(bright, upbeat music) >> Thank you, Adam, you're looking great in the studio. Those clouds going behind you in that beautiful blue sky. Okay. We're excited here at the Fira in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 21. Yes, it's on. Yes, it's alive and I'd say it's pretty well. Andriy Zhylenko is here as the CEO of Porta One and Roman Khalenkov is joining us as well He's the Chief Commercial Officer of Porta One. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> You're very welcome. You guys are local Barcelonans now. That's awesome. You've came in from Russia. You had this great idea for a company. Tell us about Porta One. >> Well, Porta One exists for over 20 years and we focus on helping Telco operators to deliver services more efficiently or create something new by providing an open architecture platform. And we mostly focus on tier two and three operator. So, I think about us as this weapon they can use to fight the Goliath; the large telecom operators because they need flexibility and the ability to get there faster. >> I mean, I love that, right. And we're going to talk about the cloud is a key part of that because you're now giving the smaller operators the capabilities that the big guys have had but actually doing it a way that may be cleaner and more agile, it's cloud based, they can price differently. It's a whole new ball game, right? I mean, what are you seeing when you talk to customers? What's that? What's the initial conversation like? >> Well, people still, to some extent, are afraid of the cloud but we try to give them different options on premises or in the cloud. It's a software after all. >> Dave: What, what are they afraid of with the cloud? >> They're afraid of not having the full control and usually people are afraid of things, which they don't completely understand and I guess having us here helps them to overcome that fear. >> Well, we saw this with the traditional enterprise IT when we used to have financial services executives on the cube. 10 years ago, they go, we will never put our data in the cloud. It's never going to happen. It was financial services, one of the fastest growing and largest customer segments for the cloud. But you're focusing on, you say, the tier two and tier three, I would think they have a greater motivation, right? Because they see the opportunity to disrupt. Right? >> That's true. I see cloud and other technologies such as SDN as this great equalizer because now it doesn't matter that much how much of the fiber optics you have in the ground or how many base towers you have. The true advantage will come from your platform, from the application and the service you can create. And if there's a company, they can create a great service, if it's in the cloud, it can scale to millions of subscribers easily, they just to find that product market fit. >> And Roman, you've got almost 500 customers, I believe. >> Yes. All around the globe. >> Well, that's the interesting thing, you got like 90 customers or more and so, >> 90 countries >> 90 countries, I meant 500 customers in 90 countries. So you've got local laws, you've got local politics, public policy, different across those countries, you know, provenance etc. etc. How do you see - what's the spectrum like are they open to the tier two and tier three disrupting? I mean, I would imagine some countries are trying to protect, you know, their relationships with the big Telcos because it's such critical infrastructure. What's that spectrum look like? Paint a picture of that diversity. >> It all depends on the specific country. In some countries like South Africa, the market is totally liberalized. You want to become a Telco. Here you go. In other countries like China, for example, it's only for a very small group of national carriers. So we basically follow the lead of the customers. If there are an opportunity in the specific countries, they will pop up like mushrooms. If there is no market liberation, what can you do? >> Right. Okay. So now talk more about what you guys sell to these customers. You're talking about the BSS systems and what exactly am I buying from you? And how is that all working? >> We sell the ability to manage your subscribers, create new services, and then provision and deliver those services to a variety of network elements, equipment and through integrations, and through connections to various types of apps. And right now with the cloud move, I see this as an- it's a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. If Telco has existing infrastructure that's our chance to rethink the architecture and approach. Because if they just think we have a cloud, it's some kind of computer where I'm going to run the applications a bit cheaper, they're missing the point. We were born in Soviet Union and one of my treasures is the jokes from Soviet Union times is one of them is a lady writes to the Central Committee of Communist Party and she says, I work at the Moscow Teapot Factory. And I like my job, I like my colleagues, I'm employee of the month, but, what bothers me; I can never buy a teapot in my store. I go there but they never have teapots. Can you do something? And she receives a reply saying, well, we can not change the way how we distribute goods in the whole country but there's an exception that will allow you to take one part of teapot, bring it home, and you can assemble teapot for yourself. And then two months later, there's now a letter from the same lady saying, Dear comrades, I did as you told me and now in my backyard, I have an intercontinental ballistic missile SS20 but I still don't have a teapot. So you cannot replicate what already had to just bring it piece by piece into the cloud and expect it's going to be something different, it's going to be better. >> Dave: We call it the Lunar Landing Module, very complex. Okay! Let's talk about the move from and the journey from on-prem maybe through hybrid but to the cloud, ultimately, and it starts with the customer conversation. First of all, they got to be willing. Right? Okay. But what's that journey look like? What are the phases that we should- how should we think about that? >> Over the last 20 years we've been offering our platform on premises and usually with unlimited license. So, whatever you can squeeze out of your physical machines is all yours. We don't count that. And that was a pretty straightforward model because you own your servers. We give you the license to the product, and it's fully separated. In the cloud it's not possible by default. You will provide both the physical infrastructure and software infrastructure. So, we need to change that model and we need to explain to our customers first of all. The next step; no Telco is the same. So, they provide different set of services. They offer their products to different audiences of the end-users. So it can be hosted PPBX or IP Centrics environments. So, we would then price our platform based on the number of active seats or it can be a mobile operator, a full mobile network operator or virtual mobile operator MVNO, or even enabler MVNE. So in that case, we would price our platform based on number of active sims. Many manual customers prefer to diversify. They want to choose different models, serve different market segments and not only deliver voice, but also data, messaging, value added services. We have a huge customer in Brazil, for example, they don't have a single end-user customer because everything what they do is pure IOT. So how do we price the platform? Because the variety of business models is so huge. We use the idea of billable events. So any call, any message, any data session, subscription, or anything which can produce a rate-able file can counter against the capacity of what the customer uses. So it gives a full transparency for the customer and it's easy to predict the future costs >> And you're able to charge accordingly and transparently because you've written software to do that. >> Roman: Absolutely. >> Its in the cloud, I presume. And so, you're able to show your customers exactly what you're paying for and the seat in that instance is somebody who's creating those services or somebody who's administering those services, or it's a developer? >> It's an extension >> Somebody who's using the service. So the end user. >> Ah, right. Yeah, okay. >> And actually we use our own software to charge our customers for using our software. >> Okay so you eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne as people like to say, right? How about from an engineering standpoint? Going from on-prem to the cloud, how should we think about architecting that? What are some of the roadblocks that we potentially see? >> The biggest roadblock we see in the developing countries is data centers not being available yet. That customer in Brazil, they were like knocking on the doors of the data center >> 9: 00 AM when it just opened, because they've been waiting for so long. We have about 15 customers in South Africa. They still are waiting for proper cloud at the center to be open there. But that's just the question of time. We just have to wait a little bit and this will get improved. And then that's a big thing. that you have your data center, you have your cloud software, and then you have your existing operations. You have your systems. So how do you move there? And I'm a proponent of gradual migration and gradual movement because every Telco, if they were in business for at least a few years, they have accumulated the variety of different systems, legacy, different products, different departments. It's difficult to jump in the cloud in one jump. So let's build a ladder. And with our customers, we use a technology called Dual-Version with RADIUS. It's a gradual migration. You don't move it at once You first with the pilot batch of customers, observe them, then add more customers, add more customers, and you keep going until everybody's on the new version. And it helps tremendously with new technology, or just with different user experience, because maybe some things which were improved in our perspective from some users, they don't like the change or they need some adjustments. So we see a way to the cloud. It's starting the small steps and then get them to the cloud and the process doesn't start there because once you get to version one of Clio cloud software, it's going to be version two and version three and version four. So the first is a general change in the mentality of telco, all this constant gradual improvements. >> You call it radio? Gradual? >> Gradual. >> Okay, so, gradual migration. So when you do a migration and it's gradual what, do you create some kind of abstraction layer so they don't have to freeze everything, right? Or, maybe I do freeze it but I can still operate with the pieces that have moved. >> Exactly. >> So I'm not shutting down my business. >> No, no way. >> That's the problem with migrations, right? I got to, I got to freeze it. And then, so I say, forget it. I don't ever do a migration, but technology allows you to hide that. >> Right. Some freeze may be required because maybe you should not add a new product or change one, which is currently being immigrated. >> Right. >> But to try to minimize the amount of those freezes from a product catalog perspective and the amount of potential inconveniences for the end user while they be integrated. >> Let's talk about the business value. We know that before, we know what it's like, it's a hairball. You described that spaghetti code. It's slow. It's not transparent. It's expensive. What are you seeing in the after state with some of your tier two and tier three customers, in particular, the ones that are disrupting the Telcos, what do you see? Roman. >> It Brings value, first of all. Because the scalability is no longer an issue. Their ability to migrate, ability to update the system to the new releases is also, much more easier in the cloud. So, the industry's changing fast. The consumers are instantly moving from one preferred way of communicating to another. So the Telcos need to change as well, pretty rapidly. So we are trying to give them that set of tools so they are not being dragged behind by the changes. So update faster, scale faster, introduce new products faster, configure new subscription, and get more customers. >> And then that leads to compress time to monetization. >> Roman: Exactly >> Better customer satisfaction. If we talked in this industry about NPS and how it's so negative. Usually people talk about "my NPS is better than Apple's". When they, in this industry, it's like we need to improve the NPS. Unique approach. Okay! Guys, we're almost out of time. Andriy, I'll give you the last word, put a bow on Mobile World Congress 2021 and how poor to seize it. >> Well, I think it's very symbolic, this place we are in right now, it's a space which used to belong to a large telecom software vendor. And now there's a variety of smaller disruptive companies. And I think that's the future. So the days when Telco would shop for a single huge RFP to solve all of their problems, are gone for good. Because now with the cloud, with integration, with API, You, the Telcos, have the power to build what they need, peak the solutions to integrate and create something which will deliver value and allow them to have it (indistinct) >> Fantastic. We are tracking the transformation of Telco and it just coincides with the exit of the post isolation economy. We're really excited to be here in cloud city. Adam, back to you in the studio.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back here writer jeff rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios you know kind of continuing our leadership coverage reaching out to the community for people that we've got in our community to get their take on you know how they're dealing with the Kovach crisis how they're helping to contribute back to the community to to bring their resources to bear and you know just some general good tips and tricks of getting through these kind of challenging times and we're really excited to have one of my favorite guests he's being used to come on all the time we haven't had them on for three years which I can't believe it sabi Mehta the CEO of true SATA founder to say to obby I checked the record I can't believe it's been three years since we last that down great to see you Jeff there's well first of all it's always a pleasure and I think the only person to blame for that is you Jeff well I will make sure that it doesn't happen again so in just a check-in how's things going with the family the company thank you for asking you know family is great we have I've got two young kids who have become video conferencing experts and they don't teach me the tricks for it which I'm sure is happening a lot of families around the world and the team is great we vent remote at this point almost almost two months ago down and can't complain I think their intellectual property business like you are so it's been a little easier for us to go remote compared to a lot of other businesses in the world and in America but no complaints it'll be very fortunate we are glad that we have a business and a company that can withstand the the economic uncertainty and the family's great I hope the same for the queue family I haven't seen Dave and John and it's good to see you again and I hope all of you guys are helped happy and healthy great I think in we're good so thank you for asking so let's jump into it you know one of the things that I've always loved about you is you know really your sense of culture and this kind of constant reinforcing of culture in your social media posts and the company blog post at true SATA you know celebrating your interns and and you really have a good pulse for that and you know I just I think we may even talked about it before about you know kind of the CEOs and leadership and and social media those that do and that and those that don't and you know I think it's it's probably from any kind of a risk reward trade-off you know I could say something group it versus what am I getting at it but really it's super important and in these times with the distributed workforce that the the importance and value of communicating and culture and touching your people frequently across a lot of different mediums and topic areas is is more important than ever before share with us kind of your strategy why did you figure this out early how have you you know kind of adjusted you know your method of keeping your team up and communicating absolutely like I guess I owe you guys a little bit of gratitude for it which is we launched our company and you know I'm showing a member on the cube it was a social media launch you know if you say that say it like that I think there are two or three things that are very important Jeff and you hit on all of them one is the emphasis on information sharing it becomes more important than times like these and we as as a society value the ability to share a positive conversation of positive perspective and a positive outlook more but since day zero at the seder we've had this philosophy that there are no secrets it is important to be open and transparent both inside and outside the company and that our legacy is going to be defined by what we do for the community and not just what we do for our shareholders and by its very nature the fact that you know I grew up in a different continent now live and call America now a different continent my home I guess I was it's very important for me to stay connected to my roots it is a good memory or reminder that the world is very interconnected unfortunately the pandemic is the is the best or worst example of it in a really weird way but I think it's also a very important point Jeff that I believe we learned early and I hope coming out from this is something that we don't lose the point you made about kindness social media and social networking has a massively in my opinion massively positive binding force for the world at the same time there were certain business models it tried to capitalize on the negative aspects of it you know whether they are the the commercialized versions of slam books or not so nice business models that capitalize on the ability for people to complain I hope that people society and us humans coming out of it learn from people like yourself or you know the small voice that I have on social media or the messages we share and we are kinda in what we do online because the ability to have networks that are viral and can propagate or self propagate is a very positive unifying force and I hope out of this pandemic we all realize the positive nature's of it more than the negative nature's of it because unfortunately as you know that our business models built on the negative forces of social media and I really really hope they're coming out of this are positive voices drown out the negative voices that's great point and and it's a great I want to highlight a quote from one of your blog's again I think you're just a phenomenal communicator and in relationship to what's going on with kovat and and I quote we are fighting fear pain and anxiety as much as we are fighting the virus this is our humble attempt to we'll get into what you guys did to help the thousands of first responders clerks rockstars but I just really want to stick with that kindness theme you know I used to or I still joke right that the greatest smile in technology today is our G from signal FX the guys are gonna throw up a picture of him he's a great guy he looks like everybody's favorite I love that guy but therefore signal effects and actually it's funny signal FX also launched on the cube at big data a big data show I used to say the greatest smile intact is avi Mehta I mean how can I go wrong and and what I when I reached out to you I I do I consciously thought what what more important time do we have than to see people like you with a big smile with the great positive attitude focusing on on the positives and and I just think it's so important and it segues nicely into what we used to talk about it the strata shows and the big data shows all the time everyone wanted to talk about Hadoop and