>>Hey guys and girls, welcome back to Motor City, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier on the Cube's third day of coverage of Coon Cloud Native Con North America. John, we've had some great conversations over the last two and a half days. We've been talking about identity and security management as a critical need for enterprises within the cloud native space. We're gonna have another quick conversation >>On that. Yeah, we got a great segment coming up from someone who's been in the industry, a long time expert, running a great company. Now it's gonna be one of those pieces that fits into what we call super cloud. Others are calling cloud operating system. Some are calling just Cloud 2.0, 3.0. But there's definitely a major trend happening around how cloud is going Next generation. We've been covering it. So this segment should be >>Great. Let's unpack those trends. One of our alumni is back with us, O Rika Zi, co-founder and CEO of Aerio. Omri. Great to have you back on the >>Cube. Thank you. Great to be here. >>So identity move to the cloud, Access authorization did not talk to us about why you found it assertive, what you guys are doing and how you're flipping that script. >>Yeah, so back 15 years ago, I helped start Azure at Microsoft. You know, one of the first few folks that you know, really focused on enterprise services within the Azure family. And at the time I was working for the guy who ran all of Windows server and you know, active directory. He called it the linchpin workload for the Windows Server franchise, like big words. But what he meant was we had 95% market share and all of these new SAS applications like ServiceNow and you know, Workday and salesforce.com, they had to invent login and they had to invent access control. And so we were like, well, we're gonna lose it unless we figure out how to replace active directory. And that's how Azure Active Directory was born. And the first thing that we had to do as an industry was fix identity, right? Yeah. So, you know, we worked on things like oof Two and Open, Id Connect and SAML and Jot as an industry and now 15 years later, no one has to go build login if you don't want to, right? You have companies like Odd Zero and Okta and one login Ping ID that solve that problem solve single sign-on, on the web. But access Control hasn't really moved forward at all in the last 15 years. And so my co-founder and I who were both involved in the early beginnings of Azure Active directory, wanted to go back to that problem. And that problem is even bigger than identity and it's far from >>Solved. Yeah, this is huge. I think, you know, self-service has been a developer thing that's, everyone knows developer productivity, we've all experienced click sign in with your LinkedIn or Twitter or Google or Apple handle. So that's single sign on check. Now the security conversation kicks in. If you look at with this no perimeter and cloud, now you've got multi-cloud or super cloud on the horizon. You've got all kinds of opportunities to innovate on the security paradigm. I think this is kind of where I'm hearing the most conversation around access control as well as operationally eliminating a lot of potential problems. So there's one clean up the siloed or fragmented access and two streamlined for security. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? And if not, where, where am I missing that? >>Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the life of an IT pro, you know, back in the two thousands they had, you know, l d or active directory, they add in one place to configure groups and they'd map users to groups. And groups typically corresponded to roles and business applications. And it was clunky, but life was pretty simple. And now they live in dozens or hundreds of different admin consoles. So misconfigurations are rampant and over provisioning is a real problem. If you look at zero trust and the principle of lease privilege, you know, all these applications have these course grained permissions. And so when you have a breach, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when you wanna limit the blast radius of you know what happened, and you can't do that unless you have fine grained access control. So all those, you know, all those reasons together are forcing us as an industry to come to terms with the fact that we really need to revisit access control and bring it to the age of cloud. >>You guys recently, just this week I saw the blog on Topaz. Congratulations. Thank you. Talk to us about what that is and some of the gaps that's gonna help sarto to fill for what's out there in the marketplace. >>Yeah, so right now there really isn't a way to go build fine grains policy based real time access control based on open source, right? We have the open policy agent, which is a great decision engine, but really optimized for infrastructure scenarios like Kubernetes admission control. And then on the other hand, you have this new, you know, generation of access control ideas. This model called relationship based access control that was popularized by Google Zanzibar system. So Zanzibar is how they do access control for Google Docs and Google Drive. If you've ever kind of looked at a Google Doc and you know you're a viewer or an owner or a commenter, Zanzibar is the system behind it. And so what we've done is we've married these two things together. We have a policy based system, OPPA based system, and at the same time we've brought together a directory, an embedded directory in Topaz that allows you to answer questions like, does this user have this permission on this object? And bringing it all together, making it open sources a real game changer from our perspective, real >>Game changer. That's good to hear. What are some of the key use cases that it's gonna help your customers address? >>So a lot of our customers really like the idea of policy based access management, but they don't know how to bring data to that decision engine. And so we basically have a, you know, a, a very opinionated way of how to model that data. So you import data out of your identity providers. So you connect us to Okta or oze or Azure, Azure Active directory. And so now you have the user data, you can define groups and then you can define, you know, your object hierarchy, your domain model. So let's say you have an applicant tracking system, you have nouns like job, you know, know job descriptions or candidates. And so you wanna model these things and you want to be able to say who has access to, you know, the candidates for this job, for example. Those are the kinds of rules that people can express really easily in Topaz and in assertive. >>What are some of the challenges that are happening right now that dissolve? What, what are you looking at to solve? Is it complexity, sprawl, logic problems? What's the main problem set you guys >>See? Yeah, so as organizations grow and they have more and more microservices, each one of these microservices does authorization differently. And so it's impossible to reason about the full surface area of, you know, permissions in your application. And more and more of these organizations are saying, You know what, we need a standard layer for this. So it's not just Google with Zanzibar, it's Intuit with Oddy, it's Carta with their own oddy system, it's Netflix, you know, it's Airbnb with heed. All of them are now talking about how they solve access control extracted into its own service to basically manage complexity and regain agility. The other thing is all about, you know, time to market and, and tco. >>So, so how do you work with those services? Do you replace them, you unify them? What is the approach that you're taking? >>So basically these organizations are saying, you know what? We want one access control service. We want all of our microservices to call that thing instead of having to roll out our own. And so we, you know, give you the guts for that service, right? Topaz is basically the way that you're gonna go implement an access control service without having to go build it the same way that you know, large companies like Airbnb or Google or, or a car to >>Have. What's the competition look like for you guys? I'm not really seeing a lot of competition out there. Are there competitors? Are there different approaches? What makes you different? >>Yeah, so I would say that, you know, the biggest competitor is roll your own. So a lot of these companies that find us, they say, We're sick and tired of investing 2, 3, 4 engineers, five engineers on this thing. You know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. We have to maintain this thing and so we can, we can use your solution at a fraction of the cost a, a fifth, a 10th of what it would cost us to maintain it locally. There are others like Sty for example, you know, they are in the space, but more in on the infrastructure side. So they solve the problem of Kubernetes submission control or things like that. So >>Rolling your own, there's a couple problems there. One is do they get all the corner cases who built a they still, it's a company. Exactly. It's heavy lifting, it's undifferentiated, you just gotta check the box. So probably will be not optimized. >>That's right. As Bezo says, only focus on the things that make your beer taste better. And access control is one of those things. It's part of your security, you know, posture, it's a critical thing to get right, but you know, I wanna work on access control, said no developer ever, right? So it's kind of like this boring, you know, like back office thing that you need to do. And so we give you the mechanisms to be able to build it securely and robustly. >>Do you have a, a customer story example that is one of your go-tos that really highlights how you're improving developer productivity? >>Yeah, so we