. Unlock that somewhere back there. Get some courage- >> Mm-hmm. >> To raise your hand and say, "I think I want to do this," or "I have a question. You explained something and I didn't understand it." Like, that's the advice I would always give to my younger self is never be afraid to raise your hand in a meeting. >> Mm-hmm. >> I guarantee you half the people weren't listening or, and the other half may not have understood what was being talked about. >> Exactly. >> So, raise your hand, there goes Margot Gerritsen, the founder of WiDS, hey, Margot. >> Hi. >> Keep alumni as you know, raise your hand, ask the question, there's no question that's stupid. >> Mm-hmm. >> And I promise you, if you just take that chance once it will open up so many doors, you won't even know which door to go in because there's so many that are opening. >> And if you have a question, there's at least one more person in the room who has the exact same question. >> Exact same question. >> Yeah, we'll definitely keep that in mind as students- >> Well, I'm curious how Data Journalism, what you heard today, Tracy, we'll start with you, and then, Hannah, to you. >> Mm-hmm. How has it influenced how you approach data-driven, and storytelling? Has it inspired you? I imagine it has, or has it given you any new ideas for, as you round out your Master's Program in the next few months? >> I think like one keyword that I found really helpful from like all the conversations today, was problem-solving. >> Yeah. >> Because I think, like we talked a lot about in our program about how to put a face on data sets. How to put a face, put a name on a story that's like coming from like big data, a lot of numbers but you need to like narrow it down to like one person or one anecdote that represents a bigger problem. And I think essentially that's problem-solving. That's like there is a community, there is like say maybe even just one person who has, well, some problem about something, and then we're using data. We're, by giving them a voice, by portraying them in news and like representing them in the media, we're solving this problem somehow. We're at least trying to solve this problem, trying to make some impact. And I think that's like what Data Science is about, is problem-solving, and, yeah, I think I heard a lot from today's conversation, also today's speakers. So, yeah, I think that's like something we should also think about as Journalists when we do pitches or like what kind of problem are we solving? >> I love that. >> Or like kind of what community are we trying to make an impact in? >> Yes. >> Absolutely. Yeah, I think one of the main learnings for me that I want to apply like to my career in Data Journalism is that I don't shy away from complexity because like Data Science is oftentimes very complex. >> Complex. >> And also data, you're using for your stories is complex. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, how can we, on the one hand, reduce complexity in a way that we make it accessible for broader audience? 'Cause, we don't want to be this like tech bubble talking in data jargon, we want to, you know, make it accessible for a broader audience. >> Yeah. >> I think that's like my purpose as a Data Journalist. But at the same time, don't reduce complexity when it's needed, you know, and be open to dive into new topics, and data sets and circling back to this of like raising your hand and asking questions if you don't understand like a certain part. >> Yeah. >> So, that's definitely a main learning from this conference. >> Definitely. >> That like, people are willing to talk to you and explain complex topics, and this will definitely facilitate your work as a Data Journalist. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, that inspired me. >> Well, I can't wait to see where you guys go from here. I've loved co-hosting with you today, thank you. >> Thank you. >> For joining me at our conference. >> Wasn't it fun? >> Thank you. >> It's a great event. It's, we, I think we've all been very inspired and I'm going to leave here probably floating above the ground a few inches, high on the inspiration of what this community can deliver, isn't that great? >> It feels great, I don't know, I just feel great. >> Me too. (laughs) >> So much good energy, positive energy, we love it. >> Yeah, so we want to thank all the organizers of WiDS, Judy Logan, Margot Gerritsen in particular. We also want to thank John Furrier who is here. And if you know Johnny, know he gets FOMO when he is not hosting. But John and Dave Vellante are such great supporters of women in technology, women in technical roles. We wouldn't be here without them. So, shout out to my bosses. Thank you for giving me the keys to theCube at this event. I know it's painful sometimes, but we hope that we brought you great stories all day. We hope we inspired you with the females and the one male that we had on the program today in terms of raise your hand, ask a question, be curious, don't be afraid to pursue what you're interested in. That's my soapbox moment for now. So, for my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin, we want to thank you so much for watching our program today. You can watch all of this on-demand on thecube.net. You'll find write-ups on siliconeangle.com, and, of course, YouTube. Thanks, everyone, stay safe and we'll see you next time. (energetic music)

(gentle music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante of TheCUBE. This is day two of Fal.Con 2022, CrowdStrike's big customer event. Over 2000 people here, a hundred sessions, a lot of deep security talk. Amol Kulkarni is here. He's the chief product and engineering officer at CrowdStrike, and we're going to get into it. Amol, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Great to be here. >> I enjoyed your keynote today. It was very informative. First of all, how's the show going for you? >> It's going fantastic. I mean, first and foremost, like to be having everyone here in person, after three years, that's just out the world, right? So great to meet and a lot of great conversations across the board with customers, partners. It's been fantastic. >> Yeah, so I want to start with Cloud Native, it's kind of your dogma. This whole, the new acronym is CNAP Cloud Native Application Protection Platform. >> Amol: That's right. >> There's a mouthful. What is that? How does it relate to what you guys are doing? >> Yeah, so CNAP is what Gartner has coined as the term for covering entire cloud security. And they have identified various components in it. The first and foremost is the runtime protection, cloud workload protection, as we call it. Second is posture management. That's CSBM cloud security posture management. Third is CIEM, which we announced today. And then the fourth is shift left, kind of Dev SecOps part of cloud security. And all together Gartner coins that as a solution or a suite, if you will, to cover various aspects of cloud security. >> Okay, so shift left and then shield right. You still got to shield right. Is that where network security comes in? Which is not your main focus, but okay. So now it explains... Gartner is an acronym. Now I get it. But the CIEM announcement cloud infrastructure entitlement management. So you're managing identities. Is that right? Explain that in more detail. >> So, yeah, so I mean, as in the on-premise world, but even more exacerbated in the crowd world you have lots and lots of identities, both human identities and service accounts that are accessing cloud services. And lot of the time the rigor is not there in terms of what permissions those identities are provisioned with. So are they over provisioned? Do they have lots of rights that they should not have? Are they able... Are services able to connect to resources that they should not be able to connect to all of that falls under the entitlement management, the identity entitlement management part. And that's where CIEM comes in. So what we said is, we have a great identity security story for on-premise, right? And now we are applying that to understand identities, the entitlements they have, secrets that are lying around, maybe leaked, or just, available for adversaries to exploit in the cloud security world. So taking all of that into account and giving you... Giving customers a snapshot view of one single view to say; these are the identities, these are their permissions, this is where you can trim them down because these are the dependencies that are present across services. And you see something that's not right from a dependency perspective, you can say, okay, this connection doesn't make sense. There's something malicious going on here. So there's a lot that you can do by having that scope of identities. Be very narrowed down. It's a first step in the zero trust journey for the cloud infrastructure. >> So I have to ask you when you now extend this conversation to the edge, and operations technology. Traditionally the infrastructure has been air gapped by, you know, brute force air gap. Don't worry about it. And maybe hasn't had to worry so much about the hygiene. So now as you... as the business drives and forces essentially digital connect... Digital transformation and connectivity >> Connectivity. Yeah. >> I mean, wow, that's a playground for the hackers. >> You absolutely nailed it. So most of these infrastructure was not designed with security in mind, unfortunately, right? As you said, most of it was air-gapped, disconnected. And now everything is getting to be connected because the updates are being pushed rapidly changes are happening. So, and that really, in some sense has changed the environment in which these devices are operating. The operational technology, industrial control. We had the colonial pipeline breach last year. And, that really opened people's eyes like, Hey, nation state adversaries are going to come after critical infrastructure. And that can... That is going to cause impact directly to the end end users, to the citizens. So we have to protect this infrastructure. And that's why we announced discover for IOT as a new module that looks at and understands all the IOT and industrial control systems assets. >> So that didn't require an architectural change though. Right? That was a capability that you introduced with partners. Right? Am I right about that? You don't have to re-architect anything. It's just... Your architecture fits perfectly into those scenarios. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You actually... While the pace of change is there, architectural change is almost very difficult, because these are very large systems. They are built up over time. It take an industrial control system. The tracing speed is very different from a laptop. So yeah, you can't impose any architectural change. It has to be seamless from what the customers have. >> You were talking, I want to go back to CNAP. You were talking about the protecting the run time. You can do that with an agent. You had said agent... In your keynote. Agentless solutions don't give you runtime security protection. Can you double click on that and just elaborate? >> Yeah, absolutely. So what agentless solutions today are doing they're essentially tapping into APIs from AWS or Azure CloudTrail, for example and looking at misconfigurations. So that is indeed a challenge. So that is one part of the story, but that only gives you a partial view. Let's say that an attacker attacks and uses a existing credential. A legitimate credential to access one of the cloud services. And from there they escalate the privileges and then now start branching off the, the CSP, and the agentless-only solutions will not catch that. Right? So what you need is you, you need this agentless part but you have to couple that with; seeing the activity that's actually happening the living of the land attacks that cannot be caught by the CSP end-piece. So you need a combination of agentless and agent runtime to give that overall protection. >> What's the indicator of attack for a hacker that's living off the land, meaning using your own tools against you. >> That's right. So the indicators of attack are saying accessing services, for example, that are not normally accessed or escalating privileges. So you come in as a normal user, but then suddenly you have admin privileges because you have escalated those privileges, or you are moving laterally very rapidly from one place to another, or spraying across a lot of services in order to do reconnaissance and understand what is out there. So it's almost like looking for what is an abnormal attack path, abnormal behavior compared to what is normal and the good part is cloud. There's a lot that is normal, right? It's fairly constrained. It's not like a end user who is downloading stuff from the internet. And like doing all sorts of things. Cloud services are fairly constrained, so you can profile and you can figure out where there is a drift from the normal. And that's really the indicator of attack. In some sense, from cloud services >> In a previous life I want to change subjects. In a previous life. I spent a lot of time with CIOs. Helping them look at their application portfolio, understanding what to rationalize, what to get rid of, what to invest in, you know, bringing in new projects, cause you know, it's just you never throw a stuff away in IT. >> There is no obsolescence >> Right. So, but they wanted to... Anytime you go through these rationalization exercises change management is everything. And one of the hardest things to do was to map and understand the business impact of all the dependencies across the portfolio. Cause when application A needs this dataset. If you retire it, you're going to... It has ripple effects. And you talked about that in a security context today when you were talking about the asset graph and the threat graphs giving you the ability to understand those dependencies. Can you add some color to that? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So what we've done with the asset graph; It's a fundamental piece of technology that we've been building now for some time that complements the thread graph. And the asset graph looks at: Assets, identities, applications, and configuration. All of those aspects. And the interconnections between them. So if a user is accessing an application on a server, all those, and in what role, all of that relationship is tied together in the asset graph. So what that does now is, it gives you an ability to say this application connects to this application. And that's the dependency on that port, for example. So you can now build up a dependency map and then the thread graph, what it does, it looks at the continuous activity that's happening. So if you now take the events that are coming into the thread graph and the graphical representation of those, combine it with the asset graph, you get that full dependency map. And now you can start doing that impact analysis that you talked about. Which is... It's an unsolved problem, right? And that's why security as I said in my keynote is most people do not have their security tools enabled to the highest level or they don't have full coverage just because the pace of change is so rapid. They cannot keep up with it. So we want to enable change management, at a rapid pace where businesses and customers can say; we are confident about the change management, about the change we are going to implement. Because we know what the potential impact would be. We can validate, test it in a smaller subset and then roll it out quickly. And that's the journey we are on. Sort of the theme of my talk was to make IT and security friends again. >> Right, you talked about that gap and bringing those two together. You also had a great quote in there; 'The pace of change and securities is insane.' And so this assets graph capability, dependencies and the threat graph, help you manage that accelerating pace of change. Before I forget, I want to ask you about your interview with Girls Who Code. What was that like? Who'd you interview? I unfortunately couldn't see it. I apologize. >> Yeah, fantastic. So, Reshma Saujani she heads Girls Who Code and she first off had a very very powerful talk just from her own own experiences. And essentially, like, what do we need to do to get more women into computer science first, but then within that, into cybersecurity. and what all have they done with Girls Who Code. So very, I mean, we were very touched at the audience was like super into her talk. And then I had a chance to chat with her for a few minutes, ask her a few questions. Just my view was more like, okay. What can we do together? What can CrowdStrike do in our position, in to attract more women? We've done a lot in terms of tailoring our job descriptions to make sure it's more... Remove the biases. Tuning the interview processes to be more welcoming and Reshma gave an example saying; 'Hey, many of these interviews, they start with a baseball discussion.' And I mean, some women may maybe interested in it but may not all maybe. And so is that the right? Is it a gender kind-of affirming or gender neutral kind-of discussion or do you want to have other topics? So a lot of that is about training the interviewers because most of the interviewers are men, unfortunately. That's the mix we have. And it was a great discussion. I mean, just like very practical. She's very much focused on increasing the number of people and increasing the pipeline which is honestly the biggest problem. Because if we have a lot of candidates we would definitely hire them and essentially improve the diversity. And we've done a great job with our intern program, for example, which has helped significantly improve the diversity on our workforce. >> And, but the gap keeps getting bigger in terms of unfulfilled jobs. That leads me to developers as a constituency. Because you guys are building the security cloud. You're on a mission to do that. And to me, if you have a security cloud, it's got to be programmable. You're going to have developers there. You don't... From what I can tell you have a specific developer platform, but it's organic. It's sort of happening out there. What's the strategy around, I mean, the developer today is so critical in terms of implementing a lot of security strategy and putting it into action. They've got to secure the run time. They got to worry about the APIs. They got to secure the PaaS. They got to secure the containers. Right, and so what's your developer strategy. >> Yeah, so within cloud security, enabling developers to implement DevSecOps as a as a philosophy, as a strategy, is critical. And so we, we have a lot of offerings there on the shift-left side, for example, you talked about securing containers. So we have container image assessment where we plug in into the container repositories to check for vulnerabilities and bad configuration in the container images. We then complement that with the runtime side where our agent can protect the container from runtime violations, from breakouts, for example. So it's a combination. It's a full spectrum, right? From the developer building an application, all the way to the end. Second I'd say is, we are a very much an API first company. So all of the things that you can do from a user interface perspective, you can do from APIs what is enable that is a bunch of partners a rich partner ecosystem that is building using those APIs. So the developers within our partners are leveraging those APIs to build very cool applications. And the manifestation of that is CrowdStrike store where essentially we have as Josh mentioned, in his ski-notes, we have a agent cloud architecture that is very rich. And we said, okay, why can't we open that up for partners to enable them to leverage that architecture for their scenarios? So we have a lot of applications that are built on the CrowdStrike store, leveraging our platform, right. Areas that we are not in, for example. >> And here, describe it. Is there a PaaS layer that's purpose-built for CrowdStrike so that developers can build applications? >> That's a great question. So I'll say that we have a beginnings of a PaaS layer. We definitely talked about CrowdStrike store as being passed for cybersecurity but there's a lot more to do. And we are in the process of building up an application platform so that customers can build the applications for their SOC workflow or IT workflow and and Falcon Fusion is a key part of that. So Falcon Fusion is our automation platform built right into the security cloud. And what that enables customers to do is to define... Encode their business process the way they want and leverage the platform the way they want. >> It seems like a logical next step. Because you're going to enable a consistent experience across the board. And fulfill your promise, your brand promise, and the capabilities that you bring. And this ecosystem will explode once you announce that. >> And that's the notion we talk about of being the sales force of security. >> Right, right. Yeah. That's the next step. Amol, thank you so much. I got to run and wrap. We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> Congratulations on your keynote and all the success and great event. >> Appreciate it. Thank you very much for the time and great chatting with you. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back very shortly to wrap up from Fal.Con 2022. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Persichetti, the EVP of Global AWS Strategic Alliances at Jefferson Frank. A Tenth Revolution Group company. And Danielle Greshock, one of our own CUBE alumni, joins us, ISV PSA director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, women in tech. >> Thank you, Lisa! >> Great to be here! >> So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do, and about the partnership with AWS. >> Sure, so let's just start, Jefferson Frank is a Tenth Revolution Group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rebura, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the Tenth Revolution Group organization. >> Got it, Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS' perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >> Yes, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. We want to have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course, I've benefited from it. But also, I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. >> Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >> I just think that I've been able to get, a seat at the table. I think that. I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and want to see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. They give me a platform in order to do that, like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that... you always want to feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative. To bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there. >> Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gendered diversity perspective in tech? We know the numbers of women in technical positions. >> Right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping out, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing? >> So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at The Summit. And we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have, and how hard to believe but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years. Which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave. Seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be... you can't be what you can't see. So because they... we feel, collectively women, people who identify as women, just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly we put out a hiring, a salary, and hiring guide. Career and hiring guide every year. And the data points, and that's about 65 pages long, no one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. What I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, being that we have such a very big global platform, is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So... >> Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS' focus on women in tech. I was watching, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls Who Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%... that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS' specific focus here to get these numbers up. >> Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about how I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things. But then also, a more flexible working arrangements. But then also early... how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school. And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, and make it a less intimidating place. And have them look at employees from AWS and say like, "Oh, I can see myself in those people". And kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid-to-late career. But how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child, and how can we help with military women who want to... or underrepresented minorities who want to move into AWS? We have a great military program but then also just that early high school career getting them in that trajectory. >> Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel... >> Right. "There's something wrong with me, I don't get this." >> Right. >> Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >> Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that Summit that we did we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. Cause that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age, some people said high school. But then we said, even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African American woman said to me, "Sue". And I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, "Sue, it's really different for me as an African American woman" Or she identified as non-binary but she was relating to African American women. She said, "You're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey". And I thought, "This is how we're going to learn". I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that but those are the things that we need to educate people on. Those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring. We have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group. So much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >> Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >> Well, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... it