big data you always stress is never about the technology it's about the application of the technology and you focus your company on that very where that laser focus from day one now it's so great to see is we think you know the bad news about kovat a lot of bad news but one of the good news is is you know there's never been as much technology compute horsepower big data analytics smart people like yourself to bring a whole different set of tools to the battle than just building Liberty ships or building playing planes or tanks so you guys have a very aggressive thing that you're doing tell us a little bit about is the kovat active transmission the coat if you will tell us about what that is how did it come to be and what are you hoping to accomplish of course so first of all you're too kind you know thank you so much I think you also were the first people to give me a hard time about my new or Twitter picture I put on and he said what are you doing RV you know you have a good smile come on give me the smile die so thank you you're very kind Jeff I think as I as we as you know and I know I think you've a lot to be thankful for in life and there's no reason why we should not smile no matter what the circumstance we have so much to be thankful for and also I am remiss happy Earth Day you know I'm rocking my green for Earth Day as well as Ramadan Kareem today is the first day of Ramadan and you know I I wish everybody in the world Ramadan Kareem and on that friend right on that trend of how does do we as a community come together when faced with crisis so Court was a very simple thing you know it's I'm thank you for recognizing the hard work of the team that led it it was an idea I came up with it you know in the shower I'm like there are two kinds of people or to your you can we have we as humans have a choice when history is being made which I do believe I do believe history is being made right whether you look at it economically and a economic shock and that we have not felt as humanity since the depression so you look at it socially and again something we haven't seen sin the Spanish blue history is being made in in these times and I think we as humans have a choice we can either be witnesses to it or play our part in helping shape it and coat was our humble tiny attempt to when we look back when history was being made we chose to not just sit on the sidelines but be a part of trying to be part of the solution so all riddled with code was take a small idea I had team gets the entire credit read they ran with it and the idea was there was a lot of data being open sourced around co-ed a lot of work being done around reporting what is happening but nothing was being done around reporting or thinking through using the data to predict what could happen with it and that was code with code we try to make the first code wonder oh that came out almost two weeks ago now when you first contacted us was predicting the spread and the idea around breaking the spread wasn't just saying here is the number of cases a number of deaths and know what to be very off we wanted to provide like you know how firefighters do can we predict where it may go to next at a county by county level so we could create a little bit of a firewall to help it from stop you know have the spread of it to be slower in no ways are we claiming that if you did port you can stop it but if he could create firewalls around it and distribute tests not just in areas and cities and counties where it is you know spiking but look at the areas and counties where it's about to go to so we use a inner inner in-house Network algorithm we call that Orion and we were able to start predicting where the virus is gonna go to we also then quickly realize that this could be an interesting where an extra you know arrow and the quiver in our fight we should also think about where are there green shoots around where can recovery be be helped so before you know the the president email announced this it was surrender serendipitous before the the president came and said I want to start finding the green shoes to open the country we then did quote $2 which we announced a week ago with the green shoots around a true sailor recovery index and the recovery index is looking at its car like a meta algorithm we're looking at the rates of change of the rates of change so if you're seeing the change of the rates of change you know the meta part we're declining we're saying there are early shoots that we if as we plan to reopen our economy in our country these are the counties to look at first that was the second attempt of code and the third attempt we have done is we calling it the odd are we there yet index it got announced yesterday and now - you're the first public announcement of it and the are we there yet index is using the government's definition of the phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 and we are making a prediction on where which are the counties that are ready to be open up and there's good news everywhere in the country but we we are predicting there are 73 different counties that ask for the government's definition of ready to open are ready to open that's all you know we were able to launch the app in five days it is free for all first responders all hospital chains all not-for-profit organizations trying to help the country through this pandemic and poor profit operations who want to use the data to get tests out to get antibodies out and to get you know the clinical trials out so we have made a commitment that we will not charge for code through - for any of those organizations to have the country open are very very small attempt to add another dimension to the fight you know it's data its analytics I'm not a first responder this makes me sleep well at night that I'm at least we're trying to help you know right well just for the true heroes right the true heroes this is our our humble attempt to help them and recognize that their effort should not go to its hobby that that's great because you know there is data and there is analytics and there is you know algorithms and the things that we've developed to help people you know pick they're better next purchase at Amazon or where they gonna watch next on Netflix and it's such a great application no it's funny I just finished a book called ghost Bob and is a story of the cholera epidemic in London in like 1850 something or other about four but what's really interesting at that point in time is they didn't know about waterborne diseases they thought everything kind of went through the air and and it was really a couple of individuals in using data in a new and more importantly mapping different types of datasets on top of it and now this is it's as this map that were they basically figured out where the the pump was that was polluting everybody but it was a great story and you know kind of changing the narrative by using data in a new novel and creative way to get to an answer that they couldn't and you know they're there's so much data out there but then they're so short a date I'm just curious from a data science point of view you know um you know there there aren't enough tests for you know antibodies who's got it there aren't enough tests for just are you sick and then you know we're slowly getting the data on the desk which is changing all the time you know recently announced that the first Bay Area deaths were actually a month were they before they thought they were so as you look at what you're trying to accomplish what are some of the great datasets out there and how are you working around some of the the lack of data in things like you know test results are you kind of organizing pulling that together what would you like to see more of that's why I like talking to you so I missed you you are these good questions of me excellent point I think there are three things I would like to highlight number one it doesn't take your point that you made with the with the plethora of technical advances and this S curve shift that these first spoke at the cube almost eleven years ago to the date now or ten years ago just the idea of you know population level or modeling that cluster computing is finally democratized so everybody can run complicated tests and a unique segment or one and this is the beauty of what we should be doing in the pandemic I'm coming I'm coming I'm quite surprised actually and given the fact we've had this S curve shift where the world calls a combination of cloud computing so on-demand IO and technical resources for processing data and then the on-demand ability to store and run algorithms at massive scale we haven't really combined our forces to predict more you know that the point you made about the the the waterborne pandemic in the eighteen eighteen hundreds we have an ability as humanity right now to actually see history play out rather than write a book about it you know it has a past tense and it's important to do are as follows number one luckily for you and I the cost of computing an algorithm to predict is manageable so I am surprised why the large cloud players haven't come out and said you know what anybody who wants to distribute anything around predictions lay to the pandemic should get cloud resources for free I we are running quote on all three cloud platforms and I'm paying for all of it right that doesn't really make sense but I'm surprised that they haven't really you know joined the debate or contribute to it and said in a way to say let's make compute free for anybody who would like to add a new dimension to our fight against the pandemic number one but the good news is it's available number two there is luckily for us an open data movement you know that was started on the Obama administration and hasn't stopped because you can't stop open movements allows people companies like ours to go leverage know whether it's John Hancock Carnegie Mellon or the new data coming out of you know California universities a lot of those people are opening up the data not every single piece is at the level we would like to see you know it's not zip plus 4 is mostly county level it's available the third innovation is what we have done with code but not it's not an innovation for the world right which is the give get model so we have said we will curate everything is available lie and boo cost anybody is used but they're for purposes and computations you want to enrich it every organization who gives code data will get more out of it so we have enabled a data exchange keep our far-off purple form and the open up the rail exchange that my clients use but you know we've opened up our data exchange part of our software platform and we have open source for this particular case a give get model but the more you give to it the more you get out of there and our first installations this was the first week that we have users of the platform you know the state of Nevada is using it there are no our state in North Carolina is using it already and we're trying to see the first asks for the gift get model to be used but that's the three ways you're trying to address the that's great and and and and so important you know in this again when this whole thing started I couldn't help but think of the Ford plant making airplanes and and Keiser making Liberty ships in in World War two but you know now this is a different battle but we have different tools and to your point luckily we have a lot of the things in place right and we have mobile phones and you know we can do zoom and well you know we can we can talk as we're talking now so I want to shift gears a little bit and just talk about digital transformation right we've been talking about this for ad nauseam and then and then suddenly right there's this light switch moment for people got to go home and work and people got to communicate via via online tools and you know kind of this talk and this slow movement of getting people to work from home kind of a little bit and digital transformation a little bit and data-driven decision making a little bit but now it's a light switch moment and you guys are involved in some really critical industries like healthcare like financial services when you kind of look at this not from a you know kind of business opportunity peer but really more of an opportunity for people to get over the hump and stop you can't push back anymore you have to jump in what are you kind of seeing in the marketplace Howard you know some of your customers dealing with this good bad and ugly there are two towers to start my response to you with using two of my favorite sayings that you know come to mind as we started the pandemic one is you know someone very smart said and I don't know who's been attributed to but a crisis is a terrible thing to waste so I do believe this move to restoring the world back to a natural state where there's not much fossil fuels being burnt and humans are not careful about their footprint but even if it's forced is letting us enjoy the earth in its glory which is interesting and I hope you don't waste an opportunity number one number two Warren Buffett came out and said that it's only when the tide goes out you realize who's swimming naked and this is a culmination of both those phenomenal phrases you know which is one this is the moment I do believe this is something that is deep both in the ability for us to realize the virtuosity of humanity as a society as social species as well as a reality check on what a business model looks like visa vie a presentation that you can put some fancy words on even what has been an 11-year boom cycle and blitzscale your way to disaster you know I have said publicly that this the peak of the cycle was when mr. Hoffman mr. Reid Hoffman wrote the book bit scaling so we should give him a lot of credit for calling the peak in the cycle so what we are seeing is a kind of coming together of those two of those two big trends crises is going to force industry as you've heard me say many for many years now do not just modernize what we have seen happen chef in the last few years or decades is modernization not transformation and they are different is the big difference as you know transformation is taking a business model pulling it apart understanding the economics that drive it and then not even reassembling it recreating how you can either recapture that value or recreate that value completely differently or by the way blow up the value create even more value that hasn't happened yet digital transformation you know data and analytics AI cloud have been modernizing trends for the last ten years not transformative trends in fact I've also gone and said publicly that today the very definition of technology transformation is run a sequel engine in the cloud and you get a big check off as a technology organization saying I'm good I've transformed how I look at data analytics I'm doing what I was doing on Prem in the cloud there's still sequel in the cloud you know there's a big a very successful company it has made a businessman out of it you don't need to talk about the company today but I think this becomes that moment where those business models truly truly get a chance to transform number one number two I think there's going to be less on the industry side on the new company side I think the the error of anointing winners by saying grow at all cost economics don't matter is fundamentally over I believe that the peak of that was the book let's called blitzscaling you know the markets always follow the peaks you know little later but you and I in our lifetimes will see the return to fundamentals fundamentals as you know never go out of fashion Jeff whether it's good conversations whether it's human values or its economic models if you do not have a par to being a profitable contributing member of society whether that is running a good balance sheet individually and not driven by debt or running a good balance sheet as a company you know we call it financial jurisprudence financial jurisprudence never goes out of fashion and the fact that even men we became the mythical animal which is not the point that we became a unicorn we were a profitable company three years ago and two years ago and four years ago and today and will end this year as a profitable company I think it's a very very nice moment for the world to realize that within the realm of digital transformation even the new companies that can leverage and push that trend forward can build profitable business models from it and if you don't it doesn't matter if you have a billion users as my economic professor told me selling a watermelon that you buy for a dollar or fifty cents even if you sell that a billion times you cannot make it up in volume I think those are two things that will fundamentally change the trend from modernization the transformation it is coming and this will be the moment when we look back and when you write a book about it that people say you know what now Jeff called it and now and the cry and the pandemic is what drove the economic jurisprudence as much as the social jurisprudence obvious on so many things here we can we're gonna be we're gonna go Joe Rogan we're gonna be here for four hours so hopefully hopefully you're in a comfortable chair but uh-huh but I don't I don't sit anymore I love standing on a DD the stand-up desk but I do the start of my version of your watermelon story was you know I dad a couple of you know kind of high-growth spend a lot of money raised a lot of money startups back in the day and I just know finally we were working so hard I'm Michael why don't we just go up to the street and sell dollars for 90 cents with a card table and a comfy chair maybe some iced tea and we'll drive revenue like there's nobody's business and lose less money than we're losing now not have to work so hard I mean it's so interesting I think you said everyone's kind of Punt you know kind of this pump the brakes moment as well growth at the ethic at the cost of everything else right there used to be a great concept called triple-line accounting right which is not just shareholder value to this to the sacrifice of everything else but also your customers and your employees and-and-and your community and being a good steward and a good participant in what's going on and I think that a lot of that got lost another you know to your point about pumping the brakes and the in the environment I mean we've been kind of entertaining on the oil side watching an unprecedented supply shock followed literally within days by an unprecedented demand shock but but the fact now that when everyone's not driving to work at 9:00 in the morning we actually have a lot more infrastructure than we thought and and you know kind of goes back to the old mob capacity planning issue but why are all these technology workers driving to work every morning at nine o'clock it means one thing if you're a service provider or you got to go work at a restaurant or you're you're carrying a truck full of tools but for people that just go sit on a laptop all day makes absolutely no sense and and I'd love your point that people are now you know seeing things a little bit slowed down you know that you can hear birds chirp you're not just stuck in traffic and into your point on the digital transformation right I mean there's been revolution and evolution and revolution people get killed and you know the fact that digital is not the same as physical but it's different had Ben Nelson on talking about the changes in education he had a great quote I've been using it for weeks now right that a car is not a is not a mechanical horse right it's really an opportunity to rethink the you know rethink the objective and design a new solution so it is a really historical moment I think it is it's real interesting that we're all going through it together as well right it's not like there quake in 89 or I was in Mount st. Helens and that blew up in in 1980 where you had kind of a population that was involved in the event now it's a global thing where were you in March 20 20 and we've all gone through this indeed together so hopefully it is a little bit of a more of a unifying factor in kind of the final thought