have a couple of them actually. So there's the largest third party B2B marketplace in the us. Free retail. Instead of building their own, they actually brought in aer. And what they wanted to do with AER was be the authorization layer for both their externally facing applications as well as their internal apps. So basically every one of their applications now hooks up to AER to do authorization. They define users and groups and roles and permissions in one place and then every application can actually plug into that instead of having to roll out their own. >>I'd like to switch gears if you don't mind. I get first of all, great update on the company and progress. I'd like to get your thoughts on the cloud computing market. Obviously you were your legendary position, Azure, I mean look at the, look at the progress over the past few years. Just been spectacular from Microsoft and you set the table there. Amazon web service is still, you know, thundering away even though earnings came out, the market's kind of soft still. You know, you see the cloud hyperscalers just continuing to differentiate from software to chips. Yep. Across the board. So the hyperscalers kicking ass taking names, doing great Microsoft right up there. What's the future? Cuz you now have the conversation where, okay, we're calling it super cloud, somebody calling multi-cloud, somebody calling it distributed computing, whatever you wanna call it. The old is now new again, it just looks different as cloud becomes now the next computer industry, >>You got an operating system, you got applications, you got hardware, I mean it's all kind of playing out just on a massive global scale, but you got regions, you got all kinds of connected systems edge. What's your vision on how this plays out? Because things are starting to fall into place. Web assembly to me just points to, you know, app servers are coming back, middleware, Kubernetes containers, VMs are gonna still be there. So you got the progression. What's your, what's your take on this? How would you share, share your thoughts to a friend or the industry, the audience? So what's going on? What's, what's happening right now? What's, what's going on? >>Yeah, it's funny because you know, I remember doing this quite a few years ago with you probably in, you know, 2015 and we were talking about, back then we called it hybrid cloud, right? And it was a vision, but it is actually what's going on. It just took longer for it to get here, right? So back then, you know, the big debate was public cloud or private cloud and you know, back when we were, you know, talking about these ideas, you know, we said, well you know, some applications will always stay on-prem and some applications will move to the cloud. I was just talking to a big bank and they basically said, look, our stated objective now is to move everything we can to the public cloud and we still have a large private cloud investment that will never go away. And so now we have essentially this big operating system that can, you know, abstract all of this stuff. So we have developer platforms that can, you know, sit on top of all these different pieces of infrastructure and you know, kind of based on policy decide where these applications are gonna be scheduled. So, you know, the >>Operating schedule shows like an operating system function. >>Exactly. I mean like we now, we used to have schedulers for one CPU or you know, one box, then we had schedulers for, you know, kind of like a whole cluster and now we have schedulers across the world. >>Yeah. My final question before we kind of get run outta time is what's your thoughts on web assembly? Cuz that's getting a lot of hype here again to kind of look at this next evolution again that's lighter weight kind of feels like an app server kind of direction. What's your, what's your, it's hyped up now, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, it's interesting. I mean back, you know, what's, what's old is new again, right? So, you know, I remember back in the late nineties we got really excited about, you know, JVMs and you know, this notion of right once run anywhere and yeah, you know, I would say that web assembly provides a pretty exciting, you know, window into that where you can take the, you know, sandboxing technology from the JavaScript world, from the browser essentially. And you can, you know, compile an application down to web assembly and have it real, really truly portable. So, you know, we see for example, policies in our world, you know, with opa, one of the hottest things is to take these policies and can compile them to web assemblies so you can actually execute them at the edge, you know, wherever it is that you have a web assembly runtime. >>And so, you know, I was just talking to Scott over at Docker and you know, they're excited about kind of bringing Docker packaging, OCI packaging to web assemblies. So we're gonna see a convergence of all these technologies right now. They're kind of each, each of our, each of them are in a silo, but you know, like we'll see a lot of the patterns, like for example, OCI is gonna become the packaging format for web assemblies as it is becoming the packaging format for policies. So we did the same thing. We basically said, you know what, we want these policies to be packaged as OCI assembly so that you can sign them with cosign and bring the entire ecosystem of tools to bear on OCI packages. So convergence is I think what >>We're, and love, I love your attitude too because it's the open source community and the developers who are actually voting on the quote defacto standard. Yes. You know, if it doesn't work, right, know people know about it. Exactly. It's actually a great new production system. >>So great momentum going on to the press released earlier this week, clearly filling the gaps there that, that you and your, your co-founder saw a long time ago. What's next for the assertive business? Are you hiring? What's going on there? >>Yeah, we are really excited about launching commercially at the end of this year. So one of the things that we were, we wanted to do that we had a promise around and we delivered on our promise was open sourcing our edge authorizer. That was a huge thing for us. And we've now completed, you know, pretty much all the big pieces for AER and now it's time to commercially launch launch. We already have customers in production, you know, design partners, and you know, next year is gonna be the year to really drive commercialization. >>All right. We will be watching this space ery. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the keep. Great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. >>Our pleasure as well For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live. Michelle floor of Con Cloud Native Con 22. This is day three of our coverage. We will be back with more coverage after a short break. See that.

(upbeat music) >> Every company needs great salespeople, it's one of the most lucrative professions out there. And there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gitomer, and Dale Carnegie and Jack Welch, and many others. Things like, "Each of us has only 24 hours in a day, "it's all about how we use our time." And, "You don't have to be great to start, "but you have to start to be great." And then I love this one, "People hate to be sold, but they love to buy." "There are no traffic jams on the extra mile, "make change before you have to." And the all time classic, "Put that coffee down. "Coffee is for closers." Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube Video Exclusive, my name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Fifield who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to "The Cube" good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to see you again, Dave, great to be here. >> Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting, you know, what's the premise behind the company? >> Yeah sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10 year career as a CRO and it was, you know, had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically, you know, operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit and I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London, and I actually, one of the companies I started was in New York so I got schooled very much on a sort of US approach to how you build a modern you know, go to market and sales operation. Started going out there, doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function, and I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some, you know, online classes myself, got my co-founder Alex to put curriculum together as well and we literally started just doing online classes, very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks, and it really just blew up from there. >> That's amazing. I mean, so you've my, you know, tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform 'cause there's so much free information out there? Is it to organize, is it a discipline thing? Explain that. >> Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties, I think, of the last 50 years, okay. Now sales and go to market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B, so roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that 40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go to market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too little too late. So what I sort of say to people, you imagine this Dave, right. You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, you know, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos. And that's what's happened in the sales and go to market profession, okay. What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? Is the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right, doesn't mean it's