used to be a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, "Oh, this is... Danielle is going to solve this." And I think a lot of folks now realize, "Oh, this is something that we all need to solve for." And a lot of my colleagues, who maybe a couple years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their or in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data, and actually make good decisions, and feel as though they often... these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data, and providing awareness, and providing tooling, and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. >> And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective. What is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives? >> Right, so when I go back to that careers and hiring guide, that is my focus today really, because the more data that we have and the data takes... we need people to participate in order to accurately get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking. We're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action then we can't get the right... the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be, therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website jeffersonfrank.com In the survey so we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a... Danielle and I we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute. Some of the other things that we're doing, we're partnering, as I mentioned, more of these events. We're doing around the Summits, we're going to be having more EDNI events, and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there, that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, "Listen, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We want to attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information?" So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well, because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers it inspires me. And I feel like I just want to give back. Make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >> Absolutely, we need- >> Love that metaphor. >> I do too! But to your point to get those numbers up not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need It's a help me help you situation. >> Exactly. >> So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey. Help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. >> Exactly. >> Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa! >> Thank you! Thank you! >> My pleasure! For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. (gentle xylophone music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with the cube. This is a special week it's Grace Hopper week, and Grace Hopper is the best name in tech conferences. The celebration of women in computing, and we've been going there for years we're not there this year, but one of the themes that comes up over and over at Grace Hopper is women and girls need to see women in positions that they can envision themselves being in someday. That is a really important piece of the whole diversity conversation is can I see people that I can role model after and I just want to bring up something from a couple years back from 2016 when we were there, we were there with Mimi Valdez, Christina Deoja and Dr. Jeanette Epps, Dr. Jeanette Epps is the astronaut on the right. They were there talking about "The Hidden Figures" movie. If you remember it came out 2016, it was about Katherine Johnson and all the black women working at NASA. They got no credit for doing all the math that basically keep all the astronauts safe and they made a terrific movie about it. And Janet is going up on the very first Blue Origin Space Mission Next year. This was announced a couple of months ago, so again, phenomenal leadership, black lady astronaut, going to go into space and really provide a face for a lot of young girls that want to get into that and its clearly a great STEM opportunity. So we're excited to have four terrific women today that well also are the leaders that the younger women can look up to and follow their career. So we're excited to have them so we're just going to go around. We got four terrific guests, our first one is Annabel Chang, She is the Head of State Policy and Government Regulations at Waymo. Annabel great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> from San Francisco >> Jeff: Awesome. Next up is Inamarie Johnson. She is the Chief People and Diversity Officer for Zendesk Inamarie, great to see you. Where are you calling in from today? >> Great to be here. I am calling in from Palos Verdes the state >> Jeff: awesome >> in Southern California. >> Jeff: Some of the benefits of a virtual sometimes we can, we couldn't do that without the power of the internet. And next up is Jennifer Cabalquinto she is the Chief Financial Officer of the Golden State Warriors. Jennifer, great to see you Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, I wish I was coming in from the Chase Center in San Francisco but I'm actually calling in from Santa Cruz California today. >> Jeff: Right, It's good to see you and you can surf a lot better down there. So that's probably not all bad. And finally to round out our panelists, Kate Hogan, she is the COO of North America for Accenture. Kate, great to see you as well. Where are you coming in from today? >> Well, it's good to see you too. I am coming in from the office actually in San Jose. >> Jeff: From the office in San Jose. All right, So let's get into it . You guys are all very senior, you've been doing this for a long time. We're in a kind of a crazy period of time in terms of diversity with all the kind of social unrest that's happening. So let's talk about some of your first your journeys and I want to start with you Annabel. You're a lawyer you got into lawyering. You did lawyering with Diane Feinstein, kind of some politics, and also the city of San Francisco. And then you made this move over to tech. Talk about that decision and what went into that decision and how did you get into tech? 'cause we know part of the problem with diversity is a pipeline problem. You came over from the law side of the house. >> Yes, and to be honest politics and the law are pretty homogenous. So when I made the move to tech, it was still a lot of the same, but what I knew is that I could be an attorney anywhere from Omaha Nebraska to Miami Florida. But what I couldn't do was work for a disruptive company, potentially a unicorn. And I seized that opportunity and (indistinct) Lyft early on before Ride Hailing and Ride Sharing was even a thing. So it was an exciting opportunity. And I joined right at the exact moment that made myself really meaningful in the organization. And I'm hoping that I'm doing the same thing right now at Waymo. >> Great, Inamarie you've come from one of my favorite stories I like to talk about from the old school Clorox great product management. I always like to joke that Silicon Valley needs a pipeline back to Cincinnati and Proctor and Gamble to get good product managers out here. You were in the classic, right? You were there, you were at Honeywell Plantronics, and then you jumped over to tech. Tell us a little bit about that move. Cause I'm sure selling Clorox is a lot different than selling the terrific service that you guys provide at Zendesk. I'm always happy when I see Zendesk in my customer service return email, I know I'm going to get taken care of. >> Oh wow, that's great. We love customers like you., so thank you for that. My journey is you're right from a fortune 50 sort of more portfolio type company into tech. And I think one of the reasons is because when tech is starting out and that's what Zendesk was a few five years back or so very much an early stage growth company, two things are top of mind, one, how do we become more global? And how do we make sure that we can go up market and attract enterprise grade customers? And so my experience having only been in those types of companies was very interesting for a startup. And what was interesting for me is I got to live in a world where there were great growth targets and numbers, things I had never seen. And the agility, the speed, the head plus heart really resonated with my background. So super glad to be in tech, but you're right. It's a little different than a consumer products. >> Right, and then Jennifer, you're in a completely different world, right? So you worked for the Golden State Warriors, which everybody knows is an NBA team, but I don't know that everyone knows really how progressive the Warriors are beyond just basketball in terms of the new Chase Center, all the different events that you guys put on it. And really the leadership there has decided we really want to be an entertainment company of which the Golden State Warrior basketball team has a very, very important piece, you've come from the entertainment industry. So that's probably how they found you, but you're in the financial role. You've always been in the financial role, not traditionally thought about as a lot of women in terms of a proportion of total people in that. So tell us a little bit about your experience being in finance, in entertainment, and then making this kind of hop over to, I guess Uber entertainment. I don't know even how you would classify the warriors. >> Sports entertainment, live entertainment. Yeah, it's interesting when the Warriors opportunity came up, I naturally said well no, I don't have any sports background. And it's something that we women tend to do, right? We self edit and we want to check every box before we think that we're qualified. And the reality is my background is in entertainment and the Warriors were looking to build their own venue, which has been a very large construction project. I was the CFO at Universal Studios Hollywood. And what do we do there? We build large attractions, which are just large construction projects and we're in the entertainment business. And so that sort of B to C was a natural sort of transition for me going from where I was with Universal Studios over to the Warriors. I think a finance career is such a great career for women. And I think we're finding more and more women entering it. It is one that you sort of understand your hills and valleys, you know when you're going to be busy and so you can kind of schedule around that. I think it's really... it provides that you have a seat at the table. And so I think it's a career choice that I think is becoming more and more available to women certainly more now than it was when I first started. >> Yeah, It's interesting cause I think a lot of people think of women naturally in human resources roles. My wife was a head of human resources back in the day, or a lot of marketing, but not necessarily on the finance side. And then Kate go over to you. You're one of the rare birds you've been at Accenture  for over 20 years. So you must like airplanes and travel to stay there that long. But doing a little homework for this, I saw a really interesting piece of you talking about your boss challenging you to ask for more work, to ask for a new opportunity. And I thought that was really insightful that you, you picked up on that like Oh, I guess it's incumbent on me to ask for more, not necessarily wait for that to be given to me, it sounds like a really seminal moment in your career. >> It was important but before I tell you that story, because it was an important moment of my career and probably something that a lot of the women here on the panel here can relate to as well. You mentioned airplanes and it made me think of my dad. My father was in the air force and I remember him telling stories when I was little about his career change from the air force into a career in telecommunications. So technology for me growing up Jeff was, it was kind of part of the dinner table. I mean it was just a conversation that was constantly ongoing in our house. And I also, as a young girl, I loved playing video games. We had a Tandy computer down in the basement and I remember spending too many hours playing video games down there. And so for me my history and my really at a young age, my experience and curiosity around tech was there. And so maybe that's, what's fueling my inspiration to stay at Accenture for as long as I have. And you're right It's been two decades, which feels tremendous, but I've had the chance to work across a bunch of different industries, but you're right. I mean, during that time and I relate with what Jennifer said in terms of self editing, right? Women do this and I'm no exception, I did this. And I do remember I'm a mentor and a sponsor of mine who called me up when I'm kind of I was at a pivotal moment in my career and he said you know Kate, I've been waiting for you to call me and tell me you want this job. And I never even thought about it. I mean I just never thought that I'd be a candidate for the job and let alone somebody waiting for me to kind of make the phone call. I haven't made that mistake again, (laughing) but I like to believe I learned from it, but it was an important lesson. >> It's such a great lesson and women are often accused of being a little bit too passive and not necessarily looking out for in salary negotiations or looking for that promotion or kind of stepping up to take the crappy job because that's another thing we hear over and over from successful people is that some point in their career, they took that job that nobody else wanted. They took that challenge that really enabled them to take a different path and really a different Ascension. And I'm just curious if there's any stories on that or in terms of a leader or a mentor, whether it was in the career, somebody that you either knew or didn't know that was someone that you got kind of strength from kind of climbing through your own, kind of career progression. Will go to you first Annabel. >> I actually would love to talk about the salary negotiations piece because I have a group of friends about that we've been to meeting together once a month for the last six years now. And one of the things that we committed to being very transparent with each other about was salary negotiations and signing bonuses and all of the hard topics that you kind of don't want to talk about as a manager and the women that I'm in this group with span all types of different industries. And I've learned so much from them, from my different job transitions about understanding the signing bonus, understanding equity, which is totally foreign to me coming from law and politics. And that was one of the most impactful tools that I've ever had was a group of people that I could be open with talking about salary negotiations and talking about how to really manage equity. Those are totally foreign to me up until this group of women really connected me to these topics and gave me some of that expertise. So that is something I strongly encourage is that if you haven't openly talked about salary negotiations before you should begin to do so. >> It begs the question, how was the sensitivity between the person that was making a lot of money and the person that wasn't? And how did you kind of work through that as a group for the greater good of everyone? >> Yeah, I think what's really eye opening is that for example, We had friends who were friends who were on tech, we had friends who were actually the entrepreneurs starting their own businesses or law firm, associates, law firm partners, people in PR, so we understood that there was going to be differences within industry and frankly in scale, but it was understanding even the tools, whether I think the most interesting one would be signing bonus, right? Because up until a few years ago, recruiters could ask you what you made and how do you avoid that question? How do you anchor yourself to a lower salary range or avoid that happening? I didn't know this, I didn't know how to do that. And a couple of women that had been in more senior negotiations shared ways to make sure that I was pinning myself to a higher salary range that I wanted to be in. >> That's great. That's a great story and really important to like say pin. it's a lot of logistical details, right? You just need to learn the techniques like any other skill. Inamarie, I wonder if you've got a story to share here. >> Sure. I just want to say, I love the example that you just gave because it's something I'm super passionate about, which is transparency and trust. Then I think that we're building that every day into all of our people processes. So sure, talk about sign on bonuses, talk about pay parody because that is the landscape. But a quick story for me, I would say is all about stepping into uncertainty. And when I coach younger professionals of course women, I often talk about, don't be afraid to step into the role where all of the answers are not vetted down because at the end of the day, you can influence what those answers are. I still remember when Honeywell asked me to leave the comfort of California and to come to the East coast to New Jersey and bring my family. And I was doing well in my career. I didn't feel like I needed to do that, but I was willing after some coaching to step into that uncertainty. And it was one of the best pivotal moment in my career. I didn't always know who I was going to work with. I didn't know the challenges and scope I would take on, but those were some of the biggest learning experiences and opportunities and it made me a better executive. So that's always my coaching, like go where the answers aren't quite vetted down because you can influence that as a leader. >> That's great, I mean, Beth Comstock former vice chair at GE, one of her keynotes I saw had a great line, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think that its a really good kind of message, especially in the time we're living in with accelerated change. But I'm curious, Inamarie was the person that got you to take that commitment. Would you consider that a sponsor, a mentor, was it a boss? Was it maybe somebody not at work, your spouse or a friend that said go for it. What kind of pushed you over the edge to take that? >> It's a great question. It was actually the boss I was going to work for. He was the CHRO, and he said something that was so important to me that I've often said it to others. And he said trust me, he's like I know you don't have all the answers, I know we don't have this role all figured out, I know you're going to move your family, but if you trust me, there is a ton of learning on the other side of this. And sometimes that's the best thing a boss can do is say we will go on this journey together. I will help you figure it out. So it was a boss, but I think it was that trust and that willingness for him to stand and go alongside of me that made me pick up my family and be willing to move across the country. And we stayed five years and really, I am not the same executive because of that experience. >> Right, that's a great story, Jennifer, I want to go to you, you work for two owners that are so progressive and I remember when Joe Lacob came on the floor a few years back and was booed aggressively coming into a franchise that hadn't seen success in a very long time, making really aggressive moves in terms of personnel, both at the coaches and the players level, the GM level. But he had a vision and he stuck to it. And the net net was tremendous success. I wonder if you can share any of the stories, for you coming into that organization and being able to feel kind of that level of potential success and really kind of the vision and also really a focus on execution to make the vision real cause vision without execution doesn't really mean much. If you could share some stories of working for somebody like Joe Lacob, who's so visionary but also executes so very, very effectively. >> Yeah, Joe is, well I have the honor of working for Joe, for Rick Welts to who's our president. Who's living legend with the NBA with Peter Guber. Our leadership at the Warriors are truly visionary and they set audacious targets. And I would say from a story the most recent is, right now what we're living through today. And I will say Joe will not accept that we are not having games with fans. I agree he is so committed to trying to solve for this and he has really put the organization sort of on his back cause we're all like well, what do we do? And he has just refused to settle and is looking down every path as to how do we ensure the safety of our fans, the safety of our players, but how do we get back to live entertainment? And this is like a daily mantra and now the entire organization is so focused on this and it is because of his vision. And I think you need leaders like that who can set audacious goals, who can think beyond what's happening today and really energize the entire organization. And that's really what he's done. And when I talked to my peers and other teams in there they're talking about trying to close out their season or do these things. And they're like well, we're talking about, how do we open the building? And we're going to have fans, we're going to do this. And they look at me and they're like, what are you talking about? And I said, well we are so fortunate. We have leadership that just is not going to settle. Like they are just always looking to get out of whatever it is that's happening and fix it. So Joe is so committed His background, he's an epidemiologist major I think. Can you imagine how unique a background that is and how timely. And so his knowledge of just around the pandemic and how the virus is spread. And I mean it's phenomenal to watch him work and leverage sort of his business acumen, his science acumen and really think through how do we solve this. Its amazing. >> The other thing thing that you had said before is that you basically intentionally told people that they need to rethink their jobs, right? You didn't necessarily want to give them permission to get you told them we need to rethink their jobs. And it's a really interesting approach when the main business is just not happening, right? There's just no people coming through the door and paying for tickets and buying beers and hotdogs. It's a really interesting talk. And I'm curious, kind of what was the reception from the people like hey, you're the boss, you just figure it out or were they like hey, this is terrific that he pressed me to come up with some good ideas. >> Yeah, I think when all of this happened, we were resolved to make sure that our workforce is safe and that they had the tools that they needed to get through their day. But then we really challenged them with re imagining what the next normal is. Because when we come out of this, we want to be ahead of everybody else. And that comes again from the vision that Joe set, that we're going to use this time to make ourselves better internally because we have the time. I mean, we had been racing towards opening Chase Center and not having time to pause. Now let's use this time to really rethink how we're doing business. What can we do better? And I think it's really reinvigorated teams to really think and innovate in their own areas because you can innovate anything, right?. We're innovating how you pay payables, we're all innovating, we're rethinking the fan experience and queuing and lines and all of these things because now we have the time that it's really something that top down we want to come out of this stronger. >> Right, that's great. Kate I'll go to you, Julie Sweet, I'm a big fan of Julie Sweet. we went to the same school so go go Claremont. But she's been super aggressive lately on a lot of these things, there was a get to... I think it's called Getting to 50 50 by 25 initiative, a formal initiative with very specific goals and objectives. And then there was a recent thing in terms of doing some stuff in New York with retraining. And then as you said, military being close to your heart, a real specific military recruiting process, that's formal and in place. And when you see that type of leadership and formal programs put in place not just words, really encouraging, really inspirational, and that's how you actually get stuff done as you get even the consulting businesses, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. >> Yeah Jeff, you're exactly right. And as Jennifer was talking, Julie is exactly who I was thinking about in my mind as well, because I think it takes strong leadership and courage to set bold bold goals, right? And you talked about a few of those bold goals and Julie has certainly been at the forefront of that. One of the goals we set in 2018 actually was as you said to achieve essentially a gender balance workforce. So 50% men, 50% women by 2025, I mean, that's ambitious for any company, but for us at the time we were 400,000 people. They were 500, 6,000 globally. So when you set a goal like that, it's a bold goal and it's a bold vision. And we have over 40% today, We're well on our path to get to 50%, I think by 2025. And I was really proud to share that goal in front of a group of 200 clients the day that it came out, it's a proud moment. And I think it takes leaders like Julie and many others by the way that are also setting bold goals, not just in my company to turn the dial here on gender equality in the workforce, but it's not just about gender equality. You mentioned something I think it's probably at as, or more important right now. And that's the fact that at least our leadership has taken a Stand, a pretty bold stand against social injustice and racism, >> Right which is... >> And so through that we've made some very transparent goals in North America in terms of the recruitment and retention of our black African American, Hispanic American, Latinex communities. We've set a goal to increase those populations in our workforce by 60% by 2025. And we're requiring mandatory training for all of our people to be able to identify and speak up against racism. Again, it takes courage and it takes a voice. And I think it takes setting bold goals to make a change and these are changes we're committed to. >> Right, that's terrific. I mean, we started the conversation with Grace Hopper, they put out an index for companies that don't have their own kind of internal measure to do surveys again so you can get kind of longitudinal studies over time and see how you're improving Inamarie, I want to go to you on the social justice thing. I mean, you've talked a lot about