since we're referencing great books and authors and quotes right as you've all know Harare and sapiens talked about what is culture right cultures is basically it's it's a narrative that we all have bought into it I find it so ironic that in the year 2020 that we always joke is 20/20 hindsight we quickly found out that everything we thought was suddenly wasn't and the fact that the global narrative changed literally within days you know really a lot of spearhead is right here in Santa Clara County with with dr. Sarah Cody shutting down groups of more than 150 people which is about four days before they went to the full shutdown it is a really interesting time but as you said you know if you're fortunate enough as we are to you know have a few bucks in the bank and have a business that can be digital which you can if you're in the sports business or the travel business the hotel business and restaurant business a lot of a lot of a lot of not not good stuff happening there but for those of us that can it is an opportunity to do this nice you know kind of a reset and use the powers that we've developed for recommendation engines for really a much more power but good for good and you're doing a lot more stuff too right with banking and in in healthcare telemedicine is one of my favorite things right we've been talking about telemedicine and electronic medicine for now well guess what now you have to cuz the hospitals are over are overflowing Jeff to your point three stories and you know then at some point I know you have you I will let you go you can let me go I can talk to you for four hours I can talk to you for but days my friend you know the three stories that there have been very relevant to me through this crisis I know one is first I think I guess in a way all are personal but the first one you know that I always like to remind people on there were business models built around allowing people to complain online and then using that as almost like a a stick to find a way to commercialize it and I look at that all of our friends I'm sure you have friends have lots of friend the restaurant is big and how much they are struggling right they are honest working the hardest thing to do in life as I've been told and I've witnessed through my friends is to run a restaurant the hours the effort you put into it making sure that what you produce this is not just edible but it's good quality is enjoyed by people is sanitary is the hard thing to do and there was yet there were all of these people you know who would not find in their heart and their minds for two seconds to go post a review if something wasn't right and be brutal in those reviews and if they were the same people were to look back now and think about how they assort the same souls then anything to be supportive for our restaurant workers you know it's easy to go and slam them online but this is our chance to let a part of the industry that we all depend on food right critical to humanity's success what have we done to support them as easy as it was for us to complain about them what have we done to support them and I truly hope and I believe they're coming out of it those business models don't work anymore and before we are ready to go on and online on our phones and complain about well it took time for the bread to come to my table we think twice how hard are they working right number one that's my first story I really hope you do tell me about that my second story is to your have you chained to baby with Mark my kids I'm sure as your kids get up every morning get dressed and launch you know their online version of a classroom do you think when they enter the workforce or when they go to college you and me are going to try and convince them to get in a oil burning combustion engine but by the way can't have current crash and breakdown and impact your health impact the environment and show up to work and they'll say what do you talk about are you talking about I can be effective I can learn virtually why can't I contribute virtually so I think there'll be a generation of the next class of you know contribute to society who are now raised to live in an environment where the choice of making sure we preserve the planet and yet contribute towards the growth of it is no longer a binary choice both can be done so I completely agree with you we have fundamentally changed how our kids when they grew up will go to work and contribute right my third story is the thing you said about how many industries are suffering we have clients you know in the we have health care customers we have banking customers you know we have whoever paying the bills like we are are doing everything they can to do right by society and then we have customers in the industry of travel hospitality and one of my most humbling moments Jeff there's one of the no sea level executives sent us an email early in this in this crisis and said this is a moment where a strong David can help AV Goliath and just reading that email had me very emotional because they're not very many moments that we get as corporations as businesses where we can be there for our customers when they ask us to be their father and if we as companies and help our customers our clients who area today are flying people are feeding people are taking care of their health and they're well if V in this moment and be there for them we we don't forget those moments you know those as humans have long-term memories right that was one of the kindest gentlest reminders to me that what was more important to me my co-founder Richard you know my leadership team every single person at Reseda that have tried very hard to build automations because as an automation company to automate complex human process so we can make humans do higher order activities in the moment when our customers asked us to contribute and be there for them I said yes they said yes you said yes and I hope I hope people don't forget that that unicorns aren't important there are mythical animals there's nothing all about profits there's nothing mythical about fortress balance sheet and there's nothing mythical about a strong business model that is built for sustainable growth not good at all cost and those are my three stories that you know bring me a lot of lot of calm in this tremendous moment of strife and and in the piece that wraps up all those is ultimately it's about relationships right people don't do business I mean companies don't do business with companies people do business with people and it's those relationships and and in strong relationships through the bad times which really set us up for when things start to come back I me as always it's I'm not gonna let it be three years to the next time I hear me pounding on your door great to catch up you know love to love to watch really your your culture building and your community engagement good luck I mean great success on the company but really that's one thing I think you really do a phenomenal job of just keeping this positive drumbeat you always have you always will and really appreciate you taking some time on a Friday to sit down with us well first of all thank you I wish I could tell you I just up to you but we celebrate formal Fridays that to Seder and that's what this is all so I want to end on a good on a positive bit of news I was gonna give you a demo of it but if you want to go to our website and look at what everything we're doing we have a survival kit around a data survival kit around kovat how am I using buzzwords you know a is let's not use that buzzword right now but in your in your lovely state but on my favorite places on the planet when we ran the algorithm on who is ready as per the government definition of opening up we have five counties that are ready to be open you know between Santa Clara to LA Sacramento Kern and San Francisco the metrics today the data today with our algorithm there are meta algorithm is saying that those five counties those five regions look like I've done a lot of positive activities if the country was to open under all the right circumstances those five look you know the first as we were men at on cream happy Earth Day a pleasure to see you so good to know your family is doing well and I hope we see we talk to each other soon thanks AVI great conversation with avi Mehta terrific guy thanks for watching everybody stay safe have a good weekend Jeff Rick checking out from the cube [Music]

>>Bye from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco at the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm John, your host, as cybersecurity goes to the next generation as the new cloud scale, cyber threats are out there, the real impact a company's business and society will be determined by the industry. This technology and the people that a cube alumni here, caramel Jaffer, SVP, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for iron net. Welcome back. Thanks to Shawn. Good to be here. Thanks for having so iron net FC general Keith Alexander and you got to know new CEO of there. Phil Welsh scaler and duo knows how to scale up a company. He's right. Iron is doing really well. The iron dome, the vision of collaboration and signaling. Congratulations on your success. What's a quick update? >> Well look, I mean, you know, we have now built the capability to share information across multiple companies, multiple industries with the government in real time at machine speed. >>Really bringing people together, not just creating collected security or clip to defense, but also collaborating real time to defend one another. So you're able to divide and conquer Goliath, the enemy the same way they come after you and beat them at their own game. >> So this is the classic case of offense defense. Most corporations are playing defense, whack-a-mole, redundant, not a lot of efficiencies, a lot of burnout. Exactly. Not a lot of collaboration, but everyone's talking about the who the attackers are and collaborating like a team. Right? And you guys talk about this mission. Exactly. This is really the new way to do it. It has, the only way it works, >> it is. And you know, you see kids doing it out there when they're playing Fortnite, right? They're collaborating in real time across networks, uh, to, you know, to play a game, right? You can imagine that same construct when it comes to cyber defense, right? >>There's no reason why one big company, a second big company in a small company can't work together to identify all the threats, see that common threat landscape, and then take action on it. Trusting one another to take down the pieces they have folk to focus on and ultimately winning the battle. There's no other way a single company is gonna be able defend itself against a huge decency that has virtually unlimited resources and virtually unlimited human capital. And you've got to come together, defend across multiple industries, uh, collectively and collaboratively. >> Do you mean, we talked about this last time and I want to revisit this and I think it's super important. I think it's the most important story that's not really being talked about in the industry. And that is that we were talking last time about the government protects businesses. If someone dropped troops on the ground in your neighborhood, the government would protect you digitally. >>That's not happening. So there's really no protection for businesses. Do they build their own militia? Do they build their own army? Who was going to, who's going to be their heat shield? So this is a big conversation and a big, it brings a question. The role of the government. We're going to need a digital air force. We're going to need a digital army, Navy, Navy seals. We need to have that force, and this has to be a policy issue, but in the short term, businesses and individuals are sitting out there being attacked by sophisticated mission-based teams of hackers and nation States, right? Either camouflaging or hiding, but attacking still. This is a huge issue. What's going on? Are people talking about this in D C well, >> John, look not enough. People are talking about it, right? And forget DC. We need to be talking about here, out here in the Silicon Valley with all these companies here at the RSA floor and bring up the things you're bringing up because this is a real problem we're facing as a nation. >>The Russians aren't coming after one company, one state. They're coming after our entire election infrastructure. They're coming after us as a nation. The Chinese maybe come after one company at a time, but their goal is to take our electoral properties, a nation, repurpose it back home. And when the economic game, right, the Iranians, the North Koreans, they're not focused on individual actors, but they are coming after individual actors. We can't defend against those things. One man, one woman, one company on an Island, one, one agency, one state. We've got to come together collectively, right? Work state with other States, right? If we can defend against the Russians, California might be really good at it. Rhode Island, small States can be real hard, defends against the Russians, but if California, Rhode Island come together, here's the threats. I see. Here's what it's. You see share information, that's great. Then we collaborate on the defense and work together. >>You take these threats, I'll take those threats and now we're working as a team, like you said earlier, like those kids do when they're playing fortnight and now we're changing the game. Now we're really fighting the real fight. >> You know, when I hear general Keith Alexander talking about his vision with iron net and what you guys are doing, I'm inspired because it's simply put, we have a mission to protect our nation, our people, and a good businesses, and he puts it into kind of military, military terms, but in reality, it's a simple concept. Yeah, we're being attacked, defend and attack back. Just basic stuff. But to make it work as the sharing. So I got to ask you, I'm first of all, I love the, I love what he has, his vision. I love what you guys are doing. How real are we? What's the progression? >>Where are we on the progress bar of that vision? Well, you know, a lot's changed to the last year and a half alone, right? The threats gotten a lot, a lot more real to everybody, right? Used to be the industry would say to us, yeah, we want to share with the government, but we want something back for, right. We want them to show us some signal to today. Industry is like, look, the Chinese are crushing us out there, right? We can beat them at a, at some level, but we really need the governor to go do its job too. So we'll give you the information we have on, on an anonymized basis. You do your thing. We're going to keep defending ourselves and if you can give us something back, that's great. So we've now stood up in real time of DHS. We're sharing with them huge amounts of data about what we're seeing across six of the top 10 energy companies, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest healthcare companies in the country. >>Right? In real time with DHS and more to come on that more to come with other government agencies and more to come with some our partners across the globe, right? Partners like those in Japan, Singapore, Eastern Europe, right? Our allies in the middle East, they're all the four lenses threat. We can bring their better capability. They can help us see what's coming at us in the future because as those enemies out there testing the weapons in those local areas. I want to get your thoughts on the capital markets because obviously financing is critical and you're seeing successful venture capital formulas like forge point really specialized funds on cyber but not classic industry formation sectors. Like it's not just security industry are taking a much more broader view because there's a policy implication is that organizational behavior, this technology up and down the stack. So it's a much broad investment thesis. >>What's your view of that? Because as you do, you see that as a formula and if so, what is this new aperture or this new lens of investing to be successful in funding? Companies will look, it's really important what companies like forge point are doing. Venture capital funds, right? Don Dixon, Alberta Pez will land. They're really innovating here. They've created a largest cybersecurity focused fund. They just closed the recently in the world, right? And so they really focus on this industry. Partners like, Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, Andrea are doing really great work in this area. Also really important capital formation, right? And let's not forget other funds. Ron Gula, right? The founder of tenable started his own fund out there in DC, in the DMV area. There's a lot of innovation happening this country and the funding on it's critical. Now look, the reality is the easy money's not going to be here forever, right? >>It's the question is what comes when that inevitable step back. We don't. Nobody likes to talk about it. I said the guy who who bets on the other side of the craps game in Vegas, right? You don't wanna be that guy, but let's be real. I mean that day will eventually come. And the question is how do you bring some of these things together, right? Bring these various pieces together to really create long term strategies, right? And that's I think what's really innovative about what Don and Alberto are doing is they're building portfolio companies across a range of areas to create sort of an end to end capability, right? Andrea is doing things like that. Ted's doing stuff like that. It's a, that's really innovation. The VC market, right? And we're seeing increased collaboration VC to PE. It's looking a lot more similar, right? And now we're seeing innovative vehicles like stacks that are taking some of these public sort of the reverse manner, right? >>There's a lot of interests. I've had to be there with Hank Thomas, the guys chief cyber wrenches. So a lot of really cool stuff going on in the financing world. Opportunities for young, smart entrepreneurs to really move out in this field and to do it now. And money's still silver. All that hasn't come as innovation on the capital market side, which is awesome. Let's talk about the ecosystem in every single market sector that I've been over, my 30 year career has been about a successful entrepreneurship check, capital two formation of partnerships. Okay. You're on the iron net, front lines here. As part of that ecosystem, how do you see the ecosystem formula developing? Is it the same kind of model? Is it a little bit different? What's your vision of the ecosystem? Look, I mean partnerships channel, it's critical to every cyber security company. You can't scale on your own. >>You've got to do it through others, right? I was at a CrowdStrike event the other day. 91% of the revenue comes from the channel. That's an amazing number. You think about that, right? It's you look at who we're trying to talk about partnering with. We're talking about some of the big cloud players. Amazon, Microsoft, right? Google, right on the, on the vendor side. Pardon me? Splunk crashes, so these big players, right? We want to build with them, right? We want to work with them because there's a story to tell here, right? When we were together, the AECOS through self is defendant stronger. There's no, there's no anonymity here, right? It's all we bring a specialty, you bring specialty, you work together, you run out and go get the go get the business and make companies safer. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the ecosystem. What about the big cloud player? >>Cause he goes two big mega trends. Obviously cloud computing and scale, right? Multi-cloud on the horizon, hybrids, kind of the bridge between single public cloud and multi-cloud and then AI you've got the biggies are generally will be multiple generations of innovation and value creation. What's your vision on the impact of the big waves that are coming? Well, look, I mean cloud computing is a rate change the world right? Today you can deploy capability and have a supercomputer in your fingertips in in minutes, right? You can also secure that in minutes because you can update it in real time. As the machine is functioning, you have a problem, take it down, throw up a new virtual machine. These are amazing innovations that are creating more and more capability out there in industry. It's game changing. We're happy, we're glad to be part of that and we ought to be helping defend that new amazing ecosystem. >>Partnering with companies like Microsoft. They didn't AWS did, you know, you know, I'm really impressed with your technical acumen. You've got a good grasp of the industry, but also, uh, you have really strong on the societal impact policy formulation side of government and business. So I want to get your thoughts for the young kids out there that are going to school, trying to make sense of the chaos that's going on in the world, whether it's DC political theater or the tech theater, big tech and in general, all of the things with coronavirus, all this stuff going on. It's a, it's a pretty crazy time, but a lot of work has to start getting done that are new problems. Yeah. What is your advice as someone who's been through the multiple waves to the young kids who have to figure out what half fatigue, what problems are out there, what things can people get their arms around to work on, to specialize in? >>What's your, what's your thoughts and expertise on that? Well, John, thanks for the question. What I really like about that question is is we're talking about what the future looks like and here's what I think the future looks like. It's all about taking risks. Tell a lot of these young kids out there today, they're worried about how the world looks right? Will America still be strong? Can we, can we get through this hard time we're going through in DC with the world challenges and what I can say is this country has never been stronger. We may have our own troubles internally, but we are risk takers and we always win. No matter how hard it gets them out of how bad it gets, right? Risk taking a study that's building the American blood. It's our founders came here taking a risk, leaving Eagle to come here and we've succeeded the last 200 years. >>There is no question in my mind that trend will continue. So the young people out there, I don't know what the future has to hold. I don't know if the new tape I was going to be, but you're going to invent it. And if you don't take the risks, we're not succeed as a nation. And that's what I think is key. You know, most people worry that if they take too many risks, they might not succeed. Right? But the reality is most people you see around at this convention, they all took risks to be here. And even when they had trouble, they got up, they dust themselves off and they won. And I believe that everybody in this country, that's what's amazing about the station is we have this opportunity to, to try, if we fail to get up again and succeed. So fail fast, fail often, and crush it. >>You know, some of the best innovations have come from times where you had the cold war, you had, um, you had times where, you know, the hippie revolution spawn the computer. So you, so you have the culture of America, which is not about regulation and stunting growth. You had risk-taking, you had entrepreneurship, but yet enough freedom for business to operate, to solve new challenges, accurate. And to me the biggest imperative in my mind is this next generation has to solve a lot of those new questions. What side of the street is the self driving cars go on? I see bike lanes in San Francisco, more congestion, more more cry. All this stuff's going on. AI could be a great enabler for that. Cyber security, a direct threat to our country and global geopolitical landscape. These are big problems. State and local governments, they're not really tech savvy. They don't really have a lot ID. >>So what do they do? How do they serve their, their constituents? You know, look John, these are really important and hard questions, but we know what has made technology so successful in America? What's made it large, successful is the governor state out of the way, right? Industry and innovators have had a chance to work together and do stuff and change the world, right? You look at California, you know, one of the reasons California is so successful and Silicon Valley is so dynamic. You can move between jobs and we don't enforce non-compete agreements, right? Because you can switch jobs and you can go to that next higher value target, right? That shows the value of, you know, innovation, creating innovation. Now there's a real tendency to say, when we're faced with challenges, well, the government has to step in and solve that problem, right? The Silicon Valley and what California's done, what technology's done is a story about the government stayed out and let innovators innovate, and that's a real opportunity for this nation. >>We've got to keep on down that path, even when it seemed like the easier answer is, come on in DC, come on in Sacramento, fix this problem for us. We have demonstrated as a country that Americans and individual are good at solve these problems. We should allow them to do that and innovate. Yeah. One of my passions is to kind of use technology and media to end communities to get to the truth faster. A lot of, um, access to smart minds out there, but young minds, young minds, uh, old minds, young minds though. It's all there. You gotta get the data out and that's going to be a big thing. That's the, one of the things that's changing is the dark arts of smear campaigns. The story of Bloomberg today, Oracle reveals funding for dark money, group biting, big tech internet accountability projects. Um, and so the classic astroturfing get the Jedi contract, Google WASU with Java. >>So articles in the middle of all this, but using them as an illustrative point. The lawyers seem to be running the kingdom right now. I know you're an attorney, so I'm recovering, recovering. I don't want to be offensive, but entrepreneurship cannot be stifled by regulation. Sarbanes Oxley slowed down a lot of the IPO shifts to the latest stage capital. So regulation, nest and every good thing. But also there's some of these little tactics out in the shadows are going to be revealed. What's the new way to get this straightened out in your mind? We'll look, in my view, the best solution for problematic speech or pragmatic people is more speech, right? Let's shine a light on it, right? If there are people doing shady stuff, let's talk about it's an outfit. Let's have it out in the open. Let's fight it out. At the end of the day, what America's really about is smart ideas. >>Winning. It's a, let's get the ideas out there. You know, we spent a lot of time, right now we're under attack by the Russians when it comes to our elections, right? We spent a lot of time harping at one another, one party versus another party. The president versus that person. This person who tells committee for zap person who tells committee. It's crazy when the real threat is from the outside. We need to get past all that noise, right? And really get to the next thing which is we're fighting a foreign entity on this front. We need to face that enemy down and stop killing each other with this nonsense and turn the lights on. I'm a big believer of if something can be exposed, you can talk about it. Why is it happening exactly right. This consequences with that reputation, et cetera. You got it. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your insight. Um, I want to just ask you one final question cause you look at, look at the industry right now. What is the most important story that people are talking about and what is the most important story that people should be talking about? Yeah. Well look, I think the one story that's out there a lot, right, is what's going on in our politics, what's going on in our elections. Um, you know, Chris Krebs at DHS has been out here this week talking a lot about the threat that our elections face and the importance about States working with one another and States working with the federal government to defend the nation when it comes to these elections in November. Right? We need to get ahead of that. Right? The reality is it's been four years since 2016 we need to do more. That's a key issue going forward. What are the Iranians North Koreans think about next? They haven't hit us recently. We know what's coming. We got to get ahead of that. I'm going to come again at a nation, depending on staff threat to your meal. Great to have you on the QSO is great insight. Thanks for coming on sharing your perspective. I'm John furrier here at RSA in San Francisco for the cube coverage. Thanks for watching.

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

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. I'm here with Erica Brescia, who's the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Bitnami, it's the app store for the cloud, they do automated packaging, an application provider. Great to see you, CUBE alumni, great to have you in the studio, thanks for coming in. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So, so much going on, you've been to theCUBE multiple times, we see each other at conferences and, you made some time, thanks for comin' down, appreciate it. >> Yeah. >> So Bitnami's doing some great things, so give us the update, what's goin' on with the company? >> Sure. So we just launched our new offering called Stacksmith, which is our first enterprise offering that basically takes all the tooling that we've built to deliver the application catalog that we have onto all the major cloud vendors, and allows enterprise IT departments to package up their own applications, both for cloud and cloud-native platforms, as well as for whatever they're running in the enterprise today. So, it kind of meets them where they are, helps them automate the application packaging and maintenance in place today, and then sets them up to successfully move to the cloud and Kubernetes and containers over time. >> So it's kind of reverse of this journey to the cloud, you go to where the user, the customers are, help them put it together. >> And make the journey, really. So what we find is a lot of the more traditional orchestration and packaging tools just aren't well suited to cloud and containers in particular. And so enterprises are looking for new tools to help them solve current problems, which is: we need to support all these different platforms, we might have some things running internally in VMware, we're running some things on Amazon, maybe using cloud formation, and now they're trying to get to Kubernetes, and they're trying to figure out how they can do that without having a separate pipeline for everything, and that's the problem that Bitnami solves. >> Yeah, and that's been a bit, we've identified a product at Amazon, then, I want Azure, I want Google Cloud, I got to hire a different development team, different stacks. So there's kind of this problem with multi-cloud. How are you guys talkin' to customers about it? 'Cause this seems to be the hybrid cloud main problem today. It's like, okay I see the cloud, I understand I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff in the cloud, or cloud's going to be on-prem, and it's going to be in the cloud. How do I get ready for the cloud? That seems to be a number one question. >> Yeah, and I think what people are struggling with is, you know, there're a lot of companies out there, particularly in the cloud-native space, that just say: if you just rebuild everything, then your life will be so much better, right? But that's not really realistic for most companies. They need to be able to take what they have, and be able to package it in such a way that they get a lot of the benefits of the cloud and containers without completely re-architecting everything. Because, it might be practical for, say a new start up, or a company like Netflix or Spotify to do that, but lets face it, most companies are not that, most companies have too many demands on their IT and Ops teams already, hiring talent is hard even for the startups working at the forefront of Kubernetes, so, you really need tools that are approachable and solve current problems, but again, I think the key is, set you up for success in the future, and I think we help people kind of bridge the gap between what they're doing today and what they're doing in the future without trying to push them in one direction, which might not make sense for them. >> Yeah, in Netflix, and the Googles of the world, are potential future scenarios of what they might look like, but they got to take care of the current move from IT to cloud, get ready for it. >> Yeah, maybe, and you know, for a lot of these internal applications it doesn't make sense to completely re-architect and rewrite them, like the ROI isn't there, and there are companies out there that have thousands of Java or .NET applications that they just need to be able to move perhaps out of their data center, in many cases it's being shut down, and, onto cloud platforms and so we try to find that nice balance between helping you get the advantage of the automation of cloud without having to invest in re-architecting apps that just aren't worth re-architecting. >> Got to ask you Erica, we've had a couple conversations, I forget what you were founded, at Bitnami, you've had a great journey, a lot of things have changed. When did you guys found 2010, or 2011? >> So we started Bitnami in 2013. The company before Bitnami was Bitrock, and we went through YCombinator in 2013, and that's when we really started growing out the company. First around the app catalog that we deliver both via Bitnami.com as well as all the major cloud platforms, and that's allowed us to bootstrap the business up to this point. And then obviously we took all of the learnings and the technology from delivering 140 applications across 14 different platforms, native and cloud, and productize that in Stacksmith, so our enterprise users, you know, we have over a million deployments a month, but people have only been consuming the things that we build now they can use our tooling, that we've been building out over the years, to automate the packaging of their own applications. >> And it's, just to kind of put some color commentary around that time, it wasn't the most calm waters of the cloud world, massive growth, a lot of things have happened, so containers come to the scene with Docker and that becomes standardized, now you've got Kubernetes, you got service meshes right around the corner, kind of now it sets a perfect opportunity for you guys to bring customers to this app store concept, for you guys. >> Yeah, and we see this great, we call it kind of the great unbundling, right? Where apps used to be distributed with the operating system and they kind of were this one cohesive piece, and now, with Kubernetes and cloud APIs, the applications are very separate, and so there's kind of this new operating system coming together, which is the operating system of containers and Kubernetes and cloud, and it allows you to combine these different pieces in ways that you never could before. Before, you know, you would just go to your OS repo to pull in the app that you wanted. >> And you see the trends, I mean, Google has the SRE concept sight, reliability, engineer, the operators on the VMware side, dealing with VMs kind of all converging together. So I got to ask you, how does that impact your customers with your new Stacksmith offering, what's the impact to the customers? Is it ease of use, is it ease of deployment, what's the main value at? >> So, I think the most important thing is, as you said, there're all these new technologies coming out and there's also cloud formation on AWS, and there's ARM on Azure, and each cloud vendor is coming out with their own tooling and then, like you said, there's operators for Kubernetes. The advantage that you get with Bitnami is you don't have to understand the intricacies of how to package for all of those different platforms because we do that for you. We abstract away having to understand how to build a cloud formation template versus a helm chart helps that Kubernetes, you know, package manager essentially and we've been very involved in helping define and further that project. We're actually the top provider of the official helm charts. So we see a lot of promise there but, what's interesting about Bitnami is at the end of the day we're platform agnostic. And once you start using Bitnami and Stacksmith, you can very easily add support for other platforms. So we have a customer who started out on AWS, for example, they wanted to give a try to running some things on Azure, and they essentially just had to flip a switch, and then they get an ARM template, instead of-- >> What was your alternative to that? If they didn't do that, what would they have to do? >> They would have had to do it either manually, or find system specific tools for each platform, to do it. So, there's no other like singular tool chain that lets you build natively for all the different platforms and that's the key, we don't try to abstract away ARM or any of these other orchestration technologies by giving you some kind of layer on top of them. We just make it really easy to build for those technologies and also, to maintain those applications and templates over time, so this isn't point-in-time thing, we track all of the updates in everything that goes into that image or a set of images, and allow you to automatically rebuild and redeploy across any of those platforms you need to support. >> You guys have been very successful in the cloud, but also have scar tissue like everybody else that's been through the cloud wars. And now, as it starts to hit kind of an inflection point, how has cloud changed now, what are we seeing now in cloud versus, say 2014, 2015 timeframe? >> Oh boy. So, I think the most interesting thing is how quickly Azure in particular has evolved. If I had to pick one thing that has been incredibly impressive and important in the changing cloud landscape, it's, you know, you go back to 2014, it was pretty much all AWS all the time, right? And, Amazon isn't quite the Goliath it used to be anymore, I mean there's-- >> Well it's still pretty damn big. >> They're still huge. Yeah, absolutely, but I'll tell you what, the others are gaining a lot of ground, and they have really interesting and different advantages, right? Google will send all of their amazingly smart engineers in to help you architect applications, or move them over, I've heard a lot of workloads moving off of AWS onto Google because Google is giving them so much love and support and trying to attract those workloads over. But Azure's advantage is their ecosystem, right? They really understand partnering in a way that Amazons retail DNA just, it doesn't lend itself to that, and so, I think Microsoft's approach to building out a really great ecosystem around Azure, coupled with their huge field sales team, which Amazon has just been building, they've never had an enterprise sales team, is making things really interesting and creating, for us, a great dynamic in the market because we like to see a number of cloud vendors flourish. >> You're an arms dealer. >> Yeah exactly! (Erica laughs) >> Whatever you want, any cloud. >> I don't know if our CMO would want me to put it that way, but. (laughing) >> Dave Alante's favorite term, by the way. >> Sure. >> It's good to be an arms dealer, or be Switzerland, as they, to be more politically correct. >> Yeah, we go with Switzerland. >> Azure's interesting, I was just having conversation with Dave about this, because, you know, you've got, consumerization of IT, and digital transformation, have been the biggest buzz words in IT for the past decade. First it was consumerization of IT, now it's digital transformation. If you think about it Amazon and Google are really the consumer companies, Azure is an enterprise company with an ecosystem, so it's going to be very interesting to see if consumerization is the winning formula or is it digital transformation on the enterprise side? So you got to be, watching that pretty closely. Your thoughts? >> So, I