actually a good learning experience. Like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second is, the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies. And they're the people that teach, and that information is not readily available and freely out there on the internet. >> Yeah, real opportunity, you made some great points there. I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. As Earl Nightingale says, "To some degree we're all salespeople, "selling our family on living the good life" or whatever. What movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding of 22 million, tell us about that, congratulations. You know, the investors, what else can you share with us? >> Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly, we're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come onto some of the growth metrics shortly, but just in a couple of years, you know, the last year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one, we're now well over 125 people, and I'm very, very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of those prestigious universities in the world, has taken a direct investment by their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures. Another Boston great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage 2 Capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot ventures as investors, and they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of go to market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. >> Great, well actually, let's jump ahead. Let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if Stage Two is involved, they're hardcore. What can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NR and the like, what can you share with us? >> They are both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned our fiscal ends at the end of January, each year. We've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers also in that time. And customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, GT, Six Cents, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X. So 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, very proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us comfortably, the largest go to market learning community in the world. >> How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, "Okay, we're ready, "we have product market fit, "we can now scale the go to market." What were the signals there, Paul? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, like it's the pull that we're getting from the market. And I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot with one of the largest companies actually in the world which is going fantastically well, our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge. But as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, we're living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upscale all those people, right, that are, like I say, that are so distributed. It's impossible. Like in work, in the office delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solved this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market really meant that you know, we have to double down. There is such a massive TAM, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and go to market in tech alone, right. And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively, you know, are B2B and therefore represent, you know, at its largest scope, our TAM. >> Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform. How's it work if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make both financially? And what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? >> So the model is basically on a seat model. So roughly speaking, every seat's about a thousand dollars per year per rep. The lift is light. So we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for, you know, SDRs, and the AEs, and CS reps, and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales, we're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's very, very simple. We basically, it's a seat model, people literally just send us the seats and the details, we get people up and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting is that, you know, we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from you know, SDR1 let's say to SDR2, you have to complete these three courses with Sales Impact Academy, and let's say, get 75% in your exam and it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. >> Yeah, so really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me? Or are people actually going through a journey in career progression, or maybe both? >> Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, you know, running the entire function. This is the other thing about the crazy world of go to market. Very often, people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens, there's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. >> Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes, how do you find these guys, how do you structure? What are the content, you know, vectors, where's all that come from? >> Yeah. So the sort of secret source of what we do, beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer to peer learning that goes on, is that we go and source the absolute most elite people in go to market to teach, okay. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from like job to job at the very like the sort of peak of their careers, working for these incredible companies, it's that knowledge that we want to get access to, right. And so Stage 2 Capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about Stage 2 Capital as you know Dave, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on when we spoke last year and also Jay Po is all the LPs of Stage 2 Capital represent 3 to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really kind of willing to give back, of course there are commercials around it as well, and there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty, and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. >> Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? >> Yeah look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning, okay. Most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed, and there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on Andrew's recent site. A short time ago, which is talking about how the completion rates of on demand learning are somewhere between 3 and 6%. That is like, that's awful. >> Terrible. >> I was like why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction. So we teach two, one hour classes a week, that's it. We're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two, one hour classes a week. Typically, you know, Monday and a Wednesday, or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right, it's kind of how humans learn as well. You know, short bursts of information, and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming, you're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 80% for our courses. >> Okay, so they block that time out- >> In the calendar, yeah. >> And they make an investment. Go ahead, please. >> Yeah yeah, exactly, sorry Dave. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, you know, we have course lengths. So one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call The Magic Learning Hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM over in the UK, and 5:00 PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the western hemisphere joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar and it's that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. >> That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I as an individual purchase your service? >> Yeah, that's a good question. Currently it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. You know, we have an enterprise segment, we have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment, and then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic, and that's typically and most of like venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment a B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer, and then later on this year we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product led growth, so individuals can actually sign up to SIA. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep, is that right? I mean, that's- >> Yeah. >> That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of, you know, this community and grow his or her career. So that's the growth plan? You go down market I would imagine, you talked about the western hemisphere, there's international opportunities maybe, local language. What's the growth plan? >> Yeah, I mean look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the middle east and APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right. Is 5:00 PM in Auckland, it's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. What's incredible is we teach in that time and that opens up the whole of the middle east and the whole of APAC, right, right down to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world, I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning products in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many like axis of growth, we've got single users as I mentioned, but really Dave that's single users we'll be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. You know, we've seen students are now leaving university with over $100,000 dollars in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say a hundred bucks a month, right. And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR, that's a huge entry level salary. And you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. >> I love it. The cost education going through the roof, it's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress, the fresh funding. Great to have you back in "The Cube." We'd love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. >> Thank you very much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "The Cube, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks Adam in the studio. We're here on the floor in Cloud City, right in the middle of all the action. The keynotes are going on in the background, it's a packed house. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante is on assignment, digging in, getting those stories. He'll have the analysis, he'll be back on theCUBE but I want to welcome Chloe Richardson, who has been holding down the main stage here in Cloud City, with amazing content that she's been hosting. Chloe, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and kicking it up day two with me. >> No, not at all. Thank you for having me. It's very exciting. I love what you guys have got over here, very fun. >> We're inside theCUBE. This is where all the action is. And also the Cloud City is really changing the game. If you look at what's going on here in Cloud City, it's pretty spectacular. >> Know, I mean the atmosphere is absolutely palpable, isn't it? You can just feel as people walk in and see what the future looks like to the Telecoms industry, it's very exciting. >> And you've been doing a great job on the main stage. We've been really loving your content. Let's get into some of the content here. Actually the keynote is going on, we're going to have DR, maybe fly by the set later, we're going to check that up. But let's check out this videotape of, this is TelcoDR. You got to check out this reel and we'll be right back, we'll talk about it. (upbeat music) >> TelcoDR burst onto the global telecom scene this year, making headlines for taking over the huge Erickson's space at MWC21. And for building Cloud City in just a hundred days. But why did the company go to such trouble? And what is the unique offering to the telecoms industry? And what drives their dynamic CEO, Danielle Royston or DR as everyone calls her? Cloud City Live caught up with DR, away from the hustle and bustle of the city to find out. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, coming to you from beautiful Barcelona. I'm here for MWC21. About a hundred days ago, I decided to take over the iconic Erickson booth to turn it into Cloud City. Cloud City has over 30 vendors and 70 demos to introduce telco to what I think is the future for our industry. We're going to have three awesome experiences. We're going to talk about the new subscriber experience, we're going to talk about what's in store for the new network and the future of work. I'm really excited to create a community and invite awesome telco executives to see this new future. It's been a really tough 18 months, and we didn't know what MWC21 was going to be like in terms of attendance. And so from the get go we plan this amazing experience that we call, Cloud City Live. At Cloud City Live, we have two main components. We have the speaker series where we have over 50 speakers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, as well as CSPs and awesome vendors talking about the public cloud in telco. The second part of Cloud City Live, is theCUBE. Think of this as like an ESPN desk of awesome tech interviews focused on telco and the public cloud hosted by John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Dave and John are going to talk to a variety of guests, focused on telco and the public cloud. It's a great way for our virtual participants to feel like they're at the show, experiencing what's going on here. So excited to have them as part of the Cloud City booth. There's a ton of innovation going on in telco. And 20 years ago, Elon Musk set on his mission to Mars. I, like Elon Musk, I'm on a quest to take telco to the public cloud. Every year at MWC, there's always a flurry of announcements and this year is no different. At this year's MWC, Totogi, a startup that I invested a hundred million dollars in, will be launching. Totogi is introducing two products to the market, this week at MWC. The first is a planetary scale charger. More than a charger, it's an engagement coupling dual network data with charging information to drive subscriber engagement and doubling your ARPU. The second product that Totogi is introducing, is a planetary scale BSS system built on top of the TM forum, open APIs. Both of these products will be available for viewing in the virtual booth, as well as on the show for. The public cloud is an unstoppable mega trend that's coming to telco. I'm super excited to bring to you, the vendors, the products, the demonstrations, and the speakers, both to people here in Barcelona and virtually around the world. (upbeat music) >> Well, that was a fascinating insight into the origins of TelcoDR, why public cloud is going to truly disrupt the telecoms industry and why DR herself is so passionate about it. If you'd like to find out more, come and see us at Cloud City. (upbeat music) >> Okay, thanks. Just roll on that reel. Chloe, I mean, look at that reel. I mean, DR, Danielle Royston, she's a star and I've seen a lot of power players in the industry. She's got guts and determination, and she's got a vision and she's not just, you know, making noise about telco and cloud, there's actually a lot of real good vision there. I mean, it's just so impressive. >> No, really isn't. And for me, it's almost like the next moonshot. It's the moonshot of the telco world. She's innovative, she's exciting and if we've learned anything over the last 18 months is that we need to in this industry to grow and for the future of the industry. So, it's so exciting. I think she's a real inspiration. >> And I love the fact that she's so, takes a tiger by the tail, because the telco industry is being disrupted. She's just driving the bus here and I remember I did a story on Teresa Carlson, who was with Amazon web services, she was running the public sector and she was doing the same exact thing in that public sector world in DC and around the world. She opened up regions in Bahrain, which as a woman, that was an amazing accomplishment. And she wasn't just a woman, she was just a power player. And she was exceptional leader. I see DR doing the same thing and people aren't going to like that, I'll tell you right now. People are going to be like, whoa, what's going on here? >> And of course, it's always the way we pioneers though, isn't it? At the time people thinking what's going, we don't like change, why are we being shaken up. But actually afterwards, in retrospect, they think, oh, okay, I see why that happened and we needed it. So really exciting stuff. >> Making things happen, that's what we're doing here in theCUBE. Obviously the main stage's doing a great job. Let's go check out this highlight reel. If you're watching and you miss some of the action, this is, I'll see the physical event back since 2019 in February, but there's also a Hybrid event. A lot of virtual action going on. So you got theCUBE virtual, you got a lot of content on virtual sites, but in person here, we're going to go show you a highlight reel from what we did yesterday, what was happening around the show? Enjoy this quick highlight reel from yesterday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Okay. We're back here in theCUBE. We're the main floor out here with Chloe Richardson, who is emceeing, hosting and driving the content on the Cloud City main stage. Chloe, it's been great here. I mean, so far day one, I was watching your presentations and inspire site chats you've been hosting. Awesome content. I mean, people are like jazzed up. >> Yeah, I know for sure. We had Scott Brighton on yesterday, who was our opening keynote on the live stage. And his session was all about the future of work, which is so relevant and so pertinent to now. And he talked about the way it's changing and in 10 years it's going to be a trillion dollar industry to be in the cloud at work. So really interesting. I mean, yeah, the atmosphere here is great, everyone's excited, there's new content everyday. And that's the thing, it's not stale content. It's stuff that people want to hear. People are here for the new hot trends, the new hot topics. Really exciting. >> Yeah, the next big thing. And also it's a fiscal event. So since 2019, this Mobile World Congress has been a massive event and hasn't happened since February, 2019. That's a lot of time that's elapsed in the industry cause of COVID and people are glad to be here, but a lot of stuff's changed. >> Yeah, it's a different world, right? I mean, two years in the telco industry is like a hundred years elsewhere. Everything has changed, digital transformation migration, obviously cloud, which is what we're talking about over here at Cloud City Live. I'm wondering though John, I'd like to pick your brains on something. >> Sure. >> It has changed in the last two years, we know that, but what about the future of Mobile World Congress? How do you see it changing in the next few years? >> Oh man, that's a great question. I mean, my observation, I've been coming to the show for a very long time, over a decade and a half, and it's been a nerdy show about networks and telecom, which is basically radios and wireless and then mobile. It's very global, a lot of networks, but now it's evolving and many people are saying, and we were talking on theCUBE yesterday, Dave Vellante was commenting that this show is turning into a consumer like show. So CES is the big consumer electronics show in the US, in Las Vegas every year. This show has got a vibe because what's all the technology from the cloud players and from the chips, are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more