values and culture. It's a huge part of what you say. And I think that the quote that you use, if I can steal it is " no culture eats strategy for breakfast" and with the social injustice. I mean, you came out with special values just about what Zendesk is doing on social injustice. And I thought I was actually looking up just your regular core mission and value statement. And this is what came up on my Google search. So I wanted to A, you published this in a blog in June, taking a really proactive stand. And I think you mentioned something before that, but then you're kind of stuck in this role as a mind reader. I wonder if you can share a little bit of your thoughts of taking a proactive stand and what Zendesk is doing both you personally, as well as a company in supporting this. And then what did you say as a binder Cause I think these are difficult kind of uncharted waters on one hand, on the other hand, a lot of people say, hello, this has been going on forever. You guys are just now seeing cellphone footage of madness. >> Yeah Wow, there's a lot in there. Let me go to the mind reader comments, cause people are probably like, what is that about? My point was last December, November timing. I've been the Chief People Officer for about two years And I decided that it really was time with support from my CEO that Zendesk have a Chief Diversity Officer sitting in at the top of the company, really putting a face to a lot of the efforts we were doing. And so the mind reader part comes in little did I know how important that stance would become, in the may June Timing? So I joked that, it almost felt like I could have been a mind reader, but as to what have we done, a couple of things I would call out that I think are really aligned with who we are as a company because our culture is highly threaded with the concept of empathy it's been there from our beginning. We have always tried to be a company that walks in the shoes of our customers. So in may with the death of George Floyd and the world kind of snapping and all of the racial injustice, what we said is we wanted to not stay silent. And so most of my postings and points of view were that as a company, we would take a stand both internally and externally and we would also partner with other companies and organizations that are doing the big work. And I think that is the humble part of it, we can't do it all at Zendesk, we can't write all the wrongs, but we can be in partnership and service with other organizations. So we used funding and we supported those organizations and partnerships. The other thing that I would say we did that was super important along that empathy is that we posted space for our employees to come together and talk about the hurt and the pain and the experiences that were going on during those times and we called those empathy circles. And what I loved is initially, it was through our mosaic community, which is what we call our Brown and black and persons of color employee resource group. But it grew into something bigger. We ended up doing five of these empathy circles around the globe and as leadership, what we were there to do is to listen and stand as an ally and support. And the stories were life changing. And the stories really talked about a number of injustice and racism aspects that are happening around the world. And so we are committed to that journey, we will continue to support our employees, we will continue to partner and we're doing a number of the things that have been mentioned. But those empathy circles, I think were definitely a turning point for us as an organization. >> That's great, and people need it right? They need a place to talk and they also need a place to listen if it's not their experience and to be empathetic, if you just have no data or no knowledge of something, you need to be educated So that is phenomenal. I want to go to you Jennifer. Cause obviously the NBA has been very, very progressive on this topic both as a league, and then of course the Warriors. We were joking before. I mean, I don't think Steph Curry has ever had a verbal misstep in the history of his time in the NBA, the guy so eloquent and so well-spoken, but I wonder if you can share kind of inside the inner circle in terms of the conversations, that the NBA enabled right. For everything from the jerseys and going out on marches and then also from the team level, how did that kind of come down and what's of the perception inside the building? >> Sure, obviously I'm so proud to be part of a league that is as progressive and has given voice and loud, all the teams, all the athletes to express how they feel, The Warriors have always been committed to creating a diverse and equitable workplace and being part of a diverse and equitable community. I mean that's something that we've always said, but I think the situation really allowed us, over the summer to come up with a real formal response, aligning ourselves with the Black Lives Matter movement in a really meaningful way, but also in a way that allows us to iterate because as you say, it's evolving and we're learning. So we created or discussed four pillars that we wanted to work around. And that was really around wallet, heart, beat, and then tongue or voice. And Wallet is really around putting our money where our mouth is, right? And supporting organizations and groups that aligned with the values that we were trying to move forward. Heart is around engaging our employees and our fan base really, right? And so during this time we actually launched our employee resource groups for the first time and really excited and energized about what that's doing for our workforce. This is about promoting real action, civic engagement, advocacy work in the community and what we've always been really focused in a community, but this really hones it around areas that we can all rally around, right? So registration and we're really focused on supporting the election day results in terms of like having our facilities open to all the electorate. So we're going to have our San Francisco arena be a ballot drop off, our Oakland facilities is a polling site, Santa Cruz site is also a polling location, So really promoting sort of that civic engagement and causing people to really take action. heart is all around being inclusive and developing that culture that we think is really reflective of the community. And voice is really amplifying and celebrating one, the ideas, the (indistinct) want to put forth in the community, but really understanding everybody's culture and really just providing and using the platform really to provide a basis in which as our players, like Steph Curry and the rest want to share their own experiences. we have a platform that can't be matched by any pedigree, right? I mean, it's the Warriors. So I think really getting focused and rallying around these pillars, and then we can iterate and continue to grow as we define the things that we want to get involved in. >> That's terrific. So I have like pages and pages and pages of notes and could probably do this for hours and hours, but unfortunately we don't have that much time we have to wrap. So what I want to do is give you each of you the last word again as we know from this problem, right? It's not necessarily a pipeline problem, it's really a retention problem. We hear that all the time from Girls in Code and Girls in Tech. So what I'd like you to do just to wrap is just a couple of two or three sentences to a 25 year old, a young woman sitting across from you having coffee socially distanced about what you would tell her early in the career, not in college but kind of early on, what would the be the two or three sentences that you would share with that person across the table and Annabel, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I will have to make a pitch for transportation. So in transportation only 15% of the workforce is made up of women. And so my advice would be that there are these fields, there are these opportunities where you can make a massive impact on the future of how people move or how they consume things or how they interact with the world around them. And my hope is that being at Waymo, with our self driving car technology, that we are going to change the world. And I am one of the initial people in this group to help make that happen. And one thing that I would add is women spend almost an hour a day, shuttling their kids around, and we will give you back that time one day with our self driving cars so that I'm a mom. And I know that that is going to be incredibly powerful on our daily lives. >> Jeff: That's great. Kate, I think I might know what you're already going to say, but well maybe you have something else you wanted to say too. >> I don't know, It'll be interesting. Like if I was sitting across the table from a 25 year old right now I would say a couple of things first I'd say look intentionally for a company that has an inclusive culture. Intentionally seek out the company that has an inclusive culture, because we know that companies that have inclusive cultures retain women in tech longer. And the companies that can build inclusive cultures will retain women in tech, double, double the amount that they are today in the next 10 years. That means we could put another 1.4 million women in tech and keep them in tech by 2030. So I'd really encourage them to look for that. I'd encouraged them to look for companies that have support network and reinforcements for their success, and to obviously find a Waymo car so that they can not have to worry where kids are on for an hour when you're parenting in a few years. >> Jeff: I love the intentional, it's such a great word. Inamarie, >> I'd like to imagine that I'm sitting across from a 25 year old woman of color. And what I would say is be authentically you and know that you belong in the organization that you are seeking and you were there because you have a unique perspective and a voice that needs to be heard. And don't try to be anything that you're not, be who you are and bring that voice and that perspective, because the company will be a better company, the management team will be a better management team, the workforce will be a better workforce when you belong, thrive and share that voice. >> I love that, I love that. That's why you're the Chief People Officer and not Human Resources Officer, cause people are not resources like steel and cars and this and that. All right, Jennifer, will go to you for the wrap. >> Oh my gosh, I can't follow that. But yes, I would say advocate for yourself and know your value. I think really understanding what you're worth and being willing to fight for that is critical. And I think it's something that women need to do more. >> Awesome, well again, I wish we could go all day, but I will let you get back to your very, very busy day jobs. Thank you for participating and sharing your insight. I think it's super helpful. And there and as we said at the beginning, there's no better example for young girls and young women than to see people like you in leadership roles and to hear your voices. So thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay thank you. >> Thank you >> All right, so that was our diversity panel. I hope you enjoyed it, I sure did. I'm looking forward to chapter two. We'll get it scheduled as soon as we can. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Hello, and happy taco Tuesday CUBE viewers! You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Scott Hanselman, he is the partner program manager at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE! >> Absolutely, my pleasure! >> Rebecca: And happy taco Tuesday to you! Will code for tacos. >> Will code for tacos. >> I'm digging it, I'm digging it >> I'm a very inexpensive coder. >> So you are the partner program manager, but you're really the people's programmer at Microsoft. Satya Nadella up on the main stage yesterday, talking about programming for everyone, empowering ordinary citizen developers, and you yourself were on the main stage this morning, "App Development for All", why is this such a priority for Microsoft at this point in time? >> Well there's the priority for Microsoft, and then I'll also speak selfishly as a priority for me, because when we talk about inclusion, what does that really mean? Well it is the opposite of exclusion. So when we mean inclusion, we need to mean everyone, we need to include everyone. So what can we do to make technology, to make programming possible, to make everyone enabled, whether that be something like drag and drop, and PowerApps, and the Power platform, all the way down to doing things like we did in the keynote this morning with C# on a tiny micro-controller, and the entire spectrum in between, whether it be citizen programmers in Excel using Power BI to go and do machine learning, or the silly things that we did in the keynote with rock, paper scissors that we might be able to talk about. All of that means including everyone and if the site isn't accessible, if Visual Studio as a tool isn't accessible, if you're training your AI in a non-ethical way, you are consciously excluding people. So back to what Satya thinks is why can't everyone do this? SatyaSacha thinks is why can't everyone do this? Why are we as programmers having any gate keeping, or you know, "You can't do that you're not a programmer, "you know, I'm a programmer, you can't have that." >> So what does the future look like, >> Rebecca: So what does the future look like, if everyone knows how to do it? I mean, do some imagining, visioning right now about if everyone does know how to do this, or at least can learn the building blocks for it, what does technology look like? >> Well hopefully it will be ethical, and it'll be democratized so that everyone can do it. I think that the things that are interesting, or innovative today will become commoditized tomorrow, like, something as simple as a webcam detecting your face, and putting a square around it and then you move around, and the square, we were like, "Oh my God, that was amazing!" And now it's just a library that you can download. What is amazing and interesting today, like AR and VR, where it's like, "Oh wow, I've never seen augmented reality work like that!" My eight-year-old will be able to do it in five years, and they'll be older than eight. >> So Scott, one of the big takeaways I had from the app dev keynote that you did this morning was in the past it was trying to get everybody on the same page, let's move them to our stack, let's move them to our cloud, let's move them on this programming language, and you really talked about how the example of Chipotle is different parts of the organization will write in a different language, and there needs to be, it's almost, you know, that service bus that you have between all of these environments, because we've spent, a lot of us, I know in my career I've spent decades trying to help break down those silos, and get everybody to work together, but we're never going to have everybody doing the same jobs, so we need to meet them where they are, they need to allow them to use the tools, the languages, the platforms that they want, but they need to all be able to work together, and this is not the Microsoft that I grew up with that is now an enabler of that environment. The word we keep coming back to is trust at the keynote. I know there's some awesome, cool new stuff about .net which is a piece of it, but it's all of the things together. >> Right, you know I was teaching a class at Mesa Community College down in San Diego a couple of days ago and they were trying, they were all people who wanted jobs, just community college people, I went to community college and it's like, I just want to know how to get a job, what is the thing that I can do? What language should I learn? And that's a tough question. They wonder, do I learn Java, do I learn C#? And someone had a really funny analogy, and I'll share it with you. They said, well you know English is the language, right? Why don't the other languages just give up? They said, you know, Finland, they're not going to win, right? Their language didn't win, so they should just give up, and they should all speak English, and I said, What an awful thing! They like their language! I'm not going to go to people who do Haskell, or Rust, or Scala, or F#, and say, you should give up! You're not going to win because C won, or Java won, or C# won. So instead, why don't we focus on standards where we can inter-operate, where we can accept that the reality is a hybrid cloud things like Azure Arc that allows us to connect multiple clouds, multi-vendor clouds together. That is all encompassing the concept of inclusion, including everyone means including every language, and as many standards as you can. So it might sound a little bit like a Tower of Babel, but we do have standards and the standards are HTTP, REST, JSON, JavaScript. It may not be the web we deserve, but it's the web that we have, so we'll use those building block technologies, and then let people do their own thing. >> So speaking of the keynote this morning, one of the cool things you were doing was talking about the rock, paper, scissors game, and how it's expanding. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the new elements to rock, paper, scissors. >> So folks named Sam Kass, a gentleman named Sam Kass many, many years ago on the internet, when the internet was much simpler web pages, created a game called Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, and a lot of people will know that from a popular TV show on CBS, and they'll give credit to that show, in fact it was Sam Kass and Karen Bryla who created that, and we sent them a note and said, "Hey can I write a game about this?" And we basically built a Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock game in the cloud containerized at scale with multiple languages, and then we also put it on a tiny device, and what's fun about the game from a complexity perspective is that rock, paper, scissors is easy. There's only three rules, right? Paper covers rock, which makes no sense, but when you have five, it's hard! Spock shoots the Rock with his phaser, and then the lizard poisons Spock, and the paper disproves, and it gets really hard and complicated, but it's also super fun and nerdy. So we went and created a containerized app where we had all different bots, we had node, Python, Java, C#, and PHP, and then you can say, I'm going to pick Spock and .net, or node and paper, and have them fight, and then we added in some AI, and some machine learning, and some custom vision such that if you sign in with Twitter in this game, it will learn your patterns, and try to defeat you using your patterns and then, clicking on your choices and fun, snd then, clicking on your choices and fun, because we all want to go, "Rock, Paper, Scissors shoot!" So we made a custom vision model that would go, and detect your hand or whatever that is saying, this is Spock and then it would select it and play the game. So it was just great fun, and it was a lot more fun than a lot of the corporate demos that you see these days. >> All right Scott, you're doing a lot of different things at the show here. We said there's just a barrage of different announcements that were made. Love if you could share some of the things that might have flown under the radar. You know, Arc, everyone's talking about, but some cool things or things that you're geeking out on that you'd want to share with others? >> Two of the things that I'm most excited, one is an announcement that's specific to Ignite, and one's a community thing, the announcement is that .net Core 3.1 is coming. .net Core 3 has been a long time coming as we have began to mature, and create a cross platform open source .net runtime, but .net Core 3.1 LTS Long Term Support means that that's a version of .net core that you can put on a system for three years and be supported. Because a lot of people are saying, "All this open source is moving so fast! "I just upgraded to this, "and I don't want to upgrade to that". LTS releases are going to happen every November in the odd numbered years. So that means 2019, 2021, 2023, there's going to be a version of .net you can count on for three years, and then if you want to follow that train, the safe train, you can do that. In the even numbered years we're going to come out with a version of .net that will push the envelope, maybe introduce a new version of C#, it'll do something interesting and new, then we tighten the screws and then the following year that becomes a long term support version of .net. >> A question for you on that. One of the challenges I hear from customers is, when you talk about hybrid cloud, they're starting to get pulled apart a little bit, because in the public cloud, if I'm running Azure, I'm always on the latest version, but in my data center, often as you said, I want longer term support, I'm not ready to be able to take that CICD push all of the time, so it feels like I live, maybe call it bimodal if you want, but I'm being pulled with the am I always on the latest, getting the latest security, and it's all tested by them? Or am I on my own there? How do you help customers with that, when Microsoft's developing things, how do you live in both of those worlds or pull them together? >> Well, we're really just working on this idea of side-by-side, whether it be different versions of Visual Studio that are side-by-side, the stable one that your company is paying for, and then the preview version that you can go have side-by-side, or whether you could have .net Core 3, 3.1, or the next version, a preview version, and a safe version side-by-side. We want to enable people to experiment without fear of us messing up their machine, which is really, really important. >> One of the other things you were talking about is a cool community announcement. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> So this is a really cool product from a very, very small company out of Oregon, from a company called Wilderness Labs, and Wilderness Labs makes a micro-controller, not a micro-processor, not a raspberry pie, it doesn't run Linux, what it runs is .net, so we're actually playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock on this device. We've wired it all up, this is a screen from our friends at Adafruit, and I can write .net, so somehow if someone is working at, I don't know, the IT department at Little Debbie Snack Cakes, and they're making WinForms applications, they're suddenly now an IOT developer, 'cause they can go and write C# code, and control a device like this. And when you have a micro-controller, this will run for weeks on a battery, not hours. You go and 3D print a case, make this really tiny, it could become a sensor, it could become an IOT device, or one of thousands of devices that could check crops, check humidity, moisture wetness, whatever you want, and we're going to enable all kinds of things. This is just a commodity device here, this screen, it's not special. The actual device, this is the development version, size of my finger, it could be even smaller if we wanted to make it that way, and these are our friends at Wilderness Labs. and they had a successful Kickstarter, and I just wanted to give them a shout out, and I just wanted to give them a shoutout, I don't have any relationship with them, I just think they're great. >> Very cool, very cool. So you are a busy guy, and as Stu said, you're in a lot of different things within Microsoft, and yet you still have time to teach at community college. I'm interested in your perspective of why you do that? Why do you think it's so important to democratize learning about how to do this stuff? >> I am very fortunate and I think that we people, who have achieved some amount of success in our space, need to recognize that luck played a factor in that. That privilege played a factor in that. But, why can't we be the luck for somebody else, the luck can be as simple as a warm introduction. I believe very strongly in what I call the transitive value of friendship, so if we're friends, and you're friends, then the hypotenuse can be friends as well. A warm intro, a LinkedIn, a note that like, "Hey, I met this person, you should talk to them!" Non-transactional networking is really important. So I can go to a community college, and talk to a person that maybe wanted to quit, and give a speech and give them, I don't know, a week, three months, six months, more whatever, chutzpah, moxie, something that will keep them to finish their degree and then succeed, then I'm going to put good karma out into the world. >> Paying it forward. >> Exactly. >> So Scott, you mentioned that when people ask for advice, it's not about what language they do, is to, you know, is to,q you know, we talk in general about intellectual curiosity of course is good, being part of a community is a great way to participate, and Microsoft has a phenomenal one, any other tips you'd give for our listeners out there today? >> The fundamentals will never go out of style, and rather than thinking about learning how to code, why not think about learning how to think, and learning about systems thinking. One of my friends, Kishau Rogers, talked about systems thinking, I've hade her on my podcast a number of times, and we were giving a presentation at Black Girls Code, and I was talking to a fifteen-year-old young woman, and we were giving a presentation. It was clear that her mom wanted her to be there, and she's like, "Why are we here?" And I said, "All right, let's talk about programming "everybody, we're talking about programming. "My toaster is broken and the toast is not working. "What do you think is wrong?" Big, long, awkward pause and someone says, "Well is the power on?" I was like, "Well, I plugged a light in, "and nothing came on" and they were like, "Well is the fuse blown?" and then one little girl said "Well did the neighbors have power?", And I said, "You're debugging, we are debugging right?" This is the thing, you're a systems thinker, I don't know what's going on with the computer when my dad calls, I'm just figuring it out like, "Oh, I'm so happy, you work for Microsoft, "you're able to figure it out." >> Rebecca: He has his own IT guy now in you! >> Yeah, I don't know, I unplug the router, right? But that ability to think about things in the context of a larger system. I want toast, power is out in the neighborhood, drawing that line, that makes you a programmer, the language is secondary. >> Finally, the YouTube videos. Tell our viewers a little bit about those. you can go to D-O-T.net, so dot.net, the word dot, you can go to d-o-t.net, so dot.net, the word dot, slash videos and we went, and we made a 100 YouTube videos on everything from C# 101, .net, all the way up to database access, and putting things in the cloud. A very gentle, "Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood" on-ramp. A lot of things, if you've ever seen that cartoon that says, "Want to draw an owl? "Well draw two circles, "and then draw the rest of the fricking owl." A lot of tutorials feel like that, and we don't want to do that, you know. We've got to have an on-ramp before we get on the freeway. So we've made those at dot.net/videos. >> Excellent, well that's a great plug! Thank you so much for coming on the show, Scott. >> Absolutely my pleasure! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman., stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event. It's really all about 5G and what 5G is going to enable. You know, this is a really big technology that's very, very close. I think a lot closer than most people understand. And one of the most important components of 5G is it was designed from the ground up really not so much for people-to-people communications as much as machine-to-machine communications. So we're really excited to have someone who's right in the thick of that and talk about the implications, especially another topic that we hear all the time, which is Edge computing. So it's Alicia Abella. She is the VP of Operational Automation in Program Management from AT&T Labs. Alicia, welcome. >> Thank you for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely. So we were talking a little bit before we turn on the cameras about 5G and Edge computing. And how the two, while not directly tied together, are huge enablers of one another. I wonder if you can unpack a little bit about why is 5G such an important component to kind of the vision of Edge computing? >> Sure, absolutely. Yeah, happy to do so. So Edge computing is really about bringing processing power closer to the end device, closer to the end user, where a lot of the processing data analytics has to occur. And you want to do that because you want to be able to deliver the services and applications close to the edge, close to where the customer is, so that you can deliver on the speeds that those applications need. 5G plays a role because 5G is promising to be very fast and also very reliable and very secure. So now you've got three things to your advantage paired up with Edge to be able to deliver on a lot of these use cases that we hear a lot about when we talk about 5G, when we talk about Edge. Some example use cases are the autonomous vehicle. The autonomous vehicle is a classic example for Edge computing as well as 5G. And in fact, it illustrates a kind of continuum, because you can have processing that always has to remain in the car. Anything related to safety? That processing has to happen right on that device. The device in this case being the car. But there are other processing capabilities, like maybe updates to real-time maps. That could happen on the Edge. You still have to be near real-time, so you want to have that kind of processing and updating happening at the Edge. Then maybe you have something where you want to download some new entertainment, a movie to your car. Well, that can reside back at the data center, further away from where the device or the car is. So you've got this continuum. >> So really, what the 5G does is really open up the balance of how you can distribute that store computing and communications. It's always about latency. At the end of the day, it's always about latency. And as much as we want to get as much compute close, oh, and also, I guess power. Power and latency. >> Power and Edge actually go hand-in-hand as well. >> It's a big deal, right? >> Mhm. >> So what you're saying is, because of 5G, and the fact that now you have a much lower latency, faster connectivity port, you can now have some of that stuff maybe not at the Edge and enable that Edge device to do more, other things? >> Yes, so I often like to say that we are unleashing the device away from having it be tethered to the compute processor that's handling it and now you can go mobile. Because now what you do is, if the processing is happening on the Edge and not on the device, you save on battery life, but you also make the device more lightweight, easier to manage, easier to move around. The form factor can become smaller. So there's also an advantage to Edge computing to the device as well. >> Right. It's pretty interesting. There was an NVIDIA demo in the keynote of running a video game on the NVIDIA chips in a data center and pumping a really high resolution experience back out to the laptop screen I think is what he was using it for. And it's a really interesting use case in how when you do have these fast, reliable networks, you can shift the compute, and not just a peer compute, but the graphics, et cetera, and really start to redistribute that in lots of different ways that were just not even fathomable before. Before you had to buy the big gaming machine. You had to buy the big, giant GPU. You had to have that locally, and all that was running on your local machine. You just showed a demo where it's all running back in their data center in Santa Clara. Really opens up a huge amount of opportunity. >> That's right. So Edge computing is really distributed in nature. I mean, it is all about distribution. And distributing that compute power wherever you need it. Sprinkling it across the country of where you need it. So we've gone, there's been this pendulum shift, where we started with the mainframe, big rooms, lots of air conditioning, and then the pendulum swung over to the PC. And that client-server model. Where now you had your PC and you did your computing locally. And then it swung back the other way for Cloud computing where everything was centralized again and all that compute power was centralized. And now the pendulum is swinging back again the other way to this distributed model where now you've got your compute capabilities distributed across the country where you need it. >> Right. So interesting. I mean, networking was the last of the virtualized platform between storage and compute, and then finally networking. But if you really start to think of a world with basically infinite power, compute, infinite store, and infinite networking, basically asymptotically approaching zero pricing. Think of the world from that way. We're not there. We're never going to get to that absolute place, but it really opens up a lot of different ways to think about what you could do with that power. So I wonder if there's some other things you can share with us. At Labs, you guys are looking forward to this 5G world. What are some of the things that you see that just, wow, I would have never even thought that was even in the realm of possibility that some people are coming up with? >> Yeah. >> Any favorites? >> Oh, I think one of our favorites is certainly looking at the case of manufacturing. Even though you would think of manufacturing as very fixed, the challenge with manufacturing is that a lot of those robotics capabilities that are in the manufacturing assembly lines, for example, they're all based on wires and they can't change and upgrade what they're doing very quickly. So being able to deliver 5G, have things that are wireless, and have Edge compute capabilities that are very powerful means that they can now shift and move around their assembly lines very quickly. So that's going to help the economy. Help those businesses be able to adapt more quickly to changes in their businesses. And so that's one that is quite exciting to us. And I would say the next one that's also exciting for us would be, we talked about autonomous vehicles already, 'cause that one's kind of far out, right? >> I don't think it's as far as most people think, actually. We covered a lot of autonomous vehicle companies, and there's just so much research being done now. I don't think it's as far out as people think. >> Yes, and so I think we are definitely committed to deploying Edge compute. And in the process, from a more technical perspective, I think one of the things that we are going to be interested in doing is, and you alluded to it before, is how do you manage all of those applications and services and distribute them in a way that is economical, that we can do it at scale, that we can do it on demand? So that too is part of what's exciting about being able to deploy Edge. >> Yeah. It's pretty interesting, the manufacturing example, 'cause it came up again in the keynote to really embracing software-defined, embracing open source. And the takeaway was moving at the speed of software development, not moving at the speed of hardware development. Because software moves a lot faster. And can be more flexible. It's easy to respond to market demands, or competitive demands, or just to innovate a lot faster. So really taking that approach, and obviously a lot of conversation about you guys in the open Stack community and the open-source projects enables you and your customers to start to adapt to software-defined innovation as opposed to just pure hardware-defined innovation. >> That's right. That's right, yup. >> Alright, Alicia, I'll give you the final word. Any surprises? Oh, no, you've got a chat coming up, so why don't you give us a quick preview for what your conversation is going to be about later today? >> Yeah, thank you, Jeff. So yeah, later I'll be talking about AT&T's initiatives around encouraging women to pursue stem fields. In particular, computer science. It turns out that the number of women getting undergraduate degrees in computer science peaked in the mid-80s. And it's been going downhill since. Last year, only 17% of women were getting degrees in computer science So AT&T's mission, and what we announced today was a million dollar donation to the Girls Who Code organization. That's one of many different non-profit organizations that AT&T is involved with to make sure that we continue to encourage young women and also underrepresented minorities and others who want to get in the stem fields to get involved because technology is changing very quickly. We need people who can understand the technology, who can develop the software we talked about, and we need to get that pipeline filled up. And so we're very committed to helping the community and helping to encourage young girls to pursue degrees in stem. >> That's great. Girls Who Code is a fantastic organization. We've had 'em on. Anita Borg, I mean, there's so much good work that goes on out there, so that's a great announcement. And congratulations. >> Thank you. >> And I'm sure that's a meaningful contribution. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So Alicia, thanks for stopping by, and good luck this afternoon, and we'll see you next time. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> Alright. >> Appreciate it. >> She's Alicia, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Santa Clara, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Technovation's World Pitch 2018. Now, here's Sonia Tagare. >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Sonia Tagare here with theCUBE in Santa Clara, California, covering Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2018, a pitch competition for girls to develop apps in order to create a better, positive change in the world. This week, 12 finalist teams are competing for their chance to win the gold or silver scholarships. With us today, we have on Amy Kim, the Chief Operating Officer for Iridescent. Amy, congratulations, and welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Can you tell me more about Technovation? >> Technovation is a program for girls where girls identify a problem in their community and they build a mobile app and a business plan to help solve that problem. Our girls, this past year we had almost 20,000 girls participate from all around the world. We had about 115 different countries registered this year so we've had really big growth. We are in a ninth year of operation for this program, and Iridescent, who's our mother organization, we're about 13 years old. >> How did you get involved with all of this? >> I actually started off as a mentor and a volunteer here at Iridescent, so I used to volunteer for Technovation team when we used to do a small program in L.A. and San Francisco where girls used to physically come to the studio and do the Technovation program and also I used to be a mentor for our Curiosity Machine program, which is a hands-on engineering design challenge program and competition. I was a volunteer for about four years, and then I came on board as a staff member about four years ago. >> What have you noticed has been the change from when you came on to now? >> I think one thing we have done at Iridescent strategically is grow the program globally, and we did that by making our programs free and all of our curriculum accessible. What we've really relied on is training our volunteers. I think you've talked to some of the mentors, some of the regional ambassadors. The trainer model has really helped us grow, and then we're able to reach more girls at a lower cost. Most of the money that we are able to raise, we are able to serve more children and serve more kids. >> What method do you think that's really helping getting these girls noticing Technovation? Is it online, is it through mentorship? >> Actually a lot of it is word of mouth. We were featured in a documentary called Code Girl about two years ago, and that has helped us get a broader reach, too, but really it's one girl who participates or one volunteer who volunteered with us. And our RAs, our regional ambassadors, in each of their countries they really do a great job promoting on our behalf to get more girls an opportunity to be a part of this program. >> What are you most excited about for this year's competition? >> That's a little tricky, cause we always get a little attached to every team, and we really try hard not to pick a favorite, but I think one thing we've seen this year is we updated our curriculum last year and I think the curriculum has really shown to be really strong and then more and more countries can adapt it. I think just seeing what the girls can accomplish, if you guys, what you'll see is that the girls are tackling really hard problems and they bring their own unique perspectives. Just seeing how they approach a problem is, to me, very exciting. >> What are these girls judged on for their pitches? >> They're mostly judged on a few criteria. One is the actual technical ability of their apps and how well do they solve the problem that they are trying to solve. Also, what is their business plan, is this a doable thing, does this business already exist, what is unique. There will be a little bit of public speaking, also how they present themselves, and the actual technical ability of the apps as well. >> That's great. What do you hope Technovation will bring for the greater girls in tech community? >> I'm a chemist by training, and I was the only woman in my PhD program, and I think one thing that really comes up a lot is that women oftentimes don't have mentors, don't have a community, and I think for these girls, I hope that as they grow and as they go to college and they pursue their career that they have a community that they built from here that will carry on through their career. >> What success stories do you have from past Technovation winners? >> That's a tricky question cause we have so many. We have, sorry, I'm trying to remember her name. We have a student who participated about four years ago and she built an app to help Alzheimer's patients, and what she has done is she has actually created a start-up and has been featured in New York Times before. We have stories like that, but we also have stories like in the slums of India where girls don't have internet, they don't have power everyday, so what they will do is they will code on post-it notes. Then when the power will come on, they will turn on their internet and they will be able to code it on App Inventor altogether in that one hour. We have success that really varies and the way we count our success is really the fact that the girls had an opportunity that they may not have had otherwise. That's really how we count our success. Even if they don't become technology entrepreneurs, our goal really is that they try to tackle something hard, they learn through their failures, and they persisted is really our goal. >> That's wonderful, and we're so glad to be here at Technovation. Thank you for having us on. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for being here. I'm Sonia Tagare, and this is Amy Kim, and we're at Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2018. Stay tuned for more. 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(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Parc 55 in San Francisco covering the IBM CDO Strategy Summit. I'm here with Joel Horwitz who's the Vice President of Digital Partnerships & Offerings at IBM. Good to see you again Joel. >> Thanks, great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So I was just, you're very welcome- It was just, let's see, was it last month, at Think? >> Yeah, it's hard to keep track, right. >> And we were talking about your new role- >> It's been a busy year. >> the importance of partnerships. One of the things I want to, well let's talk about your role, but I really want to get into, it's innovation. And we talked about this at Think, because it's so critical, in my opinion anyway, that you can attract partnerships, innovation partnerships, startups, established companies, et cetera. >> Joel: Yeah. >> To really help drive that innovation, it takes a team of people, IBM can't do it on its own. >> Yeah, I mean look, IBM is the leader in innovation, as we all know. We're the market leader for patents, that we put out each year, and how you get that technology in the hands of the real innovators, the developers, the longtail ISVs, our partners out there, that's the challenging part at times, and so what we've been up to is really looking at how we make it easier for partners to partner with IBM. How we make it easier for developers to work with IBM. So we have a number of areas that we've been adding, so for example, we've added a whole IBM Code portal, so if you go to developer.ibm.com/code you can actually see hundreds of code patterns that we've created to help really any client, any partner, get started using IBM's technology, and to innovate. >> Yeah, and that's critical, I mean you're right, because to me innovation is a combination of invention, which is what you guys do really, and then it's adoption, which is what your customers are all about. You come from the data science world. We're here at the Chief Data Officer Summit, what's the intersection between data science and CDOs? What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, so when I was here last, it was about two years ago in 2015, actually, maybe three years ago, man, time flies when you're having fun. >> Dave: Yeah, the Spark Summit- >> Yeah Spark Technology Center and the Spark Summit, and we were here, I was here at the Chief Data Officer Summit. And it was great, and at that time, I think a lot of the conversation was really not that different than what I'm seeing today. Which is, how do you manage all of your data assets? I think a big part of doing good data science, which is my kind of background, is really having a good understanding of what your data governance is, what your data catalog is, so, you know we introduced the Watson Studio at Think, and actually, what's nice about that, is it brings a lot of this together. So if you look in the market, in the data market, today, you know we used to segment it by a few things, like data gravity, data movement, data science, and data governance. And those are kind of the four themes that I continue to see. And so outside of IBM, I would contend that those are relatively separate kind of tools that are disconnected, in fact Dinesh Nirmal, who's our engineer on the analytic side, Head of Development there, he wrote a great blog just recently, about how you can have some great machine learning, you have some great data, but if you can't operationalize that, then really you can't put it to use. And so it's funny to me because we've been focused on this challenge, and IBM is making the right steps, in my, I'm obviously biased, but we're making some great strides toward unifying the, this tool chain. Which is data management, to data science, to operationalizing, you know, machine learning. So that's what we're starting to see with Watson Studio. >> Well, I always push Dinesh on this and like okay, you've got a collection of tools, but are you bringing those together? And he flat-out says no, we developed this, a lot of this from scratch. Yes, we bring in the best of the knowledge that we have there, but we're not trying to just cobble together a bunch of disparate tools with a UI layer. >> Right, right. >> It's really a fundamental foundation that you're trying to build. >> Well, what's really interesting about that, that piece, is that yeah, I think a lot of folks have cobbled together a UI layer, so we formed a partnership, coming back to the partnership view, with a company called Lightbend, who's based here in San Francisco, as well as in Europe, and the reason why we did that, wasn't just because of the fact that Reactive development, if you're not familiar with Reactive, it's essentially Scala, Akka, Play, this whole framework, that basically allows developers to write once, and it kind of scales up with demand. In fact, Verizon actually used our platform with Lightbend to launch the iPhone 10. And they show dramatic improvements. Now what's exciting about Lightbend, is the fact that application developers are developing with Reactive, but if you turn around, you'll also now be able to operationalize models with Reactive as well. Because it's basically a single platform to move between these two worlds. So what we've continued to see is data science kind of separate from the application world. Really kind of, AI and cloud as different universes. The reality is that for any enterprise, or any company, to really innovate, you have to find a way to bring those two worlds together, to get the most use out of it. >> Fourier always says "Data is the new development kit". He said this I think five or six years ago, and it's barely becoming true. You guys have tried to make an attempt, and have done a pretty good job, of trying to bring those worlds together in a single platform, what do you call it? The Watson Data Platform? >> Yeah, Watson Data Platform, now Watson Studio, and I think the other, so one side of it is, us trying to, not really trying, but us actually bringing together these disparate systems. I mean we are kind of a systems company, we're IT. But not only that, but bringing our trained algorithms, and our trained models to the developers. So for example, we also did a partnership with Unity, at the end of last year, that's now just reaching some pretty good growth, in terms of bringing the Watson SDK to game developers on the Unity platform. So again, it's this idea of bringing the game developer, the application developer, in closer contact with these trained models, and these trained algorithms. And that's where you're seeing incredible things happen. So for example, Star Trek Bridge Crew, which I don't know how many Trekkies we have here at the CDO Summit. >> A few over here probably. >> Yeah, a couple? They're using our SDK in Unity, to basically allow a gamer to use voice commands through the headset, through a VR headset, to talk to other players in the virtual game. So we're going to see more, I can't really disclose too much what we're doing there, but there's some cool stuff coming out of that partnership. >> Real immersive experience driving a lot of data. Now you're part of the Digital Business Group. I like the term digital business, because we talk about it all the time. Digital business, what's the difference between a digital business and a business? What's the, how they use data. >> Joel: Yeah. >> You're a data person, what does that mean? That you're part of the Digital Business Group? Is that an internal facing thing? An external facing thing? Both? >> It's really both. So our Chief Digital Officer, Bob Lord, he has a presentation that he'll give, where he starts out, and he goes, when I tell people I'm the Chief Digital Officer they usually think I just manage the website. You know, if I tell people I'm a Chief Data Officer, it means I manage our data, in governance over here. The reality is that I think these Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer, they're really responsible for business transformation. And so, if you actually look at what we're doing, I think on both sides is we're using data, we're using marketing technology, martech, like Optimizely, like Segment, like some of these great partners of ours, to really look at how we can quickly A/B test, get user feedback, to look at how we actually test different offerings and market. And so really what we're doing is we're setting up a testing platform, to bring not only our traditional offers to market, like DB2, Mainframe, et cetera, but also bring new offers to market, like blockchain, and quantum, and others, and actually figure out how we get better product-market fit. What actually, one thing, one story that comes to mind, is if you've seen the movie Hidden Figures- >> Oh yeah. >> There's this scene where Kevin Costner, I know this is going to look not great for IBM, but I'm going to say it anyways, which is Kevin Costner has like a sledgehammer, and he's like trying to break down the wall to get the mainframe in the room. That's what it feels like sometimes, 'cause we create the best technology, but we forget sometimes about the last mile. You know like, we got to break down the wall. >> Where am I going to put it? >> You know, to get it in the room! So, honestly I think that's a lot of what we're doing. We're bridging that last mile, between these different audiences. So between developers, between ISVs, between commercial