would say on the consumerization of IT side, I mean that is absolutely happening, and, there, we could talk for hours probably on why that trend is here and why it's not going away, just, expectations in general have changed with the advent of iPhone and app stores and convenience across every aspect of our lives, so, I think even Microsoft gets that, and I don't think that the consumer DNA of those companies actually gives them a real edge in this case. What is interesting is, every company is starting to really focus on their app stores and their marketplace strategies, and trying to provide a frictionless buying experience. And there're a bunch of announcements coming, both on the AWS side, and the Azure side in particular, around things that they're doing to ease the enterprise buying process. >> Well we identified the three things, SAS business is table stakes, IOT is coming, connected devices, and then you've got the mobile. Those three things are on 20 year runs. Talking about Bitnami's update, you mentioned Stacksmith, you have some new stuff there, you guys are hiring, what's the ramp up, marketing, cash flow, top line revenues? Go ahead, share it. >> I'm not giving you all that. (both laughing) But, yeah it's a really exciting time for us, obviously bringing this enterprise product to market. We're gearing up to scale quite significantly, so, Bitnami's is kind of unusual in the Valley in that we're bootstrapped, and we're very heavily engineering driven. >> So no outside funding? >> A million dollars in total, which pretty much doesn't even count in Silicon Valley, and that was really just they had a number of individual folks involved in the company, when we went through YC. >> So no venturing? >> No, no institutional funding So, we are just getting ready to build out the whole go to market team around the Stacksmith product, which is very new in the market, just launched in the last couple months. >> So is it generally available? >> Oh yes! Generally available, customers, lots of great things to talk about, but, we don't have the full sales team in place. >> And what's the benefits of Stacksmith? What's the bottom line value proposition? >> It's really helping you to automate the packaging and maintenance of your applications, whether internal or external, you know, third-party commercial apps that you're using internally, and deploying them on any of the platforms that you need to support. >> App store for the cloud, I love that. So let's talk about what you're workin' on, one of the things I'm really impressed, first of all I'm really impressed with what you've done with Bitnami, I love it, love the bootstrap stories, we were bootstrapped as well in the run of SiliconANGLE. So it's great, in Silicon Valley, I think that's like the top tier player, if you can bootstrap it to economic visibility around scale, that's a success so congratulations. But you also have something exciting going on with venture investing. X factor, >> X factor, yep. >> This is super impressive. You raised a small little fund, X factor, investing in women entrepreneurs. Take a minute to explain what X factor is, do you have some news coming, another fund coming? >> Sure, yeah it's been very exciting, so, in the free free time that I really don't have, but this is such a good cause it's worth it. We put together a three million dollar fund, to invest a hundred thousand dollars in 30 different companies, with at least one female founder. And this actually was spun out of fly bridge, we have our token guys, we call 'em Chip Hazard, who's a career venture investor, who's doing a lot of interesting things. But, he basically led the charge with a woman named Anna Palmer, to put together a group of female founders, that's what really differentiates us, I think, from the rest of the market, who are operating their own companies, to invest in these very early stage female founded companies And, I think that gives us a really unique advantage in the market of venture, in that first we have an incredible pipeline and deal flow because, you know, we know these folks who are starting the companies. And we also have a unique perspective on the challenges of getting a new venture off the ground, and I think we can really be an ally to the entrepreneurs that we're funding, and helping them get that first bit of funding in the door, we typically help them with their series A rounds and beyond and they really see us as a peer and someone they can relate to and come to for advice, and so, I think it's a pretty unique value prop that we have as a VC fund. >> Operating experience brings a lot to the table, so, you want to get those first three steps goin', get that venture off the ground, trust. >> Yeah, and we have a very diverse range of experiences that we can bring to bare too, I mean some of us have deep infrastructure experience, some folks are on the consumer side, we've got a few East Coast people, a few West Coast people, a few people scattered in other areas. And we all have different areas of expertise, right? I'm pretty strong on the business development side, and I'm business model, SAS, enterprise software. Some of the other women are much more familiar with like distribution deals, or hardware deals, or other consumer businesses as well, so I think we have a really unique range of experiences and expertise that we can bring to bare in supporting our founders. >> And mentoring too, it's being there for, you know, don't give up! >> Yeah! And we've had founders go through things, and they'll call us at, one of our founders I was just on the phone with, and she was looking at changing her role within the company to take on more responsibility, and we had a great conversation around that, and that resulted in her becoming the COO, which was fantastic. Another founder was going through a difficult time where she and her co-founder were splitting up, and I was able to talk her through that. And we have a lot of those stories where, I think, you know, we have really been seen as an ally who can help founders get through those times, because we've been there, and we can empathize. And, it's an interesting dynamic because everybody knows that we're not going to invest in the next round, so there's never any posturing to make sure that they're still selling us on investing in the company. It's all about, once we're in, we're in, and we'll do anything we can do to help you scale successfully over time. >> And the key is get to that next round, or get a clear line of sight on visibility in the union economics or, scale. >> Exactly. >> Alright, so how much is going into the next funding? Can you talk about the amount, or? >> Yeah, so we're not raising yet, we're just about to start raising, we're going to be expanding the number of investment partners on the team, which is fantastic, and I'm really excited to bring some amazing new women on board, so, you know, for the women out there who are maybe interested in starting to learn a little more about venture and have raised funding and build their own companies, please send us an email: hello@xfactorventures the fund should be about 10 million dollars, is the current target. >> How is it structured? Are they structured as limited partners, general partners? How is it, so if someone comes on board, as you expand the partnership what does it look like? >> Sure, so, we all do invest our own money, but the fund has LPs just like any other fund, so there's a number of great folks who have backed up X factor. We do bring in some of our own folks along the way, you know, I had people that I know, who have invested in the fund and I'm sure that will be the case in the next one, but it's not like the fund is only funded by the investment partners, we have LPs like any other fund. >> But you guys are taking profits out of it, through the caring, right? So typical venture capital? >> It's typical venture capital, you know, it's a fairly small fund to start as we work through things, but we expect it to grow quite significantly over time. I'll tell you, without giving away too much, that we have quite grand ambitions for the long term. >> Alright, well let's keep in touch on the deal flow, congratulations on Bitnami, and, we'll see you at the cloud shows, Amazon, Microsoft Ignite, Google Next. >> Everywhere, yep, I'll be there. >> Erica, thanks for coming on and spending some time here on theCUBE. CUBEConversations here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBEConversations, thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)

[Music] [Applause] hello everyone welcome to the cube conversation here in palo alto california i'm john furrier host of thecube we got a special breaking news at scale has hired a new ceo chris lynch is the big news and taking over dave mariano with the evp of technology important because one cube alumni and also we've seen about all the big data events doing amazing work in the cloud scale data market for many many years we're very familiar at scale both david and chris lynch both cube alumni chris great to see you congratulations new ceo of atscale thanks john i really appreciate being here so um we know each other you've been on the cube before you're formerly the ceo of vertica sold to hp other ceos before that also a venture capitalist at atlas ventures for that distinguished career why this move right now what's attracted you to at scale take over the helm from the co-founder who will be partnering with you on this it's a great question um i'm still asking myself that but i think what it comes down to is i met dave years ago when i was at atlas and um it didn't work out the time for us to make an investment but i tracked the company and what they were doing and i left accomplished a little over a year ago and working with some companies out in the west coast app and be out here and i reached out to dave and said hey you want to grab dinner which we did and um by the end of the evening he was like you know you should come help us really commercialize this and take it to the next level they've been on our radar they've been on our radar for a while obviously i mean david at hadoop summit i think three four years ago and he was formerly a cloud we kind of hit it off clearly a big data um visionary and also entrepreneur but they had a unique model at that time hadoop was certainly viewed as you know the king of the castle for in big data at that time but cloud scale wasn't on everyone's radar on the mainstream they had a unique perspective has anything changed with the tech is that what's attracted to you the scaled piece of it what's the what's the secret sauce that that got you enticing so so i'm aware of the company's history that's not what got me interested um what got me interested is i think that they're the only player today in in the market that has a production product that can actually take customers from the data center to the cloud and do so transparently and i liken it to what we did at copia we virtualized file systems and frankly when we virtualized http traffic at arrow point so the idea of an abstraction layer a federation layer made sense to me and um you know as a venture capitalist i've seen the lack of adoption of big data workloads in the cloud you know there's a 200 billion dollar opportunity i think these guys are uniquely qualified to take advantage of it so that's really what drove me from a from a business perspective i see this opportunities unique versus anything i've seen on either coast we get a great reputation as an operator also someone who can manage and operate businesses and grow them and ultimately you have some great exits in your day vertica is well known in in the history of tech for two reasons one is it was probably the best deal hp ever has ever done on acquisition value-wise also it was before and during the whole vertica and autonomy autonomy acquisition was billions of dollars so and they ended up throwing that away keeping vertica and that became the flagship so you've seen how companies can take a wave and get in the right position you've done that with stone breaker in the past founder of vertica do you get the same movement here with this company it's the same playbook what's different is it the same what's the opportunity for this company so i think the opportunity for this company is different at vertica it was about executing against the excellent product that they had built in a known market they were targeted for my vision for at scale is to move beyond the data lake hadoop market and really take all the legacy warehousing vendors to the cloud cloud proof those solutions behind the firewall and begin to deliver those workloads in earnest to the cloud transparent to the user irrespective of the bi tool whether the the technology is behind the firewall in front of the firewall and i think that's a game changer certainly we've seen on the cube and the big conversation in the industry has been hybrid cloud multi-cloud but if you squint through that those trend lines it's really about integration right so you mentioned getting people to the cloud how big is that right now from an action standpoint is it is it accelerating is it early stages where is the progress bar on companies accelerating to the cloud it's it's stalled frankly because there are thousands of tens of thousands of applications in the fortune 500 that the the ability to take those applications and that data and move it to the cloud is it's on par with trying to operate do heart surgery on a patient while they're running the boston marathon so it's too difficult it's too disruptive to a business too risky what we do is we create a federation layer that basically abstracts all that complexity from the user and makes that transition transparent so to the user they don't have to care whether it's behind the firewall in front of the firewall what cloud it sits on what analytics store you're drawing from what bi tool it doesn't matter to the user so they've basically been able to separate those two things and that's going to allow people to scale and evolve into the cloud right today cloud is a revolution not an evolution it needs to be an evolution for fortune 500 companies to take advantage of it i got to ask you the hard question because ultimately let amazon they're kicking ass 10 ways from saturday they're obviously the numbers are off the chart even in public sectors just down there last week you got azure retooling and essentially they're going to try to replicate the the uh the congress of scale i think they're going to have a hard time but still no they're not going anywhere either and you get google changing the game focusing on their core competencies and where they can differentiate all that is potentially competition so this company at scale they definitely have tech chops so that's you know we know the team there so they had a lot of credit for that but 25 million dollars raised in their last round of funding total capital day 45 million how are you going to compete how are you going to take this and commercialize this opportunity and not be driftwood instead ride that wave it's a terrific question i actually think that one of the things that excites me about this opportunity it's the first opportunity as an operator that i've had that i haven't been in the david goliath thing i actually don't think that any of those people are competitors i think when atscale wins bi vendors win traditional data stores win and the cloud provider wins and ultimately the customer wins so my view is all those companies you mentioned if google wants to be relevant in the enterprise they need to get those big data workloads to their cloud we can do that we can continue to help amazon do that we can help oracle secure cloud do that we can help microsoft do that and all the time we're future proofing the legacy data stores of the teradatas and the oracles and the ibms so this is the first opportunity that i've seen where the game isn't to go disrupt and call out the competition it's to work with all these people to drive workloads to the cloud in a in a scale that hasn't been done before so you'd have to unseat anyone you've got to ride the cloud wave pretty much yeah we have to we have to demonstrate to these guys that we do what we say we we do um but my view is when we win all those participants can potentially win awesome how about uh staff funding you feel good that enough try powder in there is there another round of funding on the horizon or yeah i mean you know i haven't even started yet but you know my expectation is that in this marketplace with my track record raising capital or attracting capital will not be an issue it'll be about figuring out the business model and making sure it's right and then investing behind that business model it's enough cash now certainly do that talk about the boston california you're going to stay in boston that's news companies based in california you have a pedigree in boston certainly and being a vc down there but also you run businesses down there there's talent down there is there plans for a boston expansion a boston bi-coastal situation what's their opportunity so the company will remain headquartered in san mateo and i'll take up residence here and i'll go back and forth so my family's not moving so i'll have a residence in boston and one here um but you can absolutely expect that i'm going to leverage the ecosystem that i've grown up in and we will have a significant presence on the east coast awesome chris final question machine learning you guys were close to that for a long time at vertica you guys were doing some of the most cutting-edge machine learning before it became super popular as it is now as they call it ai now but essentially that was the beginning of the commodore store database which you guys pioneered speed and using data for competitive advantage how is that now scaled up in the market now how how robust is it how mature is it how ready is it and how does atscale take advantage of of that of that growth so i think that the world of data science in general has matured if you look at one of my proudest investments company called data robot they are the leaders in automated machine learning and their business is growing triple digits every year the level of adoption is really only gated by practitioners and people to apply the technology to these business problems but it's gaining incredible momentum for us i plan to integrate automated ai into components of our architecture which i think makes it really a game changer so of course we expect competition um but by the time that you know they get you know 100 miles behind us you know we're going to hit that what's that button that you have in those teslas you guys drive out here insane mode and it'll be automated machine learning will be powering that what's your impression of the marketplace right now is that um you know obviously you're seeing global landscape you know we see the china situation going on asia a lot of activity a lot of growth outside the united states um and obviously cloud you're seeing region specialties any thoughts on how that's going to play into it is it not relevant to you guys right now what's the what's your thoughts on the global landscape i mean i think it's it's relevant to everyone because i think it's what's driving valuations and this influx of money coming from these different places i mean if if you look at the middle east you know they're writing checks to any sort of tech company they can because they're pr trying to divest of what they know is a dead business right so that's going to drive valuations it's going to drive in my opinion um a lack of discipline and and bad behavior as we've seen you know in 2000 and other times in 2008 um i think for us as a company we're going to be disciplined and you know the fact that we can raise money and raise money attractive valuations isn't a reason to do it if you have a business model of fund that's a reason to do it so you know i don't think it'll be a distraction for us but i think it will increase you know the amount of noise in all the key markets and i think cyber we've seen it you know ai for sure um