capability, lower power. So if you look at the chips, the hardware, it's less about the speeds and feeds. It's more about the consumer experience. You got cars. I was talking to a guy yesterday, he said, "Vehicle e-commerce is coming." I'm like, "What the hell his vehicle e-commerce?" And you could be on your app, driving down the freeway and go, "Hey, I want some food." Instead of having it delivered to you, if you order it you pick it up. So that's kind of can be happening now in real time, you can do all kinds of other things. so a lot of new things are happening. >> Yeah, I think so. Do you see that as another disruption for the industry that is the fact that it's moving to be more consumer focused? Is that anything we should be worried about in that space? >> Well I think the incumbents are going to lose their position. So I think in any new shift, new brands come in out of nowhere. >> For sure. >> And it's the people that you don't think about. It's the company that's not, that you don't see. And we got DR on the main stage right here, look at this. You saw her walk out with the confidence of a pro. She just walked out there and she's not afraid. >> No. Well, as she said in her video, she is ready to wake them up and you can see as soon as she worked out. That is what she intends to do. >> I love her mojo, she's got a lot of energy. And back to the show, I mean, she's just an example of what I was saying. Like in every market shift, a new brand emerges. >> Yep. >> I mean, even when apple was tainted, they were about to shut down, they were going to run out of cash. When Steve Jobs brought back apple, he consolidated and rebooted the company. The iPad was a similar moment, then the iPhone and just the rest is history. That kind of disruption's coming. You're going to see that here. >> Yeah. Oh, it's exciting though isn't it? To be future ready rather than future proof but actually I wanted to ask you something as well, because we are seeing all these cloud players getting hot under the collar about telco. Why are they so excited? What's the buzz about why, as you're in MWS and Google Cloud? Why do they want to have a slice of the pie? >> Well, I think they're hot, hot and heavy on the fact that telco is a ripe opportunity and it used to be this boring, slow moving glacier. >> Okay. >> It's almost like global warming now. The icebergs are melting and it's going to just change and because of the edge, 5G is not a consumer wireless thing. It's not like a better phone, it's a commercial app opportunity cause it's high bandwidth. We've all been to concerts or football games or sporting events where a stadium is packed. Everyone gets bars on their wifi, but can't get out, can't upload their pictures on Instagram. Why? Because it's choking them in the network. That's where 5G solves the problem. It brings a lot of bandwidth and that's going to bring the edge to life and that's money. So when you got money and greed and power changing hands, it's every, it's on the table and the wheel's spinning, and it could be double zero, or it could be lucky seven. You don't know. >> Yeah, for sure. And that's certainly enough to get all the big players hot and bothered about getting involved. And I suppose it circles back to the fact that, DR is really leading the charge and they're probably thinking, okay, what's going on here? This is different, we want something new. You didn't know it's an open run or something that we've been talking about over the last day or so. We've had quite a few of us speakers over here constantly. I've mentioned open run. What is it all about John? Because why all the bars, if 5G is such a hot topic? Why are we getting excited about it? >> That's a great thing. 5G certainly is Google Drive the main trend for sure. OpenRent is essentially an answer to the fact that 5G is popular and they need more infrastructure. So open source, the Linux Foundation has been the driver for most of the open source software. So they're trying to bring software and open architectures to create more entrepreneurial activity around hardware and around infrastructure because we need more infrastructure. We need more antennas, we need more transceivers, we need more devices that could be open. So in order to do that, you got to open up the technology and you want to minimize the licensing and minimize a lot of these, you know, proprietary aspects. >> What if we look at, so on Wednesday, we've got a great keynote from Philippe Langlois, who is CEO and founder of P1 Security. And he's coming to talk to us about cybersecurity within the cloud and within telco. So you just mentioned that. Open mind, it's all about having open source, about having that space where we can share more efficiently and easy, more easily. What does that mean for security though? Is it a risk? >> I think that's going to increase the value of security and minimize the threats. Because open source, even though it's open, the more people that are working on it, the more secure it could be. So yes, it could be more open in sense that could be explored by hackers, but it can be open to also protect. And I think we've seen open source and cloud in particular be more secure because everyone said, "Cloud is not secure, open source is not secure." And as it turns out when the collective hive minds of developers work on things, it gets secure. >> And it is interesting, isn't it? Because we have seen that there has been an uptick in cyber security and threats. But actually I was speaking to some leaders in across various industries and particularly in tech. And they were saying, "Actually there's not been an uptick in attempted threats, there's been an uptick because with this open source environment. We are able to track them and measure them and defend more efficiently. So actually they're being battered away, but the number is probably the same as it always was. We just didn't know about them before we had this open source environment. >> There's more money in threats and there's more surface area. So as the tide rises, so do the threats. So on a net basis it's more because there's more volume, but it's pretty much the same. And look at it, there's money involved, they're organized, there's a business model on attacking and getting the cash out of your bank or ransomwares at an all time high. So this is like a big problem and it's beyond the government, it's our individual freedom. So security its huge and I think open source and cloud are going to be, I think the answer to that. >> Yeah, for sure. And it's again about collaboration, isn't it? Which we talk about all the time but without collaboration that the industries aren't going to have to work together to promote this environment. So yeah, it should be good to talk with Phillip on Wednesday. >> I just say in security, don't download that PDF if you don't know who came from. The fishing is always good. Well, we got some great stuff coming up. We're going to have a great day. We got a video here on Mobile World Live, we're going to show this next segment and we're going to toss it to a video. And this is really about to give the experience Chloe, for people who aren't here, right? >> Yeah. >> To get a feel for what's going on in Barcelona and all the actions. And if you look at the video, enjoy it. >> Hi, I'm Danielle Royston, CEO and founder of TelcoDr, but you can call me DR. Ready for some more straight talk about telco? It's go time, let's do it. Holy shit. It sure is a great time to be a tech company. I mean, if you're Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Grab, Twilio, DoorDash or Uber, life's pretty great. Just look at these stock prices over the past five years with their shareholder value going up into the right. Totally amazing. But where's telco? There I add our stocks to this awesome chart. Let's compare these fabulous tech stocks to AT&T, Vodafone, Telefonica, Tim, America Movil and Zain group. Huh, not so great, right? Yep. I'm talking directly to you senior telco execs. I'm here to wake you up. Why is it that Wall Street doesn't see you as tech? Why aren't CSPs seen as driving all the tech change? Why is it always Apple, Amazon and Google who get the big buzz? But more importantly, why isn't it you? Before I came to this industry, I always thought of carriers as tech companies. I gave more of my money to AT&T and to Apple because I really cared about the quality of the network. But I also wondered why on earth, the carriers allowed all the other tech companies to take center stage. After spending the last few years in telco, I now understand why. It's because you are network people, you are not customer people. I get it, you have the security blanket, you're a network oligopoly. It's crazy expensive to build a network and it's expensive to buy spectrum. It takes operational chops to run a killer network and it takes great skill to convince Wall Street, to finance all of it. You telco execs are amazing at all those things, but because you focus on the network, it means you don't focus on the customer. And so far you haven't had to. Every telco's KPI is to be less shitty than their next competitor. You don't have to be the best, just don't be last. Everyone else's NPS, is in the thirties too. Their mobile app ratings are just as terrible as yours. Everyone's sucks at customer sat and it's widely acknowledged and accepted. Let's talk about the cost of that. The cost is not measured on market share against other MNOs. The cost is measured in lost ARPU that the tech guys are getting. Everyone knows about the loss of texting, to WeChat, WhatsApp and the other OTT apps, but it is not just texting. The total adjustable market or term of the mobile app disruptors is huge. Instead of remaining network focused, you should be leveraging your network into a premier position. And because you're a network people, I bet you think I'm talking about coercive network leverage. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about love, customer love. There is one thing the highly valued tech companies all have in common. They all crush it on customer love. They look at every interaction with the customer and say, "How do we make the customer love this?" Like Netflix has easy monthly cancellation, Amazon does no questions asked returns, Uber gives users a real time view into driver rating and availability. Compare those ideas to the standard telco customer interaction. The highly valued tech companies, don't have the network oligopoly to fall back on like you do. To survive they must make customers love them. So they focus on it in a big way and it pays off. Their NPS is close to 70 and they have app ratings of 4.5 or higher. A far cry from your thirties NPS and app ratings of 3.5. If you want to have those huge tech multiples for yourself, you have to start thinking about these guys as your new competition, not the other telcos in your market. The crazy thing is, if you give up using your network as a crutch and put all of your focus on the customer, the network becomes an asset worth more than all the super apps. Let's step back and talk about the value of super apps and becoming customer centric. Retooling around the customer is a huge change. So let's make sure it's worth it. We aren't talking about 25% improvement. I'm going to show you that if you become customer centric, you can double your ARPU, double your valuation multiples and drive big shareholder value just like the tech companies on that chart. Now let's talk about the customer focused super apps. There are hundreds of companies and a variety of categories vying for your subscriber's disposable income. Movies, food delivery, financial services, who are they? And why does Wall Street give them such high evaluations and like them so much? Well first, look at what they are telling Wall Street about their TAM. They broadcast ridiculously huge TAMs that are greater than the telco TAMs. You know, who should have a ridiculously huge TAM? You. Hello. What I'm saying is that if you got what's yours, you double in size. And if you take the TAAMs they throw around, you'll be five times as big. When I think about the opportunity to double ARPU, without having to double the CapEx, to build out the network, I say to myself, "Hell yeah, we should totally go do it and do whatever it takes to go get." For example, let's talk about Grab. Grab is a southeast Asian super app company with an expected $40 billion valuation. Grab's customer focused started in rideshare, but then leverage its customer love into wallet deliveries, hospitality, and investing. Their ARPU is now larger than a telco's ARPU in countries where they compete, and they have a higher valuation than those telcos too. Imagine if you could combine a great user experience with a valuable services that helped grow your ARPU, that would be huge. So how do you build a super app? I bet right about now, you're wishing you had a super app. Everyone wants a super app. A lot of money has been unsuccessfully spent by telcos trying to build their own. I bet you're saying to yourself, "DR, your pie in the sky sounds great but it has no chance of success." Well, I'm betting things are about to change. There is a public cloud startup called Totogi that is going to help carriers build world class super apps. To have a successful super app, there is one key metric you need to know. It is the KPI that determines if your super app will be a success or a flop. It's not about the daily active users, it's not the average order value, it's not even gross merchandise value. It's all about the frequency of use per day by the user, that's the metric that matters. How many of you use that metric in your telco apps? Do you have a team driving up user app interactions every day? Most telco apps are used for top up or to check a bill. This is a huge missed opportunity. Super app companies excel at building great experiences and driving a huge amount of interactions. They have to, their business depends on it. They have to be customer focused. They have to keep bringing the user back to the app, every day, multiple times a day. And you know what? They do a great job. Customers love their super apps. They have great user experiences like Apple credit cards, no information required, application process. They have high net promoter scores because of customer friendly policies, like how DoorDash retroactively credits fees when you move to a better plan. And they have great app store ratings because they do simple things like remember your last order, or allow you to use the app rather than force you to call customer service. Customers of successful super apps love it when new services are added. And because of the customer love, every time something is added to the app, customers adopt it immediately. New services drive frequent daily user interactions. So our problem in telco is we have an app that is only open once per month, not multiple times per day. And without frequent opens, there is no super app. What do we do we have in telco that we could use to help with this problem? I wonder, why you don't currently have a mobile app that subscribers use multiple times a day. You have something that's 10 times better. You have a network. Subscribers already interact with your network 10 times more frequently than any user with any of the super apps. But telcos don't leverage those interactions into the insanely valuable engagements they could be. Worse, even if you wanted to your crappy over customized on premise solutions, make it impossible. Thankfully, there's this new tech that's come around, you may have heard of it. The public cloud. When you bring the enabling technology of the public cloud, you can turn your network interactions into valuable super app interactions. And there's a special new startup that's going to help you do it, Totogi. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Let me repeat that. Totogi will leverage all those network interactions and turn them into valuable customer interactions. Totogi allows the carrier to leverage its network and all the network interactions into customer engagement. This is something the super apps don't have but will wish they did. But this magic technology is not enough. Telcos also need to move from being network focus to being customer focused. Totogi enables telcos to chase exciting revenue growth without that annoying massive CapEx investment. Totogi is going to help you transform your sucky mobile apps with the crappy customer ratings, into something your subscribers want to open multiple times a day and become a platform for growth. I'm so excited about Totogi, I'm investing $100 million into it. You heard me right, $100 million. Is this what it feels like to be soft bank? I'm investing in Totogi because it's going to enable telcos to leverage the network interactions into super app usage. Which will lead to an improved subscriber experience and will give you a massive jump in your ARPU. And once you do that, all those Telco valuations will go from down here to up here. And so I've been talking to some folks, you know, checking in, feeling them out, getting their thoughts, and I've been asking them, what do you think about telcos building super apps? And the response has been, click, everyone says, "No way, telcos can't do it." Zero chance, total goose egg. One suggested I build a bonfire with 100 million dollars, because then at least I wouldn't waste years of my life. Well I think those people are dead wrong. I do believe that telcos can build super apps and make them super successful. The public cloud is changing all parts of telco and Totogi and super apps are fundamentally changing, the customer relationships. In one month at MWC, people will see what Totogi has to offer, and they will understand why I'm making this bold call. Because the Totogi takes the value of the network and the power of the public cloud to help telcos move from being network centric, to being customer centric. Boom! If you want to make this transformation and reap all the financial benefits, you will have to compete for customers with a whole new set of players. You will no longer compete with the network focus guys like the other telcos, instead you will be competing against the customer focused companies. These players don't have a network to fall back on like your old competitors. They know they have to make customers love them. Their customer loyalty is so off the charts, their customers are called fans. So if you want that big money, you will have to compete on their turf and make the customers want to choose you, you need Apple level loyalty. That bar is uber high. We will have to give up the security blanket of the network and change. Instead of NPS of the thirties, it needs to be in the 70s. Instead of mobile app ratings in the threes, they need to get five stars. I'm betting big that Totogi will make that possible. I'm going to help you every step of the way, starting with my keynote next month at MWC. Join me and I'll share the secrets to converting your super valuable network interactions to make your super app a massive success. We're going to have an amazing time and I can't wait to see you there. >> Okay. We're back here in theCUBE here at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier, Chloe Richardson filling it for Dave Vellante who's out on assignment. He's out getting all the data out there and getting stories. Chloe, what a great keynote by Danielle Royston. We just heard her and while with major action, major pump me up, punch in the face, wake the heck up cloud people, cloud is here. She didn't pull any punches. >> No, I mean the thing is John, there's trillions of