buyers. Like how do we actually make this technology, not just accessible to large enterprise, which are our main clients, but also to the other ecosystems, and other audiences out there. >> Well so that's interesting Joel, because as a potential partner of IBM, they want, obviously your go-to-market, your massive company, and great distribution channel. But at the same time, you want more than that. You know you want to have a closer, IBM always focuses on partnerships that have intrinsic value. So you talked about offerings, you talked about quantum, blockchain, off-camera talking about cloud containers. >> Joel: Yeah. >> I'd say cloud and containers may be a little closer than those others, but those others are going to take a lot of market development. So what are the offerings that you guys are bringing? How do they get into the hands of your partners? >> I mean, the commonality with all of these, all the emerging offerings, if you ask me, is the distributed nature of the offering. So if you look at blockchain, it's a distributed ledger. It's a distributed transaction chain that's secure. If you look at data, really and we can hark back to say, Hadoop, right before object storage, it's distributed storage, so it's not just storing on your hard drive locally, it's storing on a distributed network of servers that are all over the world and data centers. If you look at cloud, and containers, what you're really doing is not running your application on an individual server that can go down. You're using containers because you want to distribute that application over a large network of servers, so that if one server goes down, you're not going to be hosed. And so I think the fundamental shift that you're seeing is this distributed nature, which in essence is cloud. So I think cloud is just kind of a synonym, in my opinion, for distributed nature of our business. >> That's interesting and that brings up, you're right, cloud and Big Data/Hadoop, we don't talk about Hadoop much anymore, but it kind of got it all started, with that notion of leave the data where it is. And it's the same thing with cloud. You can't just stuff your business into the public cloud. You got to bring the cloud to your data. >> Joel: That's right. >> But that brings up a whole new set of challenges, which obviously, you're in a position just to help solve. Performance, latency, physics come into play. >> Physics is a rough one. It's kind of hard to avoid that one. >> I hear your best people are working on it though. Some other partnerships that you want to sort of, elucidate. >> Yeah, no, I mean we have some really great, so I think the key kind of partnership, I would say area, that I would allude to is, one of the things, and you kind of referenced this, is a lot of our partners, big or small, want to work with our top clients. So they want to work with our top banking clients. They want, 'cause these are, if you look at for example, MaRisk and what we're doing with them around blockchain, and frankly, talk about innovation, they're innovating containers for real, not virtual containers- >> And that's a joint venture right? >> Yeah, it is, and so it's exciting because, what we're bringing to market is, I also lead our startup programs, called the Global Entrepreneurship Program, and so what I'm focused on doing, and you'll probably see more to come this quarter, is how do we actually bridge that end-to-end? How do you, if you're startup or a small business, ultimately reach that kind of global business partner level? And so kind of bridging that, that end-to-end. So we're starting to bring out a number of different incentives for partners, like co-marketing, so I'll help startups when they're early, figure out product-market fit. We'll give you free credits to use our innovative technology, and we'll also bring you into a number of clients, to basically help you not burn all of your cash on creating your own marketing channel. God knows I did that when I was at a start-up. So I think we're doing a lot to kind of bridge that end-to-end, and help any partner kind of come in, and then grow with IBM. I think that's where we're headed. >> I think that's a critical part of your job. Because I mean, obviously IBM is known for its Global 2000, big enterprise presence, but startups, again, fuel that innovation fire. So being able to attract them, which you're proving you can, providing whatever it is, access, early access to cloud services, or like you say, these other offerings that you're producing, in addition to that go-to-market, 'cause it's funny, we always talk about how efficient, capital efficient, software is, but then you have these companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars, why? Because they got to do promotion, marketing, sales, you know, go-to-market. >> Yeah, it's really expensive. I mean, you look at most startups, like their biggest ticket item is usually marketing and sales. And building channels, and so yeah, if you're, you know we're talking to a number of partners who want to work with us because of the fact that, it's not just like, the direct kind of channel, it's also, as you kind of mentioned, there's other challenges that you have to overcome when you're working with a larger company. for example, security is a big one, GDPR compliance now, is a big one, and just making sure that things don't fall over, is a big one. And so a lot of partners work with us because ultimately, a number of the decision makers in these larger enterprises are going, well, I trust IBM, and if IBM says you're good, then I believe you. And so that's where we're kind of starting to pull partners in, and pull an ecosystem towards us. Because of the fact that we can take them through that level of certification. So we have a number of free online courses. So if you go to partners, excuse me, ibm.com/partners/learn there's a number of blockchain courses that you can learn today, and will actually give you a digital certificate, that's actually certified on our own blockchain, which we're actually a first of a kind to do that, which I think is pretty slick, and it's accredited at some of the universities. So I think that's where people are looking to IBM, and other leaders in this industry, is to help them become experts in their, in this technology, and especially in this emerging technology. >> I love that blockchain actually, because it's such a growing, and interesting, and innovative field. But it needs players like IBM, that can bring credibility, enterprise-grade, whether it's security, or just, as I say, credibility. 'Cause you know, this is, so much of negative connotations associated with blockchain and crypto, but companies like IBM coming to the table, enterprise companies, and building that ecosystem out is in my view, crucial. >> Yeah, no, it takes a village. I mean, there's a lot of folks, I mean that's a big reason why I came to IBM, three, four years ago, was because when I was in start-up land, I used to work for H20, I worked for Alpine Data Labs, Datameer, back in the Hadoop days, and what I realized was that, it's an opportunity cost. So you can't really drive true global innovation, transformation, in some of these bigger companies because there's only so much that you can really kind of bite off. And so you know at IBM it's been a really rewarding experience because we have done things like for example, we partnered with Girls Who Code, Treehouse, Udacity. So there's a number of early educators that we've partnered with, to bring code to, to bring technology to, that frankly, would never have access to some of this stuff. Some of this technology, if we didn't form these alliances, and if we didn't join these partnerships. So I'm very excited about the future of IBM, and I'm very excited about the future of what our partners are doing with IBM, because, geez, you know the cloud, and everything that we're doing to make this accessible, is bar none, I mean, it's great. >> I can tell you're excited. You know, spring in your step. Always a lot of energy Joel, really appreciate you coming onto theCUBE. >> Joel: My pleasure. >> Great to see you again. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. We're at the IBM CDO Strategy Summit in San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music) (touch-tone phone beeps)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the Cube. Covering, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Jarvis Sam, he is the manager of global diversity issues at Snap Inc. Welcome. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. >> So, I've gotta--first of all, you're wearing a Rosie the Riveter shirt, we've got these tchotchkes here, can you explain to our viewers a little bit about them? We got to, we got to talk about these first. >> Of course, so, the shirt was actually inspired by our Lady Chilla, that's our local women employee resource group at Snap. The idea was take the ghost, a representative mascot of Snap Inc. and parlay that with the idea of Rosie the Riveter, of course powerful in her own right. >> Rebecca: Alright, I love it, and then these spectacles are...? >> Yeah, so spectacles are Snap Inc.'s first ever hardware product released earlier this year. They allow for you to take an in-the-moment Snap, to be featured on your phone, using Bluetooth technology for iPhones and then WiFi technology for Android. They allow individual users to record Snaps on their phone, while of course not distorting the experience of being able to use their hands in the moment. >> Rebecca: So, I love it, these are the recruiting tactics: your own products. >> Exactly >> Want to play with these toys? Come work for us? >> Yes! >> So, tell us a little bit about what you do, Jarvis. Before you were at Snap, you were at Google. You were interested in really engaging in these diversity issues. So what do you at Snap? >> Yeah, so, at Snap, I manage our global diversity effort. What that includes is analyzing the diversity framework across three key verticals; first on the pipeline layer. So, what are we doing by way of K-12 education to ensure communities of color as well as women-- >> Rebecca: K-12? Wow. >> Exactly. >> Have specific opportunities in the space to be impactful. We often create this framework or archetype for what we think is ineffective software engineer for example or account manager. Reframing that by providing access and opportunity is showcase to people that the image that we have is not always the image that we want to portray, is critical. Next then we focus heavily on the idea of the candidate, so candidate experience. Deep diving into understanding key talent acquisition measures as well as key HR practices that will allow for us to create the best experience, moves us forward in that regard. But then finally, and this is where we get to the whole global perspective. Is the idea of the employee. Creating a nurturing community where the idea of psychological safety is not only bolstered but ensuring that your community feels empowered to the idea of inclusion. Making sure inclusion is not just a seat at the table but rather a voice in the conversation that can be actioned upon. >> So I want to dig into that a little bit, this voice in the conversation. Before the cameras were rolling you were talking about these very difficult candid conversations that employees at same have. Tell our viewers a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, so I think one of the greatest challenges across the tech industry and at Snap as well is the idea of referral networks. The tech industry on its own right has grown so greatly out of referral networks. People that you have worked with perviously, people that have the same academic or pedagogical experience as you. The problem with that is, the traditional network analysis would seem to let us know that you often refer people who look like you, or come from a similar internal dimension background as yourself. In a community that's largely rooted in a dominated discourse by white or Asian males. That means that we're continuing to perpetuate that exact same type of rhetoric. >> Rebecca: That's who you're recruiting. >> Exactly. And so then idea of getting more women or communities of color involved in that space can often be distorted. So that remains a challenge that we as a company as well as the tech industry need to overcome is understanding; one, how do we encourage more diverse referrals over time. But then two, creating an ecosystem where this seems natural and not like an artificial standard. >> Okay, so how do you do it? I mean that we've pinpointed the problem and it absolutely is a problem, but what are the kinds of things that Snap is doing to improve the referral process? >> So it's the idea of being innovative by design. One thing that's unique about Snap in particular is that we are an LA-based company. >> So based out of Venice Beach and Santa Monica, California. We don't face a lot of the core challenges that we see in Silicon Valley. And as a result have the opportunity to be more innovative in our approach. As a result when we look to referral networks in particular. One thing that Snap has focused on is the idea of diversity recruiting as a core pillar or tenant of all of our employee research groups. Not only do they join us to attend conferences like Grace Hopper, like the National Society of Black Engineers. But we actually do sourcing jams. Where we sit down with them and mine their networks. Either on LinkedIn-- >> Rebecca: Sourcing jams? >> Yes >> Rebecca: I love it. >> Yes Either on LinkedIn or GitHub or any of the various professional networking sites that they work on. Or technical networking sites to find out who are great talents that they've worked with before. >> Who do you know? Who can join us? >> Exactly. And what's more significant than that, is creating a sense of empowerment where we actually having them reach out to their network as opposed to a recruiter. This creates more of a warm and welcoming environment for the candidate. Where the idea of being a simple passive candidate is further explored by activating them to showcase how your experience has been great. >> And how are you also ensuring that the experience at Snap is great, particularly for women and people of color? >> Yes, so one area is our employee resource group. So we have a couple, so Lady Chilla is of course what I am wearing today. But Snap Noir for the black community. Snap Pride for the LGTBQ plus community and Low Snaps for the Latin X community. >> Rebecca: How big is Snap, we should just-- >> Yeah, about 3,000 people globally. >> Okay, 3,000. Okay, wow. >> And so one of the exciting things that we do is ERG that. So it's where we bring all of our employee resource groups together and they hold massive events every single quarter. To encourage other communities that are either allies or individuals of the sociological out group to understand what they do. But this deploys in so many different ways. In June, for Pride for example, we held drag bingo. Where our LGTBQ plus community participated. In March, we did a whole series of events celebrating women in engineering, women in sales, and women in media that resulted in a large expanse of events allowing for people to come in and learn about, not only the female experience more broadly, but particularly at Snap and some of the great endeavors that they're working on. >> And I know you are also working with other organizations like Girls Who Code, Women Who Code, Made with Code. Can you tell the viewers a little bit more about Snap's involvement. >> 100% Made with Code is one of the most exciting projects that I've had the opportunity to work on. It was for me personally this great combination of working with my previous employer Google, and Snap. So Google's Made with Code project is an idea that started to empower teen girls to code, ages 13 to 18 primarily. What they found is was that's exactly the same demographic that primarily uses our product. And so about three months ago, we decided to come together to launch an imitative where we'd have teen girls make geofilters, one of Snap's core products. The project actually launched one week ago, and teen girls are using Blocky technology to actually go about creating their own geofilters. And then writing a 100 word personal statement defining what their vision for the future of technology is. I'm personally exciting to say after checking the numbers this morning, more than 22,000 girls have already submitted responses to participate. And they will culminate in an event, November 1 through 3. Where we will take the top five finalists to TED Women in New Orleans. To not only showcase women who have done incredible things in the past and present. But also showcase their work at participating in this competition, as the women of technology for the future. >> Rebecca: And the next generation. >> Exactly. >> So we're running out of time here, but I want to just talk finally about the headlines. It's very depressing, you know the Google Manifesto, the sexism that we've seen against women. The racism in the industry. These are are-- we don't want to talk about it at this celebration of computing because we want to focus on the positives. And yet, where do you feel, particularly because you have worked at large tech companies, on these issues for a while now? >> Not facing challenges head on is going to be the greatest threat to the tech industry. The idea of avoiding conversation and avoiding sheer communication of these challenging issues will continue to raise-- >> Rebecca: And ignoring the bad behavior. >> Exactly, and it results in negative rhetoric that inherently put these communities out of wanting to work in this specific industry. But arguably given that technology not only represents the face of the future but how every single product and entity is made for the future, we have to include individuals. Everyone often wants to highlight the McKinsey study from Diversity Matters. Highlighting all of these great ways of diversity impacting business, but we need to look at it in addition from an ethic standpoint. The idea that technology represents how we are building our future. Leaving entire communities out of that primarily focusing on people of color and women, will result in a space where these communities will never have access, opportunity and thus employment to exist in this space. Being able to attack these issues head on, address the bad behavior, highlight what the potential implication is step one. Step two though is being proactive in everything that we're doing, to attempt to ameliorate that from the beginning. You'll notice one thing that's very different about Snap's diversity strategy is we seek to build infrastructure first, then focus on talent acquisition. Once we can ensure that communities of color and women are entering a space that is psychologically safe, open, and inviting. Then we can focus on how we're bringing in talent effectively so that the idea of retention and advancement is not an afterthought but rather top of mind. >> Right, because you can't recruit them if they haven't had the opportunities to begin with. >> Exactly, and that's what Snap often upholds the value of the idea that diversity is our determination, while inclusion is our imperative. >> Jarvis, I love it. >> Thank you so much. >> This has been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from Orlando, Florida at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Male Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to The Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here With Stu Miniman. Alicia Johnson is here. She's the managing director at Accenture Operations, and we're going to have a conversation about diversity, women in tech. Alicia, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Delighted to be here today. Thank you. >> Yeah, we're thrilled because we saw some action on Twitter, we saw the WAVE activity going on, we said, "Hey, we got to get some of these folks on theCUBE," so really appreciate you taking the time here. Let's start with your role at Accenture, and then we'll get into WAVE and what that's all about. >> Fantastic. So thank you for having me today, and I'm delighted to represent the Accenture and Veritas partnership and be able to speak at WAVE last evening. Within Accenture, we put a high priority on inclusion and diversity. One of the things that we've come out and publicly announced is that we want a 50% women workforce by 2025. We've been doing research over the last three years, and Accenture is publicly committed to growing that percentage of our women managing directors to at least 25% by 2020, so we really focus on retaining, attaining, and advancing women, and sponsoring them in that pursuit for gender balance. >> So that's an amazing statistic. I mean, I think the average in the tech industry is 17%. Is that about right? >> About that, yeah. And a lot of the fundraising these days actually goes to venture capital men-run firms, and so we're really interested in helping set that gender paradigm as well so that more VC money goes out toward women and women investments and women VCs. >> Well, it's interesting. I mean, we've done some work in this area at siliconANGLE, and we've funded some fellowships to study this problem, and two of the places that were egregious offenders, Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts, but you have to get it out there and talk about it, right? But so, when you say 50% by 2025, that's a goal? Is that a strict, people would use the term quota? Let's have that discussion. What does that all mean? >> It's a commitment that we're making, and one of the ways that within Accenture we really feel that we can hold to that commitment is making some changes internally and also being very transparent. So we have set that transparency goal across not only sponsoring women in P&L goals, but coming forward and making that commitment to transparency by publicly making the announcement. So the company has already set these clear, published, measurable targets to grow the number of women. We publish our workforce demographics, and we do this across many countries, including U.S., Canada, South Africa, Japan, India, and also our Asian countries. We also launch initiatives that are very focused on high-demand, short-supply, high-performing women in technical architect roles, and so what we do is we not only collaborate with the teams across our business and government, but we look at the programs that we have internally, and we set metrics internally as well about hiring and promoting, and so we're really committed to this through the transparency, so answering your question directly, it is not only a goal that we're after, but we are on a clear transaction path to make that happen, and hopefully we can make it happen sooner. >> Yeah, so, many events have some piece at the conference. THey'll have a panel, they'll have breakfast. We actually at theCUBE covered many Women in Tech events. Here at the Veritas Vision, they have it the Women At Vision Empowered, or WAVE Program, which there's a workshop, there's networking, there's some other things, maybe. Walk us through a little bit of it. There was the panel last night. What's the breadth of the experience here at the show? >> The experience yesterday was very much about empowering women in technology. We went through some discussions around not only gender balance, but also how to empower women and support women in your careers. We also talked about women in technology, other groups that we can align to. We also talked about some of the gender balance conversations that you often don't get to have when you're not meeting, and we encourage men to also join us in these WAVE events, but really, it's about professionally and successfully being fulfilled in your career. Within Accenture, we actually created what we call a B operations program to foster, really, this inclusive culture, and I think that the WAVE event is also looking toward fostering this inclusive culture. The people are really at the center of everything that we do, and so having a culture that's really respectful of women, their careers, their personal goals, and the culture that focuses on work-life choices, that's really very important, because those aspirations, we encourage you to become who you really can be. Some of our Accenture operations and B operations goals are focused around being limitless, driving business outcomes, being relevant, being part of others' successes and failures because you learn through growing with success and failure, be caring, and then really be yourself. Be authentic, and bringing that to the WAVE conference and that empowering diversity initiative is really key to the success of that event. We do hope next year that we'll have an opportunity to have the event actually more during the conference so that we can really get more attendants and drive much more passion and invigoration to the event, but we really believe that the opportunity above all is to get the initiative out there, start talking about it, and really make a difference. >> So let's have a conversation about the why. We can all agree it's the right thing to do, but let's have a business case conversation. What's the business benefit of inclusion? >> Well, obviously, we all come from different backgrounds and different walks of life, and bringing those experiences to the business, it's been proven time and again with all of the factors that you can look at that women make different choices, and women can be different types of role models, and in business, you actually are more successful as an organization by having women lead oftentimes in a scenario where sometimes men have been typically the leaders, and so creating more women role models will change the dynamic of the business, and as a diverse culture, you probably watched the Emmys last night. Diversity and inclusion was a hot topic, so we're changing the world as we're going through and changing technology, and this is an area that we can control, and I think that it's time for us to take control and make that difference, and really going after, really going after the fact of the matter is why wouldn't we already be there, right? And if we can make a difference to really be effective, be good communicators, be authentic, be inspiring, why wouldn't we want women bringing that to the table? >> Yeah, we were having a conversation on theCUBE a couple weeks