iot bitcoin all these what's the most exciting thing in the data business that's as it evolves now to the center value proposition that you see and as the ceo now of at scala you're going to capture this i think i would say two things in the in the ai machine learning space i think the fact that with democratization of data you're now actually seeing people applying machine learning way broader in organizations and way deeper than ever before and that's going to transform businesses low-tech business as well as high-tech businesses for us i think that the real opportunity exists it's a question of just taking these lit these legacy workloads and moving them to the cloud and that's not a trivial task not just technically but um you always have to be sensitive to companies ability to absorb technology i think one of the challenges is you know you're trying to transform a business that you know basically was informed as it developed in technology that was 1980. well chris congratulations on the ceo opportunity at at scale um what can people expect from you what what if you can write the narrative of the first couple moves off the line of scrimmage here what are you going to do what's your order of business what can they expect from you well the first thing i'd like to do after i meet the customers and the employees and the par existing partners is go out and get two significant partnerships i like to see a couple partnerships in cloud a couple partnerships with the classic data store vendors so that's probably going to be my first mission to get that moving and you know we'll see how quickly it goes but i think that's super important to do yeah and certainly scale right now has been a big competitive advantage here's a company at scale five year on their five year anniversary interesting gestation period for this big data world because hadoop you can look back into 2010 days hadoop was supposed to be the biggest thing since sliced bread but what happened was the world became bigger and from a date not just outside hadoop gave these guys an opportunity and their architecture fits well you see it's scaling quicker what's your what's your where's your point of scale how do you see this so i think i think that the company probably rightly so at the time hitch their wagon to hadoop but i think as you said it's it's really a subset of the data landscape and it's actually a pretty small one the real opportunity is in driving all the legacy data and analytics stores those islands of analytics and bringing them to the cloud and that like i said i think is a you know 100 billion dollar business well certainly great to see you congratulations getting back at the chief position and did a great job at vertica great journey we followed you on that one that was fantastic and then certainly watch it unfold certainly at hpe create a lot of value congratulations and at scale's got a good hire there congratulations thank you i appreciate it alright this is thecube conversation here inside the palo alto studios i'm john furrier thanks for watching [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017! Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back everyone, we are live, here, in Las Vegas for VMworld 2017, I'm John Furrier, my cohost Dave Vellante, eighth year with theCUBE, proud to have two great guests, Josh Epstein, CMO of Kaminario and Eyal David, CTO of Kaminario, great to see you guys again! >> Likewise, great to be here! >> You guys had a great event in Boston recently, what's going on with you guys? Give me an update on the company. >> Sure, I'll go first. Kaminario's been around for awhile, but we've been, first of all, moved the headquarters over to east coast US, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, opened up a great new office space there. Got a lot going on from a product perspective, a lot going on from a go-to-market perspective, you see a lot happening in the all-flash space and the storage space in general, and just, really excited to take it to the next step. We see a lot of things happening here. >> It's a pretty big week this week. We saw Scott Dietzen from Pure Storage become the Chairman and Jean Carlo, ex-CISCO MNA guy from Silver Lake come in to be CEO, so Dave and I were speculating, All flash, a lot of, what's going on! A lot of people saying, woah, is it growing? Still a need for flash. What's the big hubbub about? >> So, we definitely see a change in the market, and the emergence of two different models. The way people used to buy storage, and the way next-generation application, cloud-scale application, software-to-servers, e-commerce, online businesses, need to buy storage. And their need for simplicity, performance and cost-efficiency at scale is still driving the need for flash storage, and we'll talk about this yet to come some more. >> And you guys see those as really distinct opportunities, is that right? Can you add some color to that, Josh? >> Yeah, I think that we see the flash space made up of two different markets, one is just the massive stocking function of traditional enterprise data centers, making the move en masse to flash. And there you have, obviously, the incumbent vendors with their flash solutions, you know. That's a dogfight, there's a lot of competition in there. There's this other market which we see growing more healthily, more organically, which is the growth of these cloud-scale applications. As Eyal said, flash provider, or, software-to-server providers, e-commerce providers, fintech, healthtech, these large, highly-scalable, database-driven cloud-scale applications. That means a different type of of scale, so that's where we see less competition from the incumbents and more opportunity -- >> What's different about that market, what's the requirement, what are they looking for that makes this a good engine for them? >> So one of the key requirements is agility and flexibility. One of the current characteristics is they don't really know what is going to be the next workload, how their workload is going to change in scale over time. So they need an infrastructure that can change and adapt to their needs, still deliver the same level of performance, still deliver the same level of simplicity. But have that flexibility to address their changing needs in capacity and performance, to address growth in customers, changing in workload application, without too much pre-planning. >> So I'd ask the question to you guys, I get this all the time. So since you guys are the gurus in the area. I get this question a lot, what is a modern data center? With all the action on private cloud happenings, true private cloud, they truly point out, people are re-tooling their data centers to operate like cloud, it's still on-premise. That's kind of the gateway to hypercloud, very clear. Public cloud, workloads, all bursting, that stuff's great. What's a modern architecture, what's a modern data center? When I hear that term, what do you guys mean? >> That's a great question. So the modern data center, or even the next generation data center is exactly that, one that allows enterprises to achieve the same levels of scalability, efficiency, as the hypercloud, but on-premise, or in a hybrid fashion. But it allows them to have that level of control against operation simplicity that's hard to come by, but on their own terms, adapting to their own needs. >> So without the need to build out a massive engineering team to build this from the ground up. >> So are the buyers different, are those two worlds coming together? I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah, I think the buyers are, in fact, different. I think, now, you see a convergence over time as the classic enterprise data centers start to look more like a private cloud. But we see this growth in large-managed private cloud providers really exciting, and they come in different forms. You have the Telcos getting into the business, you have the outsourcers getting into the business, you have the traditional channel getting into the business. We have a great partnership with Vion, a big federal reseller, and using Kaminario as a flash service offering. And they start looking like a cloud provider, and they're thinking like a cloud provider. >> And what's the benefits then? Cause I was just looking at the gov cloud impact, I was just at the Amazon Public Sector Summit. Huge traction right now because it's so fast, you can get into the government cloud quickly. Why is that unique, why, as a service, and why are you guys really driving that? >> One, it fits with our architecture perfectly. But I think from a customer standpoint, the ability to procure, like, procuring from the cloud, but also to get the kind of services, you know, as people start re-engineering applications thinking about dev-ops, cloud-data-type applications, leveraging the same kind of utilities that they might get from an Amazon or an Ajer, from a managed private cloud provider, it becomes really important. >> And Al-fed ramp is there, you get all the federal information stuff going on around it. >> So I wonder how you deal with this problem, it's a relatively small company, you're up against the big guys, you say, it's like a rock fight. But you have an affinity to, let's say, SAS players. They like your product and it fits better with their vision. But then you have this big whale, saying, okay, I'm going to buy my HR software from, you know, some SAS provider, I'm going to do some, whatever, 70,000-person deployment, but, as a quid pro quo, you've got to buy my all-flash array. So you must see that all the time. When you peel back the covers, underneath that SAS provider, what do you really see? Like, they fence off, sort of, legacy-vendors' stuff, and they really drive in their core business with your modern platform? Or is it sort of just a mishmash? >> No, I think we're seeing a shift. I think what we're seeing is, some of the legacy architectures are running up against boundaries. Boundaries in terms of complexity, boundaries in terms of agility. Kaminario was built to scale from the get-go. It was built for performance and it was built for scale. And I think what we're seeing is, the main value of these SAS providers, as they're reaching scale, is the ability to deliver consistent performance, consistent cost-efficiency, and really, our predictability. The ability to sort of forecast in the future what cost structure's going to look like in order to continue to deliver high-performance to their own users. >> So the hypothetical example I gave, I'm sure you see it, but are you, you know, winning head-to-head in those environments, and your piece is growing, and that's sort of just a static one-time deal? >> That's exactly what we're seeing, so our main growth, our main focus is on these software-to-service companies or software-to-service departments within existing companies building these types of offerings to deliver this as a service consumption model. And you were asking about the back-end, in the back-end, these are often large-scale databases operating mixed types of workloads, for example, transaction processing, analytics, all at the same time. And the need to support these types of workloads requires an infrastructure that can deliver at-scale, consistent performance. And when we face off the legacy vendors in those environments, we win out. >> You have to be substantially better as a small company. You are, otherwise, you're out of business. >> Absolutely. >> And so, interesting thing about the flash market it, a lot of the big guys realized right away, wow, I'm way behind, so they went out and they bought a lot of startups. What happened, did they sort of pollute them, through the integration, or ... (laughing) >> I think the marketshare statistics are a little bit confusing, but what we see is, you know, the bulk of the legacy vendors, you know, push in what we call retro-fit flash, basically taking their old legacy architectures, their scale-up or scale-out architectures, and cramming flash into it, and basically, then, they don't bring the same kind of simplicity, same kind of agility, same kind of scalability as a built-for-flash-offering like Kaminario. >> Right, what about, you guys have some announcements this week? >> Yup, take that? >> Yeah, two weeks ago we announced our next-generation platform, K2.n, which is based on a fully-converged, NVIO mean over fabric back end. This is basically taking our core operating system, Vision OS, which is a mature and robust storage software stack with all the data services and enterprise features that enterprises need. And deliver it on an NVIO fabric backend which leverages the existing capability to aggregate capacity and compute, and take it to the next level, delivering a very scalable and agile storage cluster that allows you to mix and match different types of resources, to add and remove resources very dynamically, and make your data center responsive in minutes and not hours or days or even months. >> You guys are familiar with our service and research, and we're very excited about NVIO over fabric, because we've been talking about it since probably, maybe 2008, 2009, some type of ability to scale and to communicate, and that's here today, finally. How close are we to actually having a product in the field that I can actually deploy? >> We will actually be shipping this in Q1, the K2.N They added another layer on top of that, We also announced a new software platform called Kaminario Flex, which is a orchestration platform which rides on top of K2.N, and allows you to dynamically compose virtual arrays out of these NVME-connected resources. So I really take that, looking ahead, that the classic notion of a monolithic shared-storage array, is going to die over time. >> Well, here's the numbers. I mean, it's automatic, go ahead. >> Well no, this is the whole debate that we've been clearing up with the true, private cloud report. I mean, guys, no-brainer, check, as a service, as the future, so you're good there. (laughs) The true pilot board, too bad it shows the on-prem stuff is declining in general, that's settlement for buying boxes, and the old way of doing things. Labor's being automated away and shifted, that's pretty obvious. Enter your business model, right? I mean, this is perfect for any cloud deal. >> Right. >> The question is, track record, bulletproof, reliability, security, the table stays all shift, data protection, all these details, that's what they care. You guys check that box ... (laughing) >> So the disability takes vision away, so I'm going to take it to the next generation. Technology is what actually allows us to do that. Whether it's in a hypercloud or we're going into a managed cloud provider, that is becoming a very desired consumption model for a lot of the ads of service members, allows them to build such a flexible architecture, based on a mature software step. >> So you guys, really, from what I see is your strategy is, get this out there quickly from a tech standpoint, software, flex, and integration with cloud is critical. Because you can offload a lot of that heavy lifting on those unique requirements to the cloud guys, where the pre-existing tech exists. Did I get that right? >> Yeah and I think what we see is these managed cloud providers are going to want to have a say in it, they want to actually be part of the evolution of the platform, right? >> Yeah, go ahead, fine, it's your stop! You can always buy the servers more flash! (laughing) >> So talk about your channel, and you go to market, help us understand that a little bit better. >> Yeah, I think it's all about focus for Kaminario. I mean, let's face it, the flash space is competitive, right, if we're going to go head-to-head with everyone, kind of, pull one of these growth-at-all-cost models. And you see what the market values those types of companies. So we've been really focused in two ways. One, SAS providers, next-generation business. I mean, if we opportunistically find a VDI deal, okay, that's great, we have a great solution for VDI, but it's not something that we're going to go out and hunting day to day. The second is really to focus on channel partners. We've got a channel first model, really, effectively 100% of our new business in 2017 will come through a channel partner. Most of those channel partners are looking at developing some type of managed services offering as well, so you know, it's not just about the margin on the deal, it's about the longterm -- >> Cause they're trying to respond to the market transit and value. >> Exactly, so it's about focus on a relatively small number of channel partners that get it, that like our model, and again, it's just -- >> Hey, you'll make money from it, cause that's all, at the end of the day, you've got to get that leverage, because that's your David and Goliath story. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And, global footprint? Is it primarily US and Europe or -- >> Yeah, so it's been, we started in Israel, US has been a good focus, last year we opened up the UK and France, end of the great we opened up Korea, we're now in Singapore, we're moving into China through partners, and so yeah, this is a global story. Clearly, US is the, in terms of adoption of these server infrastructures, US is really the furthest ahead, but it's a global phenomenon. >> What do you make of the VMwear momentum? Because two years ago, VMwear was, the stock was sort of in the tank and there was no growth, and now it's on fire, the data center's on fire, you can't get data center space! (laughing) >> From my perspective, the fast adoption that VMwear had for new technologies, for adopting containers, for adopting cloud paradigms, for adopting this new delivery model, and enabling a fuller stack aligns very well with the kind of demands of the next-generation data system we talked about, where the management plane, the orchestration plane, is becoming more and more important in optimizing the way in this infrastructure gets delivered. So that's, I believe, what is driving that forward. >> Josh and Elay, thanks so much for coming out, coming our way, you guys, company watch, love the business model. The tech comes home, you get it with that integration, man there's not a leverage there, congratulations on your success! (laughing) Great business. TheCUBE bringing you the CUBE as a service, all flash content here! Back with more VMworld coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the RSA conference in downtown San Francsisco. 