dollars on the table and everyone seems to be fighting for it. >> And you heard her up there, if you're not on the public cloud, you're not going to get access to that money. It's a free for all. And I think the cloud people are like, they might think they're going to walk right in and the telco industry is going to just give it up. >> No, of course. >> There's not going to be, it's going to be a fight, who will win. >> Who will win but also who will build the next big thing? >> Someone needs to die in the media conversation, it's always a fight, something's dead, something's dead but keeps the living. All that kidding aside, this is really about partnering. I think what's happened is, telco's already acknowledged that they need to change in the 5G edge conversation, the chip acceleration. Look at Apple, they've got their own processors, Nvidia, Amazon makes their own chips, Intel's pumping stuff out, you've got Qualcomm, you've got all these new things. So the chips are getting faster and the software's more open source and I'm telling you, cloud is just going to drive that bus right down clouds street and it's going to be in Cloud City everywhere. >> And it's going to be peeping on the board as it drives down. John, I'm not a stalker, but I have read some of the things that you've written. And one of the things you mentioned that was really interesting was the difference between building and operating. Break it down for me. What does that mean? >> That means basically in mature markets and growing markets things behave differently and certainly economics and the people and the makeup and the mindset. >> Okay. >> So the telco has been kind of this mature market. It's been changing and growing but not like radically. Cost optimization, make profit, you know, install a lot of cable. You got to get the rents out of that infrastructure and that's kind of gone on for too long. Cloud is a growth market, and it's about building, not just operating and you've got operators, carriers are operating networks. So you're going to see the convergence of operators and builders coming together, builders being software developers, new technology and executives that think about building. And you want people on your team that are going to be, I won't say war time, you know, lieutenants or generals, but people who can handle the pace of change. >> Okay. >> Because the change and the nature is different. And some people want slow and steady, keep the boat from rocking, but in a growth market, it's turbulent and ride might not be quiet, first class ticket to paradise, but it's bumpy, but it's thrilling. >> No, of course. Is it similar to the old sales adage of hunter versus farmer and the parallels? >> Yeah. I mean, the mindset. If you have a team of people that aren't knocking down new opportunities and building the next big thing, fixing your house, get your house in order, you know, refactor, reset, reboot, re platform with the cloud and then refactor your business. If you don't have the people thinking like that, you're probably either going to be taken over or go out of business. And that's what the telco with all these assets, they're going to get bought roll into a SPAC, special purpose acquisition company was a super hot in the United States. A lot of roll ups going on with Private equity. So a lot of these telcos, if they don't refactor or re platform, then refactor, they're going to be toast and they're going to get rolled up and eaten up by somebody else. >> Yeah, sure. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because when we think of telco in tech, we often think of, obviously we've got the triad. People process technology, and we think process and technology really take the forefront here but like you said there, people are also so important because if you don't have this right balance, you're not going to be able to drive that change. We had, obviously Scott Brighton on the stage yesterday and after his session, somebody came up to me and just said, "I'm interested to hear what that means for education." So how can we establish this new generation of tech and telco leaders from the grassroots with educational associations establishments? How can we encourage that? I wonder, is this something that you talk about often? >> Yeah. I mean, education is huge and this highlights the change that telcos now part of. Telco used to be a boring industry that ran the networks, or moving packets around and mobile was there, but once the iPhone came out in 2007, the life has changed, society has changed, education's changed, how people interact has changed. So you start to see people now aware of the value and if you look at the, during the COVID, the internet didn't crash, the telcos actually saved our asses and everyone was, survive because the network didn't break. Yeah, we had some bad zoom meetings here and there and some teleconferences that didn't go well but for the most part we survived and they really saved everybody, my goodness. So they should get kudos for that. But now they're dependent upon healthcare, education, people care about that stuff. So now you're going to start to see an elevated focus on what telecom is doing. That's why The Edge has checked trillions of dollars up for grabs. But education, there's negative unemployment in cybersecurity and in cloud. So for the people who say, oh, there's no jobs or I can't work, that's a bunch of BS because you can just get online, get on YouTube and just get a degree. You can get a degree, you can get an Amazon job, it pays a hundred thousand dollars a year, American. You can make a hundred thousand pounds and be unemployed six months and then be employed. So negative unemployment means there's more jobs than people to fill them qualify. >> Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that because I was talking to a cyber security leader who was saying in some of the things there were now 3 million vacancies in cybersecurity and there's such a skill shortage, there is nobody around to fill it. So it's an interesting problem to have isn't it? Cause it's reversed to what we've been used to for the last few decades and obviously telco is in the same space. What can we do about it? Do you think it will actually bring people in? >> I think it's going to take leadership and I'm a big proponent of kids not going to university, they don't have to. Why spend the dough, money if you don't have to? You can get online. I mean, the data's there, but to me it's the relationships, the mentorship. You starting to see women in tech and underrepresented minorities in the tech field, where mentorship is more important than curriculum. Community is more important than just going through a linear course where nobody wants to sit online and go through linear courseware. Now, if they have to get a certificate or degree and accreditation no problem, but communities are out there. So that's a big change over, I'm a big fan of that and I think people should, you know, get some specialized skills, you can get that online. So why even go to school? So people are figuring that out. >> For sure. And also even transferring, I mean, so many skills are transferable nowadays, aren't there? So we could easily be talking to people from other industries and bringing them into telco and saying, look, bring what you know from your retail background or your healthcare background and help us at telco to again, drive forward, just like DR is saying it's all about the next big thing. >> Danielle, I was also driving a lot of change and if you think about the jobs and a pedigree of going to a university, oh, Harvard, all the big Ivy leagues, Oxford in your area. So it's like, if you go to a school like that and you get a pedigree, you instantly get a job. Now, the jobs that are available, weren't around five years ago. So there's no like pedigree or track record, there's no like, everyone's equal. >> Yeah. >> So you could, the democratization of the internet now is, from a job standpoint is, people are leveling up faster. So it's not about the Ivy league or the big degree or silver spoon in your mouth, you've got the entitlement. So you start to see people emergent and make things happen, entrepreneurship in America, immigrant entrepreneurship. People are billionaires that have no high school diplomas. >> It's interesting you mentioned that John, because we can have more than five years experience in this space, we know that but in telco there is a problem and maybe it's, again it's a flipped problem where, telco recruiters or talent acquisition leaders, are now asking for kind of 10, 20 years experience when they're sending out job descriptions. So does that mean that we are at fault for not being able to fill all these vacancies? >> Well, I mean, I think that's just, I mean, I think there's a transition of the new skill set happening one, but two, I think, you know, you've got to be like a chip engineer, you can't learn that online, but if you want to run a cloud infrastructure, you can. But I think embedded systems is an area that I was talking to an engineer, there's a huge shortage of engineers who code on the microprocessors, on the chips. So embedded systems is a big career. So there's definitely parts, you can specialize, space is another area you've seen a lot of activity on, obviously Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is going to be here on virtual keynote, trying to go to Mars. And, you know, Danielle Royston always says, who's going to happen first, Mars, colony, or telco adopting public cloud? Some people think Mars will happen first but. >> What do you think John? >> I think telco's going to get cloud. I mean, first of all, public cloud is now hybrid cloud and the edge, this whole internet edge, 5G, is so symbolic and so important because it's an architectural beachhead. >> Yeah. >> And