ago, and you bring up the P&L manager, and it was interesting to talk about some of the stereotypes. I wonder if you could comment as a woman. P&L managers tend to be leaders, and somebody did an analysis of performance reviews, and the adjectives for the male leaders tended to be assertive, great leader, and the adjectives for the female leaders tended to be things like abrasive, okay? But both high-performing individuals. As a woman, I mean, I'm sure you've experienced that in your career, and your colleagues have, as well. I wonder if you could comment on that. Are things changing, and where do you want to see it all go? >> Sure. That's a really great topic, and yes, I mean, in the work world you often see if a woman is assertive, she's referred to in a negative tone, and oftentimes you'll find women, the higher power they are in organizations, they're not looked upon as being friendly individuals, and I think that that's a cultural dynamic that goes back to probably maternal instinct, that you're trained to think, oh, well, we don't see empowered women as wildly successful, and that's something that we need to change as a culture. You mentioned you have a daughter, so seeing your daughter in an empowered position is going to be something that you want as a father. And then being able to proactively build upon why we look at males in a position of power as being someone who is assertive, but if the woman says the same thing, she's maybe looked at in a negative connotation, these are the questions we need to start asking, right, and is there a reason for that? There shouldn't be a reason for that. Equally intelligent, equally able to succeed. And so assertive and powerful is that gender balance, and that's really what we should start questioning in business, and it will make us better as large organizations, as individuals, and as fathers in going after what we want our children and the rest of our society to achieve. >> Yeah, and you certainly see some high-profile examples of women in leadership positions. Obviously, Accenture, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Enterprise, and some others, but you also see on the masthead, if you will, it's like, man, man, man, man, oh, Head of HR, woman, and so a lot of the P&L managers, it's interesting. That's the first time specifically the P&L management. Why the P&L management? Why that emphasis? Maybe you could share with us. >> Well, within Accenture, one of the things that we can do is actually measure the goals that help us advance internally, and so we sponsored the company's most senior women to advance in P&L roles. We've been doing this for the last six years, and approximately 80% of the women in our global executive leadership program have been promoted and significantly expanded their areas of responsibility, and I think that we looked at the goals we could take within Accenture and really make examples of those goals. We also, the commitment to transparency, which I talked about a bit ago, that's really setting and measuring publicly and holding ourselves accountable, right, to those goals and measurable targets that we can grow to. We publish that, and we also challenge other organizations to come out and publish their workforce demographics, and I think before Accenture did that, there wasn't a lot of companies that were maybe as eager to come out and publish that workplace demographic, and so we're looking to make a change. We really want to launch initiatives within our organization that we can control, and ensuring that we can collaborate and create that gender balance in the workforce is key. One other area that I want to talk briefly about is within Accenture Operations, so just in my realm of Accenture. I did mention that we finished our fiscal year 2017 with 45.9% women, really setting the bar across Accenture. One of the things that I want to mention is what we're doing to sponsor and retain women in our local programs within Accenture and their careers, and we focus on staying true to passion, which I talked about with our B operations initiative. We also introduced a flexible work option, which is really focused on our teams in India. They allow the women to fit work and school around their nursery hours, and that's one of the other reasons that you find often women not staying in the workforce is because they make the choice between family and working and the working hours, and then within Accenture, we focus on hosting our International Women's Day, very similar to the WAVE event, and we would be delighted for you guys to join us this year at the upcoming event in March. And then we also sponsor what's called a woman stream, which is internally, to our 400+ thousand employees, at major events, we're able to promote women in cloud, we're able to promote WAVE events, we're able to promote our women in IT initiatives, and on a grassroots level, we'll go out and sponsor programs that are around Girls Who Code and get involved in NPower and other initiatives which bring people into the technical workforce, be it women or men, families, looking at how can we empower and help grow our society including all inclusion and diversity. >> Alicia, how about compensation? I feel like, actually, ironically, one of the best things that happened for women was when Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth a couple of years ago at the Grace Hopper Conference. Since then, you've seen a much heightened awareness of compensation levels. Many companies have come out and said okay, we're going to, it should be transparent. States' Attorneys General have come out with strong advocates, in some cases laws mandating equal compensation. Maybe you could make some comments there, and what specifically is Accenture doing? >> Accenture is actually looking at the salaries of MDs and down through the food chain. We weigh what the percentage of men are paid versus the percentage of women, highest percentage-earning, and we also do adjustments based on that. I do find it interesting you had mentioned that the comments were made. Yes, that's true, and it's a very common fact that women make $0.49 on the dollar for what a man makes, and I can tell you, I don't believe that I'm only worth $0.49 on the dollar. It's really important for us to bring about these initiatives. You also hear people make excuses that maybe women aren't as good at negotiating, or maybe we don't go out and ask for the same balance, but it makes me say, well, why should women go out and have to ask for the same treatment, equal treatment? So I don't think it comes down to that. We all have to fight for what we want. We all have to go after how successful we want to be, and I think empowering and collaborating and really being authentic in that pursuit is really key, so yeah, good point. >> Well, and I think it's a bit self-fulfilling. Because women have historically been paid less than men, certainly in our industry, their expectations are perhaps lower, so that when they switch a job, if they're offered something lower, they're more apt to take it, and the hiring person says, "Okay, fine, that's good," so the only way out of it is if companies proactively adjust, and understandably, that can't happen overnight because there's economic realities, but it can and it feels like it's beginning to happen, slowly, maybe not as fast as you'd like. >> Yeah, and I would love to see women and girls getting more involved in tech. I watched a bit of a program last evening, actually, that referred to around in 4th grade, we start giving boys toys to work with and we start giving girls dolls to play with and different things like that. We can change that. Starting from the basic skills that you aspire for your children, you can start on paradigm, you can start with teaching others about technology. Women might always say it's not super sexy to be a technical architect, but I might disagree, with my background as a CIO. So I think it's really talking about the inclusion culture, getting more people interested in it from the beginning, and bringing more women with the opportunity to really fulfill that gender equality, and whether we promote them, within Accenture, you had asked me about the P&L case, that's something we can control as an organization, so each organization I would challenge to look at the ways that you can balance gender equality, and within Veritas, obviously, there's a very strong WAVE program that's being driven and Accenture's delighted to partner with and support, and that's a commitment to being a champion for change. >> Well, congratulations on being a champion for change and all the progress you're making at Accenture. Very impressive story, so thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing it. >> Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here today, and thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak with you gentlemen. >> It's our pleasure. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. It's theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll be right back. (intelligent electronic theme)

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's The Cube, on the ground with Accenture Labs' 30th anniversary celebration. >> Hello, everyone, welcome to the special coverage of The Cube, on the ground here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. It's The Cube's coverage of Accenture Labs' 30th year celebration. I'm here with Paul Dougherty, the chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture Labs. Welcome to The Cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> It's great to be here. >> So first I want to toast you guys to 30 years from turning to an accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, to Accenture Labs Consulting. Guys are really changed. Congratulations to all your success. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thanks, it's been an incredible journey. If you think back in the 30 years, it's the 30th anniversary of Accenture Labs, and the transformation of our company to now be an innovation-led company, leading in IT services and IT innovation, and with the amazing innovations that are happening in technology, it's a great time to be doing what we're doing. >> So the theme here at the party is magic. There's a magic show going on. We can't get coverage. It's a little private event, probably some G-rated, probably ... >> Lots of magic. >> A lot of magic. But there's magic right now. We were commenting earlier, before you came on, about, you know at my age, I love this innovation cycle, but if I was 20 years old, I'd really be excited. There's so much going on. It's really magical. You've got the convergence of infrastructure, cloud, software. You guys have been on all sides of innovation, from the mini-computer boom, all the way now through now, where AI and software and now data science is coming together. What's the exciting thing for you right now? Because it's beyond software eating the world, it's beyond data eating software. This is real applications. >> Yeah, this is ... We're at an era where technology is the driving force behind every business. There was a survey recently of CEOs, and they asked CEOs how do they view their business, and 81% of CEOs, 81%, said their company's a technology company. And that was a cross-industry survey. And that's why it's an exciting time, because the option we have as Accenture is to work with any company, and every company, and help them transform, change their business, and lead them through the transformation to deliver technology-enabled digital products and services. And that's why it's an exciting time. >> What I find exciting about these global system integrators, as they're now called, is that you guys have always been a consultative organization to customers, helping them through their journey of that generational shift. Now it's interesting, with cloud computing, you guys are not only just advising, you're delivering services. A mindset transformation as well as talent, technology, process, and people. How are you doing it? What's the secret formula? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we found, the reason we've driven our business model in that direction, is our clients need help throughout the cycle. So we help with Accenture strategy, with advising our clients. We help with Accenture consulting, on helping our clients transform. Accenture digital, bring the digital capabilities in. Accenture technology, building the solutions in. Accenture operations, providing business process, infrastructure, and cloud operations. So, we've found that our clients, they need help with it all. They want to understand where to take their business, they want to understand how to get there, and they want somebody to help them manage their business as they do. And that's why we've taken the business in that direction. >> Not to give you guys a lot of props, but I do want to give you guys kudos, Accenture, Accenture Labs, is that all of folks might not know, or some, you guys probably do know, you've accumulated a lot of data scientists over the years. You've got thousands of data scientists, a lot of talent coming in. Accenture Labs is a booming operation, it's not just a throwaway lip-service kind of operation for customers, to say "Hey, we got some smart people." You guys have actually have a real organization. What are some of the cool things that you guys are doing? Can you give some examples? >> Yeah, let's just step back and talk about Labs a bit, and then I'll give some examples. We've been at Labs now for 30 years, hence the celebration we're talking about, and it's thousands of patents, it's billions of dollars of impact on the revenue of our business. And really, you're driving innovation that sets us ahead in the marketplace. And it's a fabric of a global organizations. We have labs here in Silicon Valley. We have labs in Washington, DC, that focus on security and other things. We have labs in Dublin, Ireland, in Tel Aviv, in Bangalore, India, in Beijing, in Sophia Antipolis in France. And it's that global infrastructure that allows us to tap into the innovation, I think in the key hot spots where it's happening. The kinds of innovation that we've driven are, think back to the early days of the cloud, we were doing R&D in patents and research in the cloud before the term "cloud" existed. And once the cloud phenomena took off, we had assets and architectures that we turned into the Accenture cloud platform, which has made us a leader in the multi-billion dollar ... Built a multi-billion dollar business in the cloud market. So that's an example of research and idea in early patents going to scale business for Accenture. That's the research to results that we talk about and what makes a difference in our business. >> So, talk about AI. AI's a hot trend, it's a great buzzword. I love AI because it gets young people excited about software. IOT is a little bit more boring than AI. But AI is augmented intelligence, also a little bit of artificial intelligence. Look no further than a test load, look no further than some of these cool things. How's AI impacting your world? >> AI's massive. I would say AI is the biggest single innovation and the most disruptive innovation of the information age to date. And probably, the biggest impact on how we work and live since the industrial revolution a couple hundred years ago. That started a couple hundred years ago. So AI is a big impact, and we're just at the start of it. That's kind of a paradox, though, because AI has been around for 60 years. The term was coined 60 years ago in 1956 at Dartmouth. And it just did it kind of slowly, but now we're at the inflection point where we have the computing hardware and the data and the processing power to make it really happen. So for the next five to 10 and 20 years, it's all about applying intelligence to augment the way we as people work and live and really create new opportunities to improve the productivity and creativity of humans. That's why we're excited. >> It's a perfect innovation storm. You've got great compute capability, almost unlimited capacity, software, new developer, open source is booming, and now you have STEM. >> Well, before you get to STEM, let me just make one comment on that. I think the other exciting thing about AI is we've been working with dumb technology up until this point. Think about the way we interact with our thumbs on a mobile phone. Think about the way you use traditional software in an enterprise on your PC or your screen. We're slaves to dumb technology, and the power and potential of AI is to make technology smarter, more human-like, and really enhance our ability as humans to use it. And that's why it's an exciting era. >> That's a great perspective from someone who has been in the process business. The classic example is, does the process work for you? Do you work for the process? >> Dougherty: Yeah. That's what technology ... >> And technology, we don't work for technology. They should work for us. >> And that's what's changing. That's the inflection point. >> So now, 30 years now, a lot's changed, certainly in Silicon Valley lately. Women and the role of women in the industry is certainly important. We're going to be at Grace Hopper for the fourth year this year as part of our women in tech celebration, in California this year covering women in tech. STEM is huge, but also, the gender gap is still there. You guys have a pledge to be 50% by 2025, Accenture as an organization. Labs, in particular, getting STEM in the technical roles is also a challenge. What are you guys doing to address that, and what's your personal philosophy? What's your comment about STEM and women in tech? >> Well, look, the technology industry in general has a gender diversity problem, and we believe at Accenture, we can really set the standard for how to really get to gender equality in the workforce. And that's the commitment we've got with our 50/50 gender diversity pledge by 2025. We're well along the path to getting there, right about 36% or so. Now, with the actions we're taking, the formula we've got, I'm confident that we'll get to the 50/50 pledge that we set out there. And it's an imperative for the technology industry, not just for Accenture, because we won't innovate to the potential of the industry, and we won't create the right opportunity if we don't have the right gender balance in the workforce. That's what will lead to the right innovations. In this new era where the humanity of how we apply technology, as you were saying earlier, flipping the lens on a people-centric view, we need all the perspectives and an equal representation of the population going into the way we develop solutions. That's why it's a priority for us. And we think we can really set a standard for how to apply to the technology industry. >> It's certainly a topic near and dear to my heart and our company's heart. I want to ask one more question on that as a follow-up. Computer science was always kind of narrow, I'm not saying super narrow, but now it's broadened, with analytics, the tech science side is opening up, for all the reasons you were just talking about, the AI stuff. It's a broad landscape now for many diverse roles. Can you share your thoughts on where the entry points could be for women, where it's not a man-led culture or new opportunities or new areas, new opportunities to engage, learn? Certainly digital will help that, in terms of acquiring knowledge. But in terms of getting into the business, what is the surface area of opportunities? >> The surface, it's the whole surface area. I think the wrong approach is to think that there are certain roles that are better for women or better for any group to do. There's equal opportunity in all the roles. One stat that's striking to me is the fact that, when I graduated from college in 1986, 35% of the graduates were women. 35% in 1986. Today that number is about 18%. We've gone backwards in the percentage of women graduates from computer science programs. That's a problem that we need to address. We need to get more women into technology careers. It's about sponsorship, it's about mentorship, it's about having the right role models, and it's about painting the right picture of the opportunity in technology. One of the organizations I'm involved with is Girls Who Code, where I'm on the board of directors because of our Accenture involvement because I believe that we need that kind of early involvement with girls to get them on the right paths and make them aware of the right opportunities that we can get them into the pipeline earlier. >> Congratulations. Thanks for doing that; it's great stuff. Personal question. 30 years, you've been in Accenture for a long time, 30 years of labs now, celebrating. What's the coolest thing you've done? >> You know, the coolest thing, the coolest thing is building the fabric of innovation of the company, so what we've done with the labs, creating Accenture Ventures, which is our tool for investing in companies, formalizing our Accenture research capabilities, that we now have an innovation fabric that goes from research to our ventures into our labs and the rest of Accenture's business. So we can take innovations like quantum computing and scale it and ramp it right into our business like we're doing today. So that's what's exciting to me, is to have created a funnel that we can use to take the early-stage innovations and pump them into real impact on our business. >> Awesome, and quick, what's happening here tonight? We're here at the 30th, labs here in Silicon Valley, Computer History Museum, historic event, magic. What's the show about today? >> Yeah, it's all about the past, the present, and the future. The past is how we got here with tremendous leaders of Accenture Labs, who built the organization to where it is today. The present is what I was just talking about, all the opportunity we have. And the future is more exciting that it's ever been. The next 30 years ... My only regret is that I'm not 20 years old right now. So the next 30 years are going to be even more exciting than the 30 years that I've lived through. And we're in a great place. Computer History Museum isn't just about the past. It's about the future. I'm on the board of trustees here at the Computer History Museum, and I love the mission of the museum in the way it brings the stories of innovation to light and sets us on the course for the future as well. >> Well, since you have so much influence, we're going to have to get our genes edited for sequencing so we can actually live longer because that's coming around the corner, too. >> I think that's the right idea. >> Cheers. Congratulations. >> Paul: Cheers. >> We'll be back with more coverage here live in The Cube. Accenture Labs' 30-year anniversary. I'm John Furrier with Paul Daugherty, chief technology and information officer, great work, innovation officer, great work. Congratulations. More coverage after this short break. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from the Javits Center in New York City. It's the Cube, covering the Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are wrapping up the Cube's day two coverage of conference here in New York City at Inforum. My name is Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dan Barnhardt. He is the Infor Vice President of Communications. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here two days in a row. >> It's been a lot of fun. We've had a great time. So yeah, congratulations, it's been a hugely successful conference, a lot of buzz. Recap it for us, what's been most exciting for you? >> Sure, this was our second year having a forum in New York, which is our home town. I think it was a more exciting conference than last year. We unveiled some incredible development updates, led by Coleman, our AI offering, which is an incredible announcement for us, as well as Networked CloudSuites, which takes the functionality from our GT Nexus commerce network, and bakes it into our CloudSuites, the mission critical industry CloudSuites, that we offer on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Those were really exciting developments, as well as some other announcements we made with regard to product. And then, in addition to product, we had a lot of customer momentum that we shared. Last year, we had customers like Whole Foods and Travis Perkins up here. We continued the momentum with big enterprise customers making big bets on Infor, led by Koch Industries who invested more than two billion dollars this year at Infor, and are now modernizing their human resources and their financial operations with Infor CloudSuites. Moving to the cloud HR for 130,000 employees at Koch Industries which is an incredible achievement for the product, and for cloud HR. And, that's very exciting, as well as other companies like FootLocker, which were recognized with the Innovation Award for our Progress Makers Award. They're using talent science, data science to power their employees, not to power their employees, but to drive their employees towards greater productivity and greater happiness, because they've got the right people in the right fit for FootLocker, that's very exciting. And, of course, Bank of America, our Customer of the Year, which uses our HR solutions for their workforce, which obviously is exceptionally large. >> Yes, there was a great ceremony this morning, with a lot of recognition. So, let's talk a little bit more about Coleman, this was the big product announcement, really the first product in AI for Infor. Tell us a little bit about the building blocks. >> For certain. We have a couple of AI offerings now, like predictive hotel pricing, predictive demand and assortment planning in retail, but we have been building towards Coleman and what we consider the age of networked intelligence for multiple years. Since we architected Infor CloudSuite to run mission critical ERP in the cloud, we developed the capability of having data, mission critical data that really runs a business, your manufacturing, finance, distribution core functions, in the cloud on AWS, which gives us hyper-scale compute power to crunch incredible data. So, that really became possible once we moved CloudSuite in 2014. And then in 2015, we acquired GT Nexus, which is a commerce network that unites, that brings in the 80 percent of enterprise data that lies outside the four walls, among suppliers, and logistics providers, and banks. That unified that into the CloudSuite and brought that data in, and we're able to crunch that using the compute power of AWS. And then last year at Inforum, we announced the acquisition of Predictix, which is a predictive solutions for retail. And when building those, Predictix was making such groundbreaking development in the area of machine learning that they spun off a separate group called Logicblox, just to focus on machine learning. And Inforum vested heavily, we didn't talk a lot about Logicblox, but that was going to deliver a lot of the capabilities along with Amazon's developments with Lex and Alexa to enable Coleman to come to reality. So we were able then to acquire Birst. Birst is a BI program that takes, and harmonizes, the data that comes across CloudSuite and GT Nexus in a digestible form that with the machine learning power from Logicblox can power Coleman. So now we have AI that's pervasive underneath the application, making decisions, recommending advice so that people can maximize their potential at work, not have to do more menial tasks like search and gather, which McKenzie has shown can take 20 percent of your work week just looking for the information and gathering the information to make decisions. Now, you can say Coleman get me this information, and Coleman is able to return that information to you instantly, and let you make decisions, which is very, very exciting breakthrough. >> So there's a lot there. When you and I talked prior to the show, I was kind of looking for okay, what's going to be new and different, and one of the things you said was we're really going to have a focus on innovation. So, in previous Inforums it's really been about, to me anyway, we do a lot of really hard work. We're hearing a lot about acquisitions, certainly AI and Coleman, how those acquisitions come together with your, you know, what Duncan Angove calls the layer cake, you know the wedding cake stack, the strategy stack, I call it. So do you feel like you've achieved those objectives of messaging that innovation, and what's the reaction then from the customer base? >> Without a doubt. I wouldn't characterize anything that we said last year as not innovative, we announced H&L Digital, our digital transformation arm which is doing some incredible custom projects, like for the Brooklyn Nets, essentially money balling the NBA. Look forward to seeing that in next season a little bit, and then more in the season to come. Some big projects with Travis Perkins and with some other customers, care dot com, that were mentioned. But this year we're unveiling Coleman, which takes a lot of pieces, as Duncan said sort of the wedding cake, and puts them together. This has been a development for years. And now we're able to unveil it, and we've chosen to name it Coleman in honor of Katherine Coleman Johnson, one of the ladies whose life was told in the movie Hidden Figures, and she was a pioneer African-American woman in Stem, which is an important cause for us. You know, Infor years ago when we were in New Orleans unveiled the Infor Education Alliance program so that we can invest in increasing Stem education among young people, all young people with a particular focus on minorities and women to increase the ranks of underrepresented communities in the technology industry. So this, Coleman, not only pays honor to Katherine Johnson the person, but also to her mission to increase the number of people that are choosing careers in Stem, which as we have shown is the future of work for human beings. >> So talk a little bit more about Infor's commitment to increasing number to increasing, not only Stem education, but as you said increasing the number of women and minorities who go into Stem careers. >> Certainly. We, you know Pam Murphy who is our chief operating officer, this has been an incredibly important cause to her as well as Charles Phillips our CEO. We launched the Women's Infor Network, WIN, several years ago and that's had some incredible results in helping to increase the number of women at Infor. Many years ago, I think it was Google that first released their diversity report, and it drew a lot of attention to how many women and how many minorities are in technology. And they got a lot of heat, because it was about 30, 35 percent of their workforce was female, and then as other companies started rolling out their diversity report, it was a consistent number between 30 to 35 percent, and what we identified from that was not that women are not getting the jobs, it's that there aren't as many women pursuing careers in this type of field. >> Rebecca: Pipeline. >> Yes. So in order to do that, we need to provide an environment that nurtures some of the specific needs that women have, and that we're promoting education. So we formed the WIN program to do that first task, and this year on International Women's Day in early March, we were able to show some of the results that came from that, particularly in senior positions, SVP, VP, and director level positions at Infor. Some have risen 60 percent the number of women in those roles since we launched the Women's Infor Network just a couple of years ago. And then we launched the Education Alliance Program. We partnered with institutions, like CUNY the City University of New York, the New York Urban League, and universities now across the globe, we've got them in India, in Thailand and China, in South Korea to help increase the number of people who are pursuing careers in Stem. We've also sponsored PBS series and Girls Who Code, we have a hack-athon going on here at Inforum with a bunch of young people who are building, sort of, add-on apps and widgets that go to company Infor. We're investing a lot in the growth of Stem education, and the next generation. >> And by the way, those numbers that you mentioned for Google and others at around 30, 34 percent, that's much better than the industry average. They're doing quote, unquote well and still far below the 50 percent which is what you would think, you know, based on population it would be. So mainly the average is around, or the actual number's around 17 percent in the technology business, and then the other thing I would add is Amazon, I believe, was pretty forthcoming about its compensation, you know. >> Salesforce really started it, Marc Benioff. >> And they got a lot of heat for it, but it's transparency is really the starting point, right? >> It was clear really early for companies like Salesforce, and Amazon, and Google, and Infor that this was not something that we needed to create talking points about, we were going to need to effect real change. And that was going to take investment and time, and thankfully with leadership like Charles Phillips, our CEO, and Marc Benioff were making investments to help make sure that the next generation of every human, but particularly women and minorities that are underrepresented right now in technology, have those skills that will be needed in the years to come. >> Right, you have to start with a benchmark and then know where you're moving from. >> Absolutely, just like if you're starting a project to transform your business, where do you want to go and what are the steps that are going to help you get there? >> Speaking of transforming your business, this is another big trend, is digital transformation. So now that we are at nearing the end of day two of this conference, what are you hearing from customers about this jaunting, sometimes painful process that they must endure, but really they must endure it in order to stay alive and to thrive? >> Without a doubt. A disruption is happening in every industry that we're seeing, and customers across all of the industries that Infor serves, like manufacturing, healthcare, retail, distribution, they are thinking about how do we survive in the new economy, when everything is digital, when every company needs to be a technology company. And we are working with our customers to help first modernize their systems. You can't be held back by old technology, you need to move to the cloud to get the flexibility and the agility that can adapt to changing business conditions and disruptions. No longer do you have years to adapt to things, they're happening overnight, you must have flexible solutions to do that. So, we have a lot of customers. We just had a panel with Travis Perkins, and with Pilot Flying J, who was on the Cube earlier, talking about how their, and Cook Industries our primary investor now, talking about how they're re-architecting their IT infrastructure to give them that agility so they can start thinking about what sort of projects could open up new streams of revenue. How could we, you know, do something else that we never thought of, but now we have the capability to do digitally that could be the future of our business? And it's really exciting to have all the CIOs, and SVPs of technology, VPs of technology, that are here at Inforum talking about what they're doing, and how they're imagining their business. It's really incredible to get a peek at what they're doing. >> You know, we were talking to Debbie earlier. One of the interesting things that I, my takeaway is on the digital transformation, is you know, we always say digital is data and then what we talked about was the ability to traverse industry value change, not just vertically but horizontally. Amazon buying Whole Foods is a perfect example, Amazon's a content company, Apple's getting into financial services. I wonder if you could comment on your thoughts on because you're so deep into micro-verticals, and what Debbie said was well I gave a consumer package good example to a process manufacturing company. And they were like what are you talking about, and she said look, let me connect the dots and the light bulbs went off. And they said wow, we could take that CPG example and apply it, so I wonder when we talk about digital transformation, if you see or can foresee your advantage in micro-verticals as translating across those verticals. >> Without a doubt. We talk about it as adjacent innovation. And Charles points back to an example, way back from the creation of the niche in glass, and how that led to additional businesses and industries like eyeglasses and fire preparedness, and we look at it that way for certain. We dive very deep into key industries, but when we look at them holistically across and we say oh, this is happening within the retail industry, we can identify key functionality that might change the industry of disruption, not disruption, distribution. Might disrupt the distribution industry, and we can apply the lessons learned by having that industry specialization into other industries and help them realize a potential that they weren't aware of before, because we uncovered it in one place. That's happening an awful lot with what we do with retail and assortment planning and healthcare. We run 70 percent of the large hospitals in the US, and we're learning a lot from retail and how we might help hospitals move more quickly. When you are managing life and death situations, if you are planning assortment or inventory for those key supplies within a hospital, and you can make even small adjustments that can have huge impact on patient care, so that's one of the benefits of our industry-first strategy, and the adjacent innovation that we cultivate there. >> I know we're not even finished with Inforum 2017, but we must look ahead to 2018. Talk a little bit about what your goals for next year's conference are. >> For sure. You're correct, we're not finished yet with Inforum. I know everyone here is really excited about Bruno Mars who's entertaining tonight, but we are looking forward to next year's conference as well, we're already talking about some of the innovative things that we'll announce, and the customer journeys that are beginning now, which we'd like to unveil there. We are going to be moving the conference from New York, we're going to move to Washington DC in late-September, September 24th to 27th in Washington DC, which we're very excited about to let our customers, they come back every year to learn more. We had seven thousand people attending this year, we want to give them a little bit of a variety, while still making sure that they can reach, you know, with one stop from Europe and from Asia, cause customers are traveling from all over the world, but we're very excited to see the growth that would be shared. This year, for instance, if you look at the sponsors, we had our primary SI partner Avaap was platinum partner last year. In addition to Avaap this year, we were joined by Accenture, and Deloitte, Capgemini, Grant Thorton, all of whom have built Infor practices over the last 12 months because there's so much momentum over our solutions that that is a revenue opportunity for them that they want to take advantage of. >> And the momentum is just going to keep on going next year in September. So I'll see you in September. >> Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate you guys being here with us for the third year, second year in a row in New York. >> Indeed, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum 2017 in a bit.

(upbeat synthesized music) >> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Inforum, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Pam Murphy, she is the Infor COO, thanks so much for coming on the program-- >> Thank you for having us, thank you. >> So you're hosting for the third time, a special session devoted to WIN, the Women's Infor Network. Tell us a little bit about this session and who are the guests and what we can expect. >> Yes, absolutely, so as you said, it's our third year hosting it. It's a very popular session, it's the only non product session of the entire conference and open to everybody, men and women. We always have a fantastic lineup of speakers and this year is no different. So the way we work it is we do a combination of TED Talks and panel sessions so we've got Tan Lee, who's the founder of Emotiv brain augmentation technology. And then we've got Reshma Saujani who's the founder of Girls Who Code. She's done great stuff in terms of pioneering STEM and getting girls to code. So she's going to talk us through her work, if you will, in training so many girls to code and how she wants girls to adopt, and behaviors she wants them to exhibit in this industry. And then we've got what will be I'm sure a lively panel with Ambassador Susan Rice and Farah Pandith and we're going to be talking about the government's ability to manage the terrorism that we're seeing today and we're going to be talking counter terrorism, we're going to be talking about what lessons are we learning from what's going on in Europe and what is the role in technology in helping curb terrorism. So that's going to be an exciting and interesting session. And then we're going to have Dr. Jill Biden come in and hopefully lighten up the session and talk about resilience and leadership today, so very exciting, very much looking forward to it. It's 11 AM tomorrow morning in the Special Events Hall, and hopefully it will be good if not better than the last two years. >> Rebecca: And we're going to have many of those guests on our program >> Yes. >> after that too. So why, what is the purpose of it? It sounds like a great session and it's going to be enlightening and exciting to hear all those women talk, but what is your goal in gathering this group of women? >> I guess I should go back to the founding of WIN. So I started WIN probably over four or five years ago at this point and its purpose was to just galvanize and bring women together, allow forum in which they could mentor each other and where we could work on the advancement of women within the organization. It's something that as I traveled through the offices, people have been asking me a lot to create that forum, create that environment and so we've got hundreds of WIN chapters around the globe with thousands of women participating. So we have very regular sessions and we talk about topics that are relevant to women and also just about advancing their careers and given that at a forum we have so many thousands and thousands of not only our own Infor WIN members but also customers, we just thought it was a great opportunity to have one of our sessions at Inforum and invite inspiring female speakers to come and talk to us about their experiences, how they got to be where they are, the challenges that they met along the way. So what's interesting is that the only WIN or female aspect of the session is the fact that every speaker on stage is female. Outside of that, that's where the relevance ends in the sense that it really is talking to topics that is applicable to everyone. So that's why it is just a topic and an audience that appeals to everybody, men, female, old, and young. >> So these sessions are always interesting and inspiring. What kind of impact have they had? Can you share with us any results? >> Absolutely, so we have, first of all they're very inspirational for everybody attending and I've had customers, not only our own employees, but I've had customers reach out to me and say that they were inspired by a story and it caused them to take action and change in their life. And before they may have felt something but they heard from somebody else saying that how they overcame it and it caused them to honestly take change within their own lives and their own organizations. So for customers, partners, whoever's attending, it just, to hear from someone else, you often have the perception with these speakers that they have this fantastic upbringing, fantastic education, they're successful because it's a function of that. Well actually that's not often the case. People have had a hard upbringing or they've met a lot of challenges around the way and it's how they overcame those challenges and the resilience that they brought into the mix is what inspires people. So really that's what I would say people get out of it, and often spawning from that, we often end up as well tailoring programs or development techniques which we feel would be of benefit to folks beyond that. So one of our speakers last year prompted a big thought about diversity and how we should be dealing with ways in which we may be dismissive of certain topics or abrasive to people, so it's thought provoking and it inspires action, which is obviously what we want to get out of it. >> We funded a nonprofit initiative last year in partner with another journalism outfit, The GroundTruth, to study women in tech and we presented at the, we had The Cube at the Grace Hopper Conference and some of the things that came out of that, I wanted to comment, chief data officers actually have a disproportionately higher percentage of women, maybe it's 'cause it's such a thankless job and they're (laughing) wiling to take it on. And then we found cyber bullying had a very negative effect on the participation of women in tech which is about 17% of the women. And then of course the salary disparity, one of the areas that we found was most egregious was Cambridge, Mass, now this is supposed to be a progressive, relatively liberal area. >> Our hometown. >> And it was huge, our hometown, very high disparity of low participation of women in tech. Any thoughts on that data and what kind of progress you'd like to see us make as an industry? >> I'm hopeful of the fact that the next generation will look back on where technology is now from the perspective of the low representation of women and that whole diversity factor and look on it as being a non-issue. I'm hopeful in the sense that, I don't think it's going to be as pronounced as we have it now. I think we're doing a far better job of going out to colleges, to institutions, and enabling girls and providing girls with coding courses. So I'm hoping it's not going to be a longterm issue for us. From our perspective, to your point, we look at the various line of businesses and functions within our organization and we see where is the disparity arising and where do we need to focus? And so interestingly enough, if you look at G&A functions or if you look at marketing functions, it's 50/50, right, in terms of representation, but there's definitely certain functions where either the nature of what they're doing or if it's a high travel related function, meaning you're away for long periods of time, there are certainly the areas I think which don't have as equal distribution in terms of men, and for those really, we've been working on creating programs to ease those burdens that may be had, or else promote them positively where it literally is an unconscious bias, if you will. It's a long topic, for sure, that I could go on about for a long period of time but I just think it's constant, looking at unconscious biases, it's looking at ways in which we feel that there's fairness, if you will, into the equation. And a lot of the time I honestly feel that it's not conscious, if you will, and it therefore just needs to be looked at specifically at ways and means in which that could be addressed or tackled. >> So as a successful woman in technology, COO at a major technology company, what advice do you have for that young woman who wants to get into technology but is dispirited by the headlines and by what appears to be a very macho culture where there is vast salary discrepancies? >> Yeah, it's unfortunate that that has come out all too much more frequently and with volume in the last six months for the companies that we're aware of. But I would say, I personally haven't experienced that, and I'm personally of the view that, by the way, I never meant to end up in this industry, so I look back and think how on Earth did I actually get here, but I think you have to be willing to take risks and you have to be wiling to dismiss a lot of what you hear and look on the fact that there is a lot of very successful women, even within Infor. Since we started WIN, we have had a huge increase in the amount of SVPs and VPs within our organization. I think it's something like a 60% increase in terms of who we have. There is so much more women in very, very senior roles now than we've ever had before, so I'm hopeful that it is changing. I hope that some recent coverage and recent events have not, will not create a longterm impact, but I think people just need to look and see with the tech industry booming, with the way in which people are being compensated, that it's a good industry in which you can be very successful and do great things. >> Dave: And cloud helps. >> Yeah. >> It does. >> Yeah. >> There are far more women at application oriented shows than there are infrastructure oriented, 'cause hardware guys are hardware guys. I don't know why, like mechanics, other than Mona Lisa Vito, mostly hardware people. But let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the global alliances. You are running that initiative here. These are folks that we haven't typically seen at Inforum but they're coming out of the wood works, what's going on, what's driving that? >> Yeah first of all we have a fantastic base of existing partners who had great successes in implementing Infor applications for their customers and so but with the growth that we've been seeing, honestly, in our business, over the last number of years, we just need to have more and more delivery capacity to create more choice for our customers as to who they can go to to implement our software. And if you think about the move to the cloud and if you think about digitalization and the fact that every customer is becoming more consumed and obsessed with technology because it's changing their businesses so fundamentally, they do want the option and the choice of having the large global system integrators, digital integrators, that they can go to do massive transformation work and business process re-engineering and program management and change management. And so for us it was important to form good reliances with the Deloittes, the Accentures, the Caps, and the Grant Thorntons in order to provide that larger ecosystem of transformational services that we can offer to our customers. So it's great, they're all platinum sponsors here at Inforum this year and there's over a hundred very senior executives and managing directors from those four. And we're just very excited about the extent and pace to which they're building out Infor practices, so it's great. >> I have to ask you, so don't hate me for saying this, but those guys love to pig out on big complicated ERP implementations that take two and three years. Is that world just going away and it's moving toward more of a digital transformation and a whole new line of thinking and that's why there's a good fit with Infor or is it something else? >> I think they understand and know that the older days of a company spending $100 million on an ERP implementation are gone, that's really not acceptable anymore. It's absolutely not our strategy, as you know from being here at the conference, our strategy is around creating industry specific end to end suites which don't require modifications and which are purpose built for the cloud. And so that is very clear to them and they understand that and are embracing the concept because they realize that cloud is an enabler, it's just another deployment method, but fundamentally it's about helping the customers take advantage of that technology and transform their businesses and to do that, it requires a lot more than software. And so they're changing, our industry is changing. Steve talked to the point of the stage today that the cost of technology is becoming very low and that therefore the permeation of technology in everything we do is going to be so prevalent. So it's understood and for them, it's more about helping our customers get to that digital age and being able to transform their businesses to cope with the changing technology. >> Are you satisfied with the pace? >> Pace of? >> Of the change, of getting people to the cloud. Do you feel there is, is the momentum there? >> Well we've seen huge growth in our sector. We have completely tipped the balances. I would have said, obviously it's been coming, it's like Salesforce.com and companies who basically do certain applications in the cloud and for us, we're different because we have complete end to end suites in the cloud, mission critical applications. And so our business has grown enormously over the course of the last three years and I think now it's mainstream, if you will. And so we're very pleased and happy. We have a lot of customers who have made, obviously we have over 8,400 customers now already there. And the pace is increasing. And it's just a continuous effort for the customers who haven't gone already, helping them understand what they need to do to get there, and that's what we've been doing in spades for the last couple of years. >> Great, well Pam Murphy, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> We really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vallente, we will have more from The Cube's coverage of Inforum 2017 just after this. 