40,000 security professionals talking about how to keep the bad guys out, especially with IOT and 5G coming right around the corner. Joined by the many time CUBE alumnae, always great to catch up with Mark. Mark Nunnikhoven from Trend Micro, what's your title now? >> VP... >> Cloud research? >> VP Cloud research, that's good. >> Welcome! >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. >> So it's always good to see that the booth, you guys always have kind of the craziest, wackiest booths. I was wondering though, if you fell out of the rocket ship and that's how you busted your arm. >> That's definitely a better story, so I think we can go with that, or a transporter malfunction, something like that will be a much better story than the sad truth. >> Okay. >> So you've been coming to this show for a while, we see you at all the AWS events, how is the kind of evolution of cloud and the ongoing expansion of cloud kind of change the game in the world of security? >> Yeah, I think cloud has enabled us to do a lot of things that we've been trying to do for a long time, and you know, so we've talked about enabling granular security throughout the enterprise for years, and it's always been hard because we've had a lot of different vendors, a lot of different systems. When we moved to cloud, it's getting a lot more homogenized, and everything's accessible via an API. So we're seeing a lot of maturity in that space where people are embracing that fact, and starting to enable some things that we've been trying to do, like that solid identity in axis management, you know, that's been really difficult in the enterprise, it's far simpler in a cloud space. >> That's interesting, because the other fact is all these things are now all connected via APIs, right? And there are a whole lot of SAS applications in the enterprise >> Yeah! >> So the attack surface is growing significantly and as was pointed out in the keynote this morning, a lot of people work from home, they plug in their desks, you know, it's just, it's growing very very quickly. >> It is! >> So how do you look at some of these challenges? >> Yeah, and it's funny because it is significant and you look at IOT alone, right? There's billions and billions of devices that are being connected and the devices themselves aren't necessarily so much of a threat, though we did see that this year with the Miray bot net and you know some massive d-dos attacks, but it's the data that's going in the back end that's more of a danger to consumers. And we see that with sas services as well. As a security practitioner, you lose the ability to apply the traditional controls that we're used to. And now you're relying on your service provider to do that for you. But it's still your data. So you're sort of forced to construct this balance of, you know, making sure you're leveraging the controls and options the provider has, but also looking out for things like, you know, people effecting the data going in, and sort of manipulating and gaming the system more, and I think you mentioned they said that this morning too. >> Right, the other thing they said this morning is that every company has at least one person that's trying to connect with a Nigerian prince. >> Yeah! >> Who's going to click on these? >> Well he needs money! He needs money, right? >> Yeah, got to give him a little money. >> Yeah! >> I mean it's funny, as far as we've evolved, you know, every, you know, my wife will say "Oh, I got this weird email", so like don't click it, don't click it! >> Mark: Yeah! >> It's the same old techniques! >> It is, and, you know, I've been doing a lot of research in serverless security lately, and that's driven me to a really weird question. Because it's a collection of services where you don't have the ability to apply any controls directly. And it's sort of started me down this path of what is security mean? And it ties to what you were saying in that at the end of the day, users need to be able to use these systems. And sort of a pet peeve of mine is we tell people not to click on these links, but that's the sole purpose of a link is to be clicked on. So we need to find a better balance of educating people and giving them the context in which to make these decisions and having better reputation systems and better automated controls, so that they don't have the option of clicking or not clicking, they just never see bad links in the first place. >> Right, that's a good strategy. The other theme that's coming in, over and over, is really collaboration within the ecosystem here. To share facts, share knowledge, share data, so that you can pick up patterns faster, you can see notes, really the same thing over and over and over. And really, being the kind of co-op-itician, which is what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley. >> It is. And it's nice to see it increasing, I think it's gaining pace. And we're not just seeing it with the vendors, we're also seeing it where competitors in different industries are getting together. So a lot of financial CSOs are collaborating because they have a common enemy. And they realize they can't beat them alone, so if they're sharing threat intelligence amongst themselves, that they all sort of win because if one of them goes down, you know that attack's coming to the next door, right? >> Jeff: Right. >> You know, the next day. And we're doing the same thing in the vendor space, we're being more open to collaboration, and we're sharing research analysis, you know. A lot of vendors are launching bug bounty programs. You know, responsible disclosure is becoming a little more standardized. So not only within the community of vendors, but also within the research community. I think the more we talk, the better off we are because we see it in the underground where criminals are selling services to each other. They go "don't worry about setting up a bot net, Jeff I'll rent you one," so that miray bot net of IOT devices, we found that available for sale, you could lease it for 7500 US would get you almost a gigabyte of d-dos attack. And, you know, that's a really low barrier of entry for criminals, >> Jeff: Yeah. >> We need to make sure that we're making it easy for defenders to defend against that kind of thing. >> Still my favorite is the fake ransomware, where I didn't actually put ransomware in your machine but I told you I did, so go ahead and send the money to the Nigerian guy, and I promise I won't turn it on. >> Well, so that one's one of my favorites, but also sort of the super evil one that we saw this year was okay, I've encrypted your files, and I'll give you the key not for money, but if you encrypt two of your friends. So the pyramid scheme in spreading the attack. And that one was just super evil, cause it's mainly the social side, like, what kind of guy are you? Are you going to encrypt, like, you know? >> Which friends get it, right? >> Exactly, you know. >> Ones at the bottom of the list from Facebook. >> Yeah, but ransomware is a great example of attackers realizing that they can do this at scale, they can be insanely profitable, because even if you don't think you have a lot of valuable data, you probably got personal photos and videos that are really important to you, and if you're not taking basic preventative steps like backing up or patching your systems, then they're going to be able to get 500 bucks out of you, and that doesn't sound like much, but when you multiply that times, you know, 50, 60,000 people, because they just need to click a button or add people to a list, that's a huge amount of cash that's flowing in their coffers. >> Right. The other big change in scale that keeps getting talked about here is government, you know, kind of backed. >> Cyber... >> The nation state? >> Yeah, the nation state, thank you. Totally changing the game again, and as we talked about off air, it's good to know who you're fighting with. At least you can see 'em, but at the same time the scale of resources that they can bring to bare significantly bigger. >> Yeah, and that's the challenge. If you're not a nation state against a nation state, you know, it's David versus Goliath, without a good ending. Yeah, without the rock. You just got a piece of cloth, you're like "I hope I can throw somethin' at ya!" You know, but there is some advantage in knowing your adversary, especially when you're talking about, you know, nation state versus nation state, because everybody's got signature moves, they've got go-to work, you know, and you can kind of track them over time. And we've seen that with some research available, which is a great example of, you know, community participation, places like Mandy sharing information, you know, we do it at Trend Micro, bunch of the community players share like "hey, we found this ABT, we're associating it with, you know, probably a nation state, we're not sure who," but even the government, GHS just had a great release on grizzly stat, which was a very good campaign done, but very detailed analysis. Which we didn't see that three years ago, so helping people out to understand what they're up against, and if you're, you know, a smaller enterprise, or even a larger enterprise, you might not have the resources, but you can still take steps to make it harder. >> Right. >> And that's sort of the name of the game. Make it harder so that you get a better chance at protecting your data and at least being aware when you have been breached. >> Alright Mark, I'm going to give you the last word before we sign off here. What are your kind of priorities for 2017? You know, we talk a year from now, what are we going to talk about that you guys worked on this year? >> Yeah, hopefully, you know, a lot of the same, we're still pushing hard in cloud security around servers and containers, but a lot of my personal research has been pushing more towards teams and security professionals, and what we need to do to adjust to be educators in the space as opposed to being a silo team that's just telling you, saying "hey, you really should do this better." And I think that's a space that as an industry, we're ranking up to, that we have the expertise and we need to make sure the rest of business gets it too. >> I love it. We're hearing about big data all the time, it's a team sport, security is a team sport too. >> It is. It's a great way to put it. >> Alright, Mark Nunnikhoven, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA, downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music) (gentle techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube. Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016, sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> Welcome back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage here at Quickbooks Connect 2016 live from San Jose at the Convention Center. 5,000 attendees, the third year of this event, more than ever, and certainly that explosive growth is personified in what's happening here. On this floor and the key note station, and of course at home, if you're a small business owner you know exactly what we're talking about. Along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls and we're joined now by probably one of the most popular authors, most widely read authors in America today. Malcolm Gladwell, five times New York Times Bestseller Author. Congratulations on that. And the Revisionist History Podcast, which we love. I love the Wilt Chamberlain podcast, Big Man Can't Shoot. Thanks for joining us. Great to have you. >> Delighted to be here. >> So, first off, tell us about, and the whole spirit of this show is about the entrepreneurial capabilities of so many people in the workplace today. What's your thought about entrepreneurism if you will, and what does it take to be a good outside the box thinker? Like so many of these folks are. >> Well there ... The explosion ... Here we are in the middle of Silicon Valley and what this part of the country has done to change the culture of the entire world's economy in the last 20 years, 25 years is nothing short of incredible. Entrepreneurship has gone from something that people thought of as the province of wackos and weirdos and strange people to a kind of thing that kids aspire to do and be. That's an amazing transformation. And I think when we ... What's happened over the course of that transformation is we've discovered that the definition of what it takes to be good is a lot broader than we thought. That many different kinds of people using many different kinds of strategies can be effective at starting businesses and achieving. I think that's been the great take home lesson of this entrepreneurial explosion of the last generation. >> I think probably in all of your works, there are pieces of it that you could extract and apply to this world, but what really struck me I think about David and Goliath, about advantages, disadvantages and making the most of your strengths basically, how do you see that translating or how would you want to communicate that to somebody, a small business owner, who thinks "Man, I'm up against the wall"? "How am I going to cut through the clutter?" "How am I going to get there?" All this sweat equity. But yet, there are advantages that they have. >> Yeah. Yeah, because this goes to this issue of learning strategies that there's a kind of learning called compensation learning, where you are learning out of weakness, not out of strength. You're learning from your failures and that kind of learning is a lot harder to do, but it's a lot more powerful. So the task of the small business owner, who is facing a whole series of disadvantages and weaknesses relative to much larger competitors, there's no question, it's a harder way to go. But, if you can pull it off, you'll end up in a much stronger position. If you can be one of those people who can do compensation learning, and in that book I talk, for example, about how many entrepreneurs are dyslexic, and that's a beautiful example of that. Some portion of people who suffer from quite a serious learning disorder, not all of them, some portion of them manage to turn that around into an advantage. To take something, to take a basic inability to read, and turn that into developing skills or delegation and leadership and problem solving and developing an incredible resilience, the ability to cope with failure. They turn a weakness into a strength and they end up being far more powerful than they would be as a result. And when I interviewed all these successful, dyslexic entrepreneurs for that book, what was amazing was that all of them said, "I did not succeed despite my disability, I succeeded because of it." And that's the crux of it. And so I think there is a silver lining to many of the clouds that small business owners face. >> It's a really powerful statement because so often, people are using drugs and medication and other things to kind of normalize people that are maybe not in the mean, that are on the fringe. But in fact, it's their ability to put a different lens, and see things differently that opens up an opportunity that the regular person just trucking down the road didn't see right in front of them. >> That's what I meant when I said earlier, talking about how our kind of definition of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur is expanding. I think we're beginning to understand that lots of traits that we once thought of as just problematic have unexpected benefits. Like I remember once reading someone who was putting out that basically, most of the great research scientists in the world have OCD. And you kind of have to have OCD if you want to be ... 'Cause what are you doing? You're spending hours and hours in the lab doing the same incredibly precise experiment over and over and over again, and measuring your results to the slightest. That's OCD behavior that has found a beautiful home. Right? Has found a world where you need to be that way, right? And I read that as like, "That's lovely." These are people who we drugged up and pushed off to the fringes two generations ago, and now we've found a home for them in labs where they're doing incredibly productive and satisfying work. >> Yeah, I think you profiled in one of the podcasts, a cancer researcher who you said nobody really likes the guy, he's kind of an ordinary guy, but he was just so laser focused on the very specific problem that he was trying to solve. He didn't really care. That's what he was all about. >> Yeah, no, this has been a lovely development in our understanding of human capacity. >> So where do the ideas come from? I'm one of the many fans and I've read, and every time I read one of your books, it never ceases to amaze me how much you make me think. Which is, I think, why we're all so attracted to it. Because it seems so obvious, right? After you present this beautiful, elegant case, like "I never thought of that." Where do those ideas come from? What motivates you to say "I'm going to write blank. I'm going to do tipping point." >> I wish I had a system, 'cause right now I'm planning the next season of my podcast, so I need 10 more ideas for that, and I'm starting to write a new book so I need 80,000 words for that. And I'm wondering, I wish I had a big bucket full of ideas. (laughter) So I'm running around with my head cut off talking to people, but I spent the summer ... I probably read 40 books this summer to do with ... Apart from, I'm not talking about novels and fillers, and serious books that I'm trying to get. And I've been going around talking to people, just talking to interesting people trying to work out what I'm interested in. And trying to just uncover interesting things that will prompt me to go in cool new directions. There is a kind of, you have to let your mind ... It's like, the farmer lets his field go fallow for a while. You've got to have a fallow period where you just let everything regenerate and then you plant the crop again. >> But somehow reading 40 books doesn't sound like, to me, you're letting your mind go fallow. >> Well I didn't have a ... I was literally just lying around reading books. It seemed pretty fallow to me. >> What was your favorite one out of that read? Or the most enlightening one out of that read? >> I got on these weird side tracks this summer. I became obsessed with Churchill's Best Friend. Churchill had a best friend who betrays him. And it's this incredibly moving story. And I don't know how it fits in what I want to do, but I want to try and make it fit, 'cause it's such a weird and troubling story about this, I mean a truly transcendent figure in history who has a best friend who stabs him in the back with consequences for the world. Anyway, so I read like seven bizarre, weird, obscure books about this guy. And I was like "There's something there I think." >> He's out there, yeah. >> Alright, so we'll pick something that was a little more topical. Last night, they had a drink making robot machine over in the corner making drinks. And it just brings up, as we get into more automation, more connected systems. We had the huge knockout of the web last week from the East coast. As you look at the future, there's the happy future, where the machines do all the hard work and we get to sit around and read books like you did, which is fantastic. And then there's the darker potential future, where the machines take everyone's jobs. What are people going to do? And if it can make drinks and it can diagnose disease and read every manual that came out. How do people fit? And then there's the middle ground, right? The best chess player is the best chess player and a machine, not either or. So I'm just curious to get your thoughts as we look to the next big wave of AI and machine learning and automation, how you see that shaking out. >> I think it's important not to overstate how much of our lives we will be willing to let machines take over. So it's been very interesting for me as a writer, to observe, for example, what happened with eBooks over the last 10 years. So eBooks come along and everyone says, "The printed book is over. It's going to all going to be on ... Why would you go and lug around a big, heavy book when you can get for a fraction of the cost something that'll be ..." And so there were all these gloom and doom, and expectations, and what happens? Well, it turns out that eBooks are still a fairly sizeable portion of the market place. But it turns out that most people actually want to read a book, a physical object, that that's more pleasurable somehow, that the interaction with this thing, this pages and paper, is pleasing. It's part of the experience. And I think that's a useful ... No, that's not a robot and that's not AI, but it's an important reminder that the interactions and the activities that make up our lives are not just functional activities. They are opportunities for enjoyment and engagement, and part of the reason you go to a restaurant is not just to eat the food, but to engage with the people in the restaurant. Part of the pleasure is the person who brings you the wine bottle and gives you a little spiel. Now, I can replace that person with a robot, but the question is do you want to? Now, you can do it. And I can imagine a future where the robot brings you the best wine in the world and does some algorithm and gives you the finest wine. But I don't know, if I'm having a nice night out and I'm paying 60 dollars a plate for my dinner, I kind of want the human interaction. I mean, it's part of the pleasure. Same thing with self-driving cars. It baffles me as a kind of car guy how everyone assumes that "Oh, well, by 2020, it'll all be self-driving cars." Wait a minute, what if I enjoy driving a car? We've forgotten this. It's actually quite a pleasant thing to go and to make decisions unconsciously and consciously and drive down the road. And I like a manual transmission, I