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>> Commentator: Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology held at VMware. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Joining me today is Cornelia Davis. She is the Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal which is the Palo Alto-based company that provides Agile development services on an open source platform. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling, you started telling me a little bit about your personal story. You're a woman in tech who loves the tech, but you said for the past three years, you've also become an activist and an evangelist for getting more women into this business. Tell us about that transformation. >> Yes, I'll tell you a little bit about that story. I have the gray hair to prove it. I've been doing this for some time. I actually was a woman studying computer science back in the day where we were getting close to equity. >> Rebecca: There was a time when it was-- >> Yeah, there was so back in the '80s, I was majoring in computer science and I think that we were close to 40% at the time, although I have to say even before I was in college, I was always the girl who was out playing soccer with the boys at lunch time. Gender never really seemed to make much of a difference to me but anyway, I got a degree in computer science and then I spent 25 years in the industry and sure, there were times where I would notice that I was the only woman in the room. Actually I would say maybe three or four years ago, I went to a customer opening where they were catering to the developer community and in the room there were 250 developers, I was the only woman. I mean seriously, I was the only woman of 250 and I was like wow. But other than notice it and chuckle about it and even have some of those experiences where maybe somebody assumed that I was the HR person and not the technologist, those types of things, I never really did anything about it. And then about three years ago, I had the great fortune of meeting Robin Hauser Reynolds and Stacy Hartmann who are the two women behind the movie Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, you've seen it? >> Rebecca: Yes, yes. >> A fantastic film, a fantastic piece and had this opportunity to meet them and got involved in the film and Pivotal became a sponsor. They did some of the filming. They did some interviewing of people at Pivotal and it was through that experience and then I got to go to some of the screenings and participate in panels and so on and it was through that experience that I started to understand that it wasn't just curiosity, that it was actually declining, the numbers were declining and that it was a real serious problem. And so after being in the industry for 25 years and not really doing anything about it, I've become an activist and so I spend a lot of time jabbing on about this. I'll give you another example. Last year in January, Pivotal brought most of the company together here in the Bay Area. We brought about 1,200 people into the Bay Area for worldwide kickoff. And the very first talk that they had after our CEO spoke was a talk on diversity and they actually invited me to come up and speak about gender diversity or lack thereof in technology and talked about the Girls Who Code and some of those great programs out there. >> I want to get back to Girls Who Code because I know that you're passionate about it, but I want to also just get back to the moment that you described where you went from chuckling about being the only woman in the room and saying, "Oh it's not silly," to really feeling, "Hey this isn't right. "I want things to be different." What was that moment? Are you trying to recreate that moment for other women as a wake up call? How would you describe your activism? >> I don't know that it was a moment, but the thing that catalyzes me, the thing that makes me really passionate about doing this is that I have this tremendous opportunity. The way that I came into computing personally was at the end of my sophomore year in high school when we were signing up for classes the following year, I was looking at what might I sign up for and I signed up for a computer programming class and then I went off and I joked around that I went off and had a bitchin' summer. That's the stuff we said in the '80s. I went off and had a bitchin' summer. >> We should bring that word back. Let's do it, Cornelia. >> It's a good word. And I came back and had this computer class on my schedule and I was like, "Uh no, no, no, no. "There is no way I'm doing this." And I skipped class for the first two or three days and then I finally went and curiosity got the better of me. I tried it out and I was hooked. Literally that was the moment, not for my activism, but that was the moment where I had like, "Oh my gosh, this is going to change everything. "This is what want to I do." And that's what brought me to computing and that's what makes me an activist now because I didn't realize for those 25 years that other people didn't have those opportunities, that they were actually systemically being discouraged from having those opportunities and so I think that's at the core of my activism is I want people to have the opportunity because I love what I do so much and I think I was mentioning before before we started rolling the cameras that I've been a technologist my whole career. Occasionally I've branched off and tried to do maybe a little bit more leadership or a little bit more of that, but I love the tech so much and it's such a great wonderful career to be in, self-sustaining and all of those things, I want other people to have that opportunity. That's what gets me going. >> I was reading a bio where you're a self-described propeller head and you can find her knee deep in the code and now you want to inspire the next generation and so you've gotten involved with Girls Who Code. Tell us more. >> Yes so it wasn't actually through the film. I think it was just simply, it was serendipitous, right around the time that I was starting to awaken to what was going on in the industry. Working for Pivotal, Pivotal in our San Francisco office, it's a very cool office. It's very different from what I saw in most of my career which was cube farms. It's a very open floor plan, very hip, just a cool place to be. >> What the rest of us East Coasters envisions Silicon Valley to be. >> Yeah, it's really pretty cool. And so the Girls Who Code, for those of you who might be watching that don't know about the Girls Who Code, it's an organization that really targets high school girls and their flagship program is in the summer they have a seven-week immersion program where they bring girls in and they basically code, they learn to code from nine to five every day for seven weeks. It's a pretty intensive program. Well about three years ago, we weren't sponsoring at that level, but we would be a field trip location. One of our close partners, investors, customers, is General Electric. They hosted a group of these 20 girls in their San Ramon office. They came to us for a couple of summers as a field trip location and of course the girls loved it. They walk off the elevator there's snacks, there's drinks. We parent programmed with them. It's a really cool experience. And then last summer, we actually took the next step and hosted our own groups so we had a group of 20 young women who were here in our Palo Alto office for seven weeks learning to code and I had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with them several times throughout the summer and I actually commute to the Bay Area, not everyday but I commute to the Bay Area and the days that I was coming up here in part to see the girls, I'd wake up at four in the morning for my flight and I'd be like, "I get to spend time with the girls today," and I saw it. I saw the girls who in the first week were clearly there because their parents made them be there and they're sitting there like this and they've got the same attitude that I had when I was in high school the first three days like I am not doing this and the same people are standing up at the graduation ceremony at the end of the seven weeks saying, "This changed my life." And one of those young women I'm spending a little bit more time with is now a computer science major at Northwestern, early decision. It's just fantastic to see that light up. That's what gets me going. >> Now why high school? I get high school in the sense that they're old enough to take on a summer job like internship, but what is it about that age do you think that is so critical? >> Yeah so that age, I'll be honest with you, I think is almost too late for a lot of girls because we are able to reach, I just mentioned, that there were girls in there whose parents forced them into that. They had already self-selected out. Just like I had when I was in high school. I had self-selected out. I was way too cool to be in computing and so in some ways high school is a little bit too late. However, I think you nailed it, is that there's an opportunity there that they're mature enough that you can do something as immersive as a seven-week program and these girls are tremendous. These girls after a seven-week program are going back to their high schools and being the president of their Girls Who Code after school clubs and teaching them and I was just spending some time, we had a hangout with them recently where they said when their friends are asking, "What are you going to do this summer?" And the girls said, "I have no idea, "but you know what you should do "is you should do Girls Who Code." She said, "That's all I want to do. "I just want to do Girls Who Code all over again." And so I think you're right, I think it's opportunistic in that they're ready, but unfortunately I think it, like I said, it self-selects a lot of people out. I think fundamentally the thing that we need to do to reach the younger grades, the younger students, is it needs to be part of the curriculum. It absolutely 100% needs to be part of primary school curriculum so that they can get hooked and understand what it is before they self-select out because they're self-selecting out based on a perception and the image that they have of what it is, the Silicon Valley show, that's a perception. Sure it's satyr but young people see that and they don't see it as that. It just looks like something where there's a whole bunch of misbehaving men treating women poorly. >> So on that actually Cornelia, what do you make of the really distressing news that we're hearing that's not necessarily new, there has been the Uber bombshell of last week, but what we know about the culture here and maybe why there were so many women and it was almost 50/50 and then we started to see a drastic change and lower numbers of women in computer science and a lot of women just saying, "Ew, I don't want to be part of that. "I don't want that for my career." What do you say to them and what do you say to the men who are not even knowingly discouraging them from that kind of career? >> Oh, I love what you just said, not even knowingly. One of the things that I spend a lot of time talking with folks about every chance I get is implicit bias. I think that there's definitely overt sexism and in the last week we've seen that big in the news and that is a huge problem. I think I've heard statistics of whatever 60% of women have some level of relatively overt sexism, 100% of us get the implicit, the non-overt, and people who are well-meaning saying things, when they say for example, I was just chatting with a young lady a couple of weeks ago. She's a sophomore in college and she was telling me that last summer during her internship, within the first week or two, her boss was talking to her about her career plans moving forward and was already encouraging her to go more into management than into technology. This person was not evil, wasn't trying to keep women out of technology or keep women out of the most technical parts of a technology career, but he really genuinely believed that, "Maybe women are better at that and not so good at this," and it's really just our implicit biases. So I think that's a big part of it. And for the last year or two, I've been talking about implicit bias and I've been talking about the compensating mechanisms so first of all recognizing your implicit biases and then being conscious about them and then consciously combating them. I've become in the last several months, I would say six months, I've become more and more interested in the idea of how do we actually change those implicit biases. >> And this is men and women. It's not just the men here. >> No question because when I've had conversations where I've spoken for example on implicit bias, I've had women come up to me afterward and say, "I signed my son up for a coding camp. "I never even thought about signing up my daughter." >> Rebecca: Oh, that hurts. >> And I was like, "So you're signing her up now, right?" She's like, "Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah." And so I think it's really interesting to start thinking about how do we actually get rid of them? It's one thing to recognize them and then fight them, but it's another thing to get rid of them. I think the only way we can get rid of them goes back to the statistics that we talked about early on which is I am surprised when I see a woman technologist. That's just the way our brains work. We categorize things. >> We have an idea in our head of what that person looks like. >> We put things in buckets. We wouldn't be able to function in this world with so many different inputs unless we put things into buckets and we just put things into buckets largely based on statistics. And so I'm becoming increasingly interested in really amplifying the voice of women in technology because when we hear women's voices in technology, women who are up there not talking about what we're talking about today which is the gender imbalance, but talking about the tech itself, then we start to normalize, then we start to re-categorize things in our brains so that we're not surprised when we hear a woman talking about something deeply technical or somebody who's doing particle physics or something like that, we're not surprised anymore and say, "Wow she's a rocket scientist," it's normal. That's what I'm interested in doing is getting that to be the norm, not the exception. I think the first step what I would say to people, what I do say to men and women across the industry is first of all recognize it and then let's see what we can do to change it. >> Cornelia Davis, thank you so much. That's good advice, that's good advice. And we'll be right back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here at VMware. (modern techno music)

(rhythmic music) >> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube. At Catalyst Conference, here's your host, Jeff Frick. (rhythmic music) >> Hey, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls Who Code Catalyst Conference It's a great show, about 400 people; they're fourth year. It's going back to the Bay Area next year, so I wanted to come down, talk to some of the key notes, some of the speakers. And really give you a taste if you weren't able to make the trip to Phoenix this year of what's going on. So we're really excited to be joined by our next guest, Fran Maier, she co-founded Match, she co-founded TRUSTe. Serial entrepreneur, the start-up veteran. Fran, welcome. >> Thank you so much Jeff, It's great to be here. >> Absolutely. So you were giving a presentation on really what it is to be a woman entrepreneur. >> Yes, so I've been a internet entrepreneur for now more than twenty years going back to when we started Match.com. And I joined that in late 1994. We really launched around 1995, about 21 years ago, this month, April of 1995. >> Time flies >> And many of the things that were still very much, I think, in the early years of the impact of the internet and mobile and cloud and connectivity on our lives, but Match.com has proven to be what they call a unicorn, a very successful new business model, but more than that many, many people have found their life partner or at least a few good dates on Match.com. So I am always very happy about that. >> And you're way ahead of the curve. Now, I think, I don't know, I've been married for over twenty years, but I think a lot of people that's kind of the first way >> Yeah. to meet people. >> Not the second way. Where when you guys first made Match.com, that was a pretty novel idea. >> Well, well now they call dating where like we used to do it, where you met people at parties and bars, now that's called dating in the wild. >> In the wild (laughing) >> So the more natural thing is using Match.com. But from an entrepreneurial support, I was one of the only women who was involved in starting company in the mid-1990's, still women are less than 10% of TechFounders or venture-backed founders. Women raise a lot less money. And so one of my passions and why I am here at Girls in Tech is to try and impart some of the wisdom gleamed over twenty plus years. >> So what are some of the ways that you see that barrier starting to break down? Is it just, you just got to keep banging on it and slowly and slowly it will move and >> (murmers) >> So I think there's been some difference, I think it's a lot easier to be an entrepreneur of any kind now >> Well that's true. >> than it was twenty years ago. I mean, now having meals delivered to you and the sort of support like Girls in Tech, there was very little of that guidance or certainly there were very few role models, >> Right. >> Twenty years ago. So that certainly has changed. I think another big change, and this is probably over the last two or three years, is that now women feel they can speak out loud about some of the issues. And that there is some, men are willing to listen, >> Right >> Right >> at least some are. >> We still see things like TechCrunch a couple of years ago had a team present a new mobile app called Titstare. We still hear about things like that. We still, there was a survey called The Elephant in Silicon Valley that itemized stories and stats about women and sexual abuse, other kinds of harassment, exclusion, not being invited to sit at the table. So a lot of that stuff is still going on. But I feel like we can call it out a little bit easier. >> Right, right. And it's ... >> Without retribution potentially. >> Is there, is there, kind of a tipping point event, action, that you see potentially as to kind of accelerating ... accelerating it? >> Well I think the media, since lead-in has really kind of picked up on this and discovering it. And the Ellen Pao trial, last year; I spoke a little bit about that, where she brought suit to Kleiner Perkins. She lost the suit, but it started the dialogue. >> Right. >> So I think a lot of this is, is happening and my approach is to try and ... I see, I advise so many start ups. And I see business plans. And almost invariably the business plans from women aren't big enough. They don't say "Hey we're going to be a hundred million dollar company in five years. And we need to raise five million dollars to get there." >> Right. >> Women play it more safe, and, I don't think that, I'm trying to encourage them to take more risk, to figure out how to do it, to play to win. >> Right. Play big to win, right? Playing big. >> Play big to win, yes, swing big. >> It's interesting, on the Lean In, you know Sheryl Sandberg's, I don't know if ground breaking is the right word, but certainly ground breaking. >> Surely, yeah. >> But the Golden State Warriors right now, probably the most popular professional sports team in the country, at the zenith of their success, they have a Lean In commercial. I don't know if you've seen it in the Bay Area, >> I havent seen it! >> where all of the players talk about leaning in. And it just so happens that Steph Curry, their number one superstar, >> Sure. is very close to his wife. She has a cooking show. They're very family orientated. Green ... >> But I thought you were going to ... >> Draymond Green has his mom, who he just constantly just gushes about his mom. And so they, as a male sports team, have a whole commercial they run quite frequently on specifically Lean In. >> Well I, I appreciate that. I also, though, read the article that, that team is owned by bunch of venture capitalists. They all get together and play basketball and it reminded me of a little bit of another place where women have been excluded. And so I was talking to a venture capital friend of mine saying "Buy into the Warriors, or let's buy into a women's soccer team." And you know sports being what they are, it's almost a different thing, but the news about the women's soccer players being paid much less than the men, even though they generate more income. It's just another example, profession by profession where women are paid less or have less opportunity to advance. >> But to your point, I think people understand it, it's not right, but I think everyone pretty much knows that women aren't paid the same as men. But that was interesting about the soccer story, to your point is it was brought up. >> Yeah we could talk about it. >> It wasn't a retribution, right? It's like hey, you know, we're not getting paid and they listed the numbers in Sports Illustrated. They were dramatically different. And, in fact, you know, one of the knocks in the WNBA is that you can't make a living as a player in the WNBA. You just can't. They pay them like, I don't know >> So they should have been. Yeah. >> $60,000. Whatever it is. You know they have to go play in other places, foreign countries to make enough money to live. So I do think its interesting, your point that, you know, the exposure of the problem, the kind of acceptance that we need to do something about it, does seem to be in a much better place than it used to be. >> The other thing that I think that these things illustrate is one of the messages I try and get across, is women tend to settle for too little. You know, they don't necessarily negotiate for themselves. Out of college they don't do as well. They, I've talked to many women who they felt that when they were raising capital, or negotiating deals, that the men on the other side of the table, mostly, not always of course, it sort of said, "Hey this is great, you should be happy to get this. How many women get this?" And that's not really the issue. The issue should be, you should be getting what you deserve. I learned that the hard way, we talked about it a little bit, awhile ago, where Match.com was sold in 1998 for less than $10,000,000. And I was the general manager, I had grown it, we were number one, we were cash flow positive, although probably shouldn't have been. And I walked away with a hundred thousand dollars. And, at the time, sure that's a lot of money, but nobody seemed to encourage me that I probably could have raised the money and led the investment and had an equity round. A year later Match.com was sold from Send It to ISC for $70,000,000. And of course I didn't get anything. >> Yeah. >> So that's my big lesson. The good news is, ten years later, I took TRUSTe, which was a nonprofit, switched it to a for-profit, I raised the capital, and got my ownership in equity position. But tough lesson. >> Yeah, expensive one. >> Yeah. >> But those are the ones you learn though. (laughter) >> I could go through a few of those too. So Fran, we're running low on time. I wanted to give you the last word and get your perspective on, kind of, mentorship and sponsorship. We hear those words tossed around a lot. And that there's a significant difference between just being a mentor and actually being a sponsor, taking an active role in someone else's career. Pushing them to maybe uncomfortable places. Giving them, you know, kind of, the oomph, if you will, that, "Yes you can do this, you do belong." What are you seeing kind of the development of that as people try to help more women ascend, kind of up the line? >> Well, you know, I tend to think of mentorship as something that happens within a company and sponsorship can happen within a company, but advising, sponsoring, promoting, championing, are things that we certainly need to do within the entrepreneurial community of women. So, mentoring is, I see that as a little bit more passive, and I don't know why. But, it's important to have people to look up to and for you, role models are really important. But I think the active thing of championing or sponsoring or even being a more active coach or advisor, is a little bit more hands-on and willing to challenge, you know, you're not just a role model, you're really saying, "Tell me what you're dealing with, and let me see how I can help." I just got off a phone call from one of my advisees, she just raised the money, great news, you know, now she's freaking out about how to spend it. (laughing) >> Maybe with your next problem. >> Yeah. (laughter) >> Been there, done that. >> Right, right. >> You know. >> Well, it's good, good for helpin' them out, and Fran, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Sure. Lot of fun. >> Absolutely. Track Fran down if you're a budding entrepreneur. She's been there, she's got the scars and the wounds from the early days, and learned from it on the success with TRUSTe. >> Thank you. >> And, some great videos on the web, by the way. I was watching them, the whole story on the Match thing was pretty funny. You'll enjoy it, so take the time ... >> There's one of them where I start to cry, I hate that, but what can you do? >> I didn't get to the crying part, but that's okay. >> Yeah, yeah, that's all right. >> That's what happens in Jerry McGuire all the time. All right, well thanks a lot Fran. >> Thanks so much. >> I'm Jeff Frick, you are watching The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. (rhythmic music)