like the feel of driving a car. I don't want to give that up. Why should I have to give that up? So it's like, we can't get ahead of ourselves. You mentioned the chess thing, which is a great example of this. Can you make a machine that will beat a person at chess? Yes, you can. But it's not chess. Chess is a gameplay between two people. That's why it's interesting. If it's played between two machines no one will watch it! So it's this absurd thing. I can also make a machine that can run faster than Usain Bolt. It's called a car. Do I want to watch a race between a car and Usain Bolt? No. Why? Because what's pleasurable is watching human beings race. >> But Jeff hit on something, and then you touched on it with the car, and I think about GPS. And how it wasn't that long ago, and I kind of sound like my grandfather now or my father, that we just drove around, right? And if you came to the traffic, "Oh God, I've hit traffic." But now we use applications that take us, and they're using their intelligence. Is it possible, can you see with this generation of kids coming up now, that artificial intelligence kind of makes our personal thinking obsolete? And we don't process like we do, we don't evaluate, we don't analyze, and so we're raising a whole different kind of human, because of the interaction with technology or what we can sign to technology, because we give up on it. >> Well it'd be different. I think that, so let's stick with cars for a moment. I think now we have a world where a whole class of people drive their car to work in the morning. And when they're driving their car, the number of things they can do with their imagination and mind is limited. They can listen to music or the news or a podcast, or they can just sit there, but they can't ... They can maybe talk on a phone even though they shouldn't, but they can't do work and they can't lie in the back and take a nap, and they can't daydream, and they can't have a meaningful interaction with more than one person. What we're going to move to is a world where some people will give up whatever kind of pleasure or interaction that came from driving a car, and replace it with another kind of interaction. So driving a car becomes ... The time that you're in a car becomes a place where an infinite number of things can happen, as opposed to five things can happen. And I sort of think that's what the world looks like, is we get this incredibly complicated mix. Medicine becomes some mixture of the computer is going to do all the easy stuff, but half of medicine is about being reassured. It's about your personal fears. It's not about the diagnosis, or which drug you take. And for that stuff, I imagine that we're going to have much longer, deeper, more meaningful conversations with our doctors 15 years from now, when the computer has taken all the easy stuff off the table, or the AI, the robot. So in many ways, that world allows for much richer, personal interactions than the one we're in now. The doctor really will have ... My doctor has no time for me now. He's like "I got to move around." >> "Got to go." >> In ten years, it's possible my doctor will be able to sit down with me for half an hour or 45 minutes twice a year and really talk about what's going on with me and that's the promise of the future. I don't think we're going to have a situation where everything's done by the robot. >> Well this is one of those occasions where I truly wish we had tons of more time, but you have a busy schedule and so we're going to allow you to go on, but thank you so much ... >> Thank you. It was super fun. >> John: For sharing this time with us. We've thoroughly enjoyed it. >> Jeff: Look forward to the KeyNote later this afternoon as well. >> And we look forward to the next 80,000 words, so good luck with that too! >> Thank you. >> Malcolm Gladwell, joining us here on the Cube. Back with more from San Jose right after this. (upbeat music)

live from New York it's the cube covering riverbed disrupt watch you buy riverbed now here are your hosts day volante and Stu minimus welcome back to the Big Apple everybody this is riverbed disrupts we've got a special guest Steve de plusieurs with us the man behind many men and women at enterprise strategy group founder head chief chief analyst senior analyst Steve's great to see you thanks for coming off thanks for having me I appreciate it I'm you doing fellas it was good we were photobombing video bombing us today and here you are that was not intentional I didn't know the exact configuration in the camera almost always live it's all right and that ended up now you're in front of the camera how the right time this is not a bomb so what's doing these days what's what's happening on that's a ridiculous question citing you ah somewhat less ridiculous and still very open to interpretation I give me a path to head down and we can't I let's start with the with Delhi MC you've got a great blog on that you know the history was good really enjoyed that it's EMC success is because you left right so I'm not exactly sure it's a 50-50 between my crackers coming in and making everything that we sold actually work because not much really good I gotta say a lot of people are really positive people who know both dell and emc are actually really positive about the the marriage here but we nuts i don't think so i think from day one I saw I'll give you a quick anecdote hopefully quick tell me to shut up if not here's the parallel in two thousand Joe Tucci comes in and at that particular run emc and at that particular time EMC was really good about bringing in some outsider and spitting them out the DNA and the antibodies were just awful in that culture in that for an outsider to come in and be able to survive in there and they went through a bunch of senior managers senior executive vice-presidents yada yada yada that nobody lasted and 2g came in and I'd never met the man or and he had no business to have any idea who I was for example and for whatever reason I was able to get an audience with him very early on and I sat down with him and the first question I asked him only question I asked him and I wasn't looking nice like you I was disrespectful and he could conceive of me as disrespectful and I said what are you going to do about mo Shay because at the time as many of us that are old enough to know mo Shay was king of the of the hill over there he owns symmetrix and and he was untouchable Harry Dixon and Mo Shay were the two untouchable human beings within that emc culture and Joe looked me right in the eye and didn't skip a beat at all and said he's either going to play nice in the sandbox or he's gone and it wasn't six weeks later that ostensibly he was gone and I couldn't believe and so I knew right that in there I knew without knowing the man that this guy was a little bit different and everybody within the EMC antibody sort of climate said nope he's not gonna last six months he's not going to last and but I you know you look somebody in the eye and you see that and so I saw a lot of the similarities in this deal so you guys have been around forever I've been around forever you know Michael Michaels a straight-shooting guy Michael's doesn't have a go or vanity pretense or he doesn't do things for the wrong reasons he said something very very interesting to me about a year before the MC deal which was or a couple years before when he was talking about I think it was three power at the time when he's in the bidding war with Dave Donatelli at HP / 3 part and I don't remember the exact context of the comment but he talked about Dell spending money and he said you know I treat it like it's my own money because it is because it is it whereas he what he was alluding to as others are spending stockholders money and it's not really it and but so that was just a sort of an interesting look into into into the guy there so when this deal happened these are not to strangers right they've been together they've been married and divorced if you will and have had a relationship for a long time they know each other and so when it sort of happened you like oh boy you know and you on paper you can see the synergies and a lot of people i think i'm certainly not unique everybody saw the synergies is not a lot of overlap really what you worry about in a deal like that is cultural other other chiefs of the generals going to be able to get along or are they going to beat the hell out of each other and backstab and and do what happens in every one of these deals it seems like and they didn't write though they really didn't interesting that you know thou MCS a private company kind of a bummer for those who live in Massachusetts good but I kind of a there's a good days that a bummer why is that a bummer well because CMC the brand emc is gonna be gone right just like the walk go up with your private yeah crime and wagon oh let's hope that doesn't happen well we'll see we'll see it's dell technologies it's there's already Delia me logos up on the building from that standpoint it's okay you're right about it too it's hard not sure after yeah of course ok but this backdrop of companies going private obviously riverbed now click BMC many many many other space this new private equity game plan veritas right exactly right used to be private equity put it in some financial guy suck all the money out sure the carcass for yeah whatever's left and now they're saying why should the VCS have all the fun I mean riverbed got taken out for 13.6 billion think at some point to an IPO they're gonna be 10 billion plus a year from now J right I mean eight ten billion maybe I probably 70th I mean that's a nice return as a nitrile Michael Dell returns so I think that you bring up a very fascinating point that I think is gonna happen more often than less and the at the I'm not that smart but fundamentally having that microscope and that's spotlight on you in 90 day increments dealing with no disrespect 26 year old MBAs that have never had a real job that their only interest is squeezing that any per share regardless of what the human impact or what the long-term impact of a company is is the wrong way to do business it's it's our way it's our system but it's the wrong fundamental way to do business you your dad's probably told you just like I did no no you you you spend less than you make it's right if we're not the government we can't print our own money you spend less than you make and and you you honor your debts and all these other things i think the privatization aspect and all of this stuff is just going to keep going because these companies are good companies and they you take the handcuffs on them they don't care what Wall Street thinks for a certain period of time years certain period of time and when they're ready to come back exactly right they go from three billion dollars to ten billion dollars because they were able to do the right things not because they only cared about squeezing the coffee budget to make another you know point ten cents a share yeah Steve so you know market shares in competition and enterprise tech you know seemed for a long time you know nothing change storage industry was very entrenched you know we've seen market share shifting a lot i'll bring it back to you know where to show called disrupt here you know there's been a leader in the networking world for most of my career here um why are you know enterprises you know open to you no more change they're doing cloud there you know looking at some of the things like riverbeds talking about it's a great question so at first i would say they're not they're not open to it nobody and there are two fundamental reasons one is i hate to say it but human beings are lazy I'm one of them the devil I know is easier than the devil I don't yeah most people don't like change no to do not like change whatsoever so the really reason that anybody changes any of this stuff is because one they have to it just doesn't work anymore nobody buys something that's better because it's better they buy it because they have to buy it yeah why'd you buy that Tesla yeah what well that's a terrible example I'm an idiot and I just bought it because it was way better all right sorry now but where we are at some inflection points right now so it doesn't matter why the change occurred right so I could still I think maybe a different answer is I could buy a horse but it's still a valid mode of transportation it just makes me a complete ass if if I do right but it's technically a valid mode of transportation so we I can still go on do that path I people get into a habit of over a course of years and sometimes decades this is just the way we did it this is the way we do it its way I was trained this is way I will train the next guy I'm gonna walk in in the morning and smash myself on the hand with a hammer in the head every day why I don't know it doesn't feel good why do you keep doing it because that's the way we do it type of stuff so it change tends to be some you need some macro external function to force a change VMware had ESX for 10 years before they became VMware as we know them in 10 years why did that happen because it was a nice to have it was the smarter thing to do it only happened when the data center ran out of power and cooling when I couldn't physically fit any more stuff in there and I still had to do a job that's when people went well those guys in the corner are running this cool stuff that emulates pretty much any environment you want to you doing them people at oh oh that's interesting and now you're an idiot if you don't run vmware just as an example right and so I think that it's the same sort of thing we get hub-and-spoke spine and leaf yatta yatta yatta whatever the networking terminology is that we had to do that had a place and and in time but you would never probably architect something like that today if you started from a clean piece of paper and I'm not picking on just Cisco I'd take the longer you're going to keep giving me a buck I'm gonna take your buck right it's because they do answer to shareholders so they're sort of at a catchment they could they could and they will eventually react to the market that says stop doing it that way because it's the wrong way to do HP HP e oh how about a go in the opposite direction of del super interesting well they will will will Dells ability to sell through EMC change the dynamic in the server market well they surpass HP ok so my personal bet if I had to bet right now I would say yes the answer is yes and here's the reason why you could you had three sort of mega companies in in what really to HP and IBM and then you had dell as the it sounds stupid to say but of the wannabe to those guys intel's grown up and now they're on equal playing field but so h IBM took one path IBM said I'm kind of getting it out of the infrastructure business and I'm gonna get into the third platform all in the higher value or what I presume to be eventually higher value plays there but there's no value in commodity hardware etc etc analytics baby yeah you got it whatever automotive yeah and ok let's very good for them and I made a lot of big bets right eight feet went exactly the other way let's just strictly you know we might have paid 10 billion for autonomy but we're gonna sell our 30 billion dollars and in software assets for less money because it is distractive and they so they split the two companies into printers assess your losses and go and don't get me wrong but those are Burger King makes money right Burger King makes money they follow McDonald's around and I'm this is not a good analogy but the only one I can kind of think of on the top of my head being number two and profitable is not a bad business and so as such they don't have to support each feed is enough to support a full stack of all of this other stuff that's really complicated and hard and really big company things so they're divesting themselves of it so makes essentially being her own PE firm she's stripping it before somebody else strips it and taking what she can get in the coffers and in a sufficient yeah starting it again what about riverbed give you a book give us your bumper sticker and then we get a rep all right so they I am I I'm probably the wrong person to ask and for the following reasons number one am not deep enough but number two is I love these guys since literally their inception and i will tell a quick story in that sense i was meeting their primary venture capitalist at the time a guy named chris chevy from light speed and i went to that that greek place in palo alto that I can never member the name of and I was meeting he he called me on the way over he said hey I'm running a little late with a guy do you mind if somebody joins us I said no and it was Jerry and in so I walk in and I'm this kid and there's Jerry and his jeans and doesn't care about anything type of thing oh great so what do you do he said oh well crank chris said why we just funded seed funded him my gosh all this terrific what's what's the company doing I swear to god he went not exactly sure yet thinking about a networking thing you know some paraphrasing Dudley they gave him money and he didn't know what they were gonna do and I was like oh my god what a great bet that worked out of any of your people really really well so I love riverbed I've loved them ever since I love Jerry is not only a character in a human being but it's a great company that is done you know again taking on Goliath really hard to take on Goliath and Cisco's about its Goliath as they come and these guys have just kicked by well you've taken on Goliath in a pretty entrenched business so I said last question last question what's new with ESG you guys are rocking you got a bunch of people working for you and just keep growing and love to see it new areas hit the security or to virtually you know every part of IT your customers love you what's what's new with you guys I'm my current personal passion and we're we're driving more I think interesting stuff the normal is insecurity because it is the wild wild west so I'm a storage guy I'm boring box kind of guy i understood that stuff 25 years ago securities fascinating to me because it is the storage business kind of 25 years ago only an order of magnitude if not bigger so there are 1500 companies not 150 trying to wannabes and and there's zero clear winners in any of these senses they riverbed brought up Palo Alto today great company but there are hundreds of different vectors that are all sort of attempting in one way or another to do the same thing but it's a it's a horse race where all the horses are running in different directions looks like a Monty Python look kind of scared two ready go hmm everywhere and so I I personally find that intriguing and fascinating also because the bigger they are the harder they fall so we'll go from 1,500 to 150 and we'll go from almost a trillion invested too oh boy a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money but from that certainly some players are going to rise tremendously and the other thing I'd really find interesting is this is we're no longer in the era of the boring box we really aren't and I and that's good for everybody in i.t except people that really love the boring box and so there's always hard a school of hard knocks right people are going to lose jobs and and it's unfortunate that respect and they'll come clinging to that Titanic but at the end of the day what's on the other side is crazy stuff you know it's great that the iphone we forget is it's seven years old or something it's eight years old we act like it's a you know we've had it forever but no no I had a bag phone when i was with the MC and i thought it was really cool at a thousand dollars a minute to be calling my friend who had a bag phone cuz you couldn't call anybody else cuz no one else at a bank what wasn't that long ago so anyway them all right well big buddy could be interesting to see picking winners in the security space but some gradual ations on all your success okay thank you very much for coming to the cubes great time guys thank you so much all right keep right to everybody will be back to wrap riverbed disrupt right after this