that's where the trillion dollar baby is. >> Of course. >> So the inside baseball and the inside money and all the investors are focusing on the edge because whoever can command the edge, wins all the dollars. So everyone kind of knows it's a public secret and it's fun to watch, everyone jockey for the positions. >> Yeah, know, it really is. But it's also quite funny, isn't it? Because the edge is almost where we were decades ago, but we're putting the control back in the hands of consumers. So it's an interesting flip and I wonder if with the edge, we can really enhance this acceleration of product development its efficiency, this frictionless system in which we live in. And also, I've heard you say hybrid a few times John. >> Yeah. >> Is hybrid going to be the future of the world no matter what industry you're in? >> Hybrid is everything now. So it's, we're the hybrid cube, we've got hybrid cloud. >> Exactly. >> You got hybrid telco, because now you've got the confluence of online and offline coming together. >> Yeah. >> That is critical dynamic, and you seeing it. Like virtual reality for instance, now you seeing things, I know you guys are doing some great work at your company around creating experiences that are virtual. >> Exactly. >> You got, like Roblox went public recently. >> Yeah. >> Metaverse is a good time to be in that business because experiential human relations are coming. So I think that's going to be powered by 5G, you know, gamers. So all good stuff, Chloe, great to be with you here in theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And we're looking forward to seeing your main stage. >> Great. >> And then we're going to send it back to the studio, Adam and the team, we're waiting for DR to arrive here in Cloud City and this is theCUBE, from Cloud City back to you, Adam in the studio.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good, brought to you by on shape. >>Hello, everyone, and welcome to Innovation for Good Program, hosted by the Cuban. Brought to You by on Shape, which is a PTC company. My name is Dave Valentin. I'm coming to you from our studios outside of Boston. I'll be directing the conversations today. It's a very exciting, all live program. We're gonna look at how product innovation has evolved and where it's going and how engineers, entrepreneurs and educators are applying cutting edge, cutting edge product development techniques and technology to change our world. You know, the pandemic is, of course, profoundly impacted society and altered how individuals and organizations they're gonna be thinking about an approaching the coming decade. Leading technologists, engineers, product developers and educators have responded to the new challenges that we're facing from creating lifesaving products to helping students learn from home toe how to apply the latest product development techniques and solve the world's hardest problems. And in this program, you'll hear from some of the world's leading experts and practitioners on how product development and continuous innovation has evolved, how it's being applied toe positive positively affect society and importantly where it's going in the coming decades. So let's get started with our first session fueling Tech for good. And with me is John Hirschbeck, who is the president of the Suffers, a service division of PTC, which acquired on shape just over a year ago, where John was the CEO and co founder, and Dana Grayson is here. She is the co founder and general partner at Construct Capital, a new venture capital firm. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, John. >>You're very welcome. Dana. Look, John, let's get into it for first Belated congratulations on the acquisition of Von Shape. That was an awesome seven year journey for your company. Tell our audience a little bit about the story of on shape, but take us back to Day zero. Why did you and your co founders start on shape? Well, >>actually, start before on shaping the You know, David, I've been in this business for almost 40 years. The business of building software tools for product developers and I had been part of some previous products in the industry and companies that had been in their era. Big changes in this market and about, you know, a little Before founding on shape, we started to see the problems product development teams were having with the traditional tools of that era years ago, and we saw the opportunity presented by Cloud Web and Mobile Technology. And we said, Hey, we could use Cloud Web and Mobile to solve the problems of product developers make their Their business is run better. But we have to build an entirely new system, an entirely new company, to do it. And that's what on shapes about. >>Well, so notwithstanding the challenges of co vid and difficulties this year, how is the first year been as, Ah, division of PTC for you guys? How's business? Anything you can share with us? >>Yeah, our first year of PTC has been awesome. It's been, you know, when you get acquired, Dave, you never You know, you have great optimism, but you never know what life will really be like. It's sort of like getting married or something, you know, until you're really doing it, you don't know. And so I'm happy to say that one year into our acquisition, um, PTC on shape is thriving. It's worked out better than I could have imagined a year ago. Along always, I mean sales are up. In Q four, our new sales rate grew 80% vs Excuse me, our fiscal Q four Q three. In the calendar year, it grew 80% compared to the year before. Our educational uses skyrocketing with around 400% growth, most recently year to year of students and teachers and co vid. And we've launched a major cloud platform using the core of on shape technology called Atlas. So, um, just tons of exciting things going on a TTC. >>That's awesome. But thank you for sharing some of those metrics. And of course, you're very humble individual. You know, people should know a little bit more about you mentioned, you know, we founded Solid Works, co founded Solid where I actually found it solid works. You had a great exit in the in the late nineties. But what I really appreciate is, you know, you're an entrepreneur. You've got a passion for the babies that you you helped birth. You stayed with the salt systems for a number of years. The company that quiet, solid works well over a decade. And and, of course, you and I have talked about how you participated in the the M I T. Blackjack team. You know, back in the day, a zai say you're very understated, for somebody was so accomplished. Well, >>that's kind of you, but I tend to I tend Thio always keep my eye more on what's ahead. You know what's next, then? And you know, I look back Sure to enjoy it and learn from it about what I can put to work making new memories, making new successes. >>Love it. Okay, let's bring Dana into the conversation. Hello, Dana. You look you're a fairly early investor in in on shape when you were with any A And and I think it was like it was a serious B, but it was very right close after the A raise. And and you were and still are a big believer in industrial transformation. So take us back. What did you see about on shape back then? That excited you. >>Thanks. Thanks for that. Yeah. I was lucky to be a early investment in shape. You know, the things that actually attracted me. Don shape were largely around John and, uh, the team. They're really setting out to do something, as John says humbly, something totally new, but really building off of their background was a large part of it. Um, but, you know, I was really intrigued by the design collaboration side of the product. Um, I would say that's frankly what originally attracted me to it. What kept me in the room, you know, in terms of the industrial world was seeing just if you start with collaboration around design what that does to the overall industrial product lifecycle accelerating manufacturing just, you know, modernizing all the manufacturing, just starting with design. So I'm really thankful to the on shape guys, because it was one of the first investments I've made that turned me on to the whole sector. And while just such a great pleasure to work with with John and the whole team there. Now see what they're doing inside PTC. >>And you just launched construct capital this year, right in the middle of a pandemic and which is awesome. I love it. And you're focused on early stage investing. Maybe tell us a little bit about construct capital. What your investment thesis is and you know, one of the big waves that you're hoping to ride. >>Sure, it construct it is literally lifting out of any what I was doing there. Um uh, for on shape, I went on to invest in companies such as desktop metal and Tulip, to name a couple of them form labs, another one in and around the manufacturing space. But our thesis that construct is broader than just, you know, manufacturing and industrial. It really incorporates all of what we'd call foundational industries that have let yet to be fully tech enabled or digitized. Manufacturing is a big piece of it. Supply chain, logistics, transportation of mobility or not, or other big pieces of it. And together they really drive, you know, half of the GDP in the US and have been very under invested. And frankly, they haven't attracted really great founders like they're on in droves. And I think that's going to change. We're seeing, um, entrepreneurs coming out of the tech world orthe Agnelli into these industries and then bringing them back into the tech world, which is which is something that needs to happen. So John and team were certainly early pioneers, and I think, you know, frankly, obviously, that voting with my feet that the next set, a really strong companies are going to come out of the space over the next decade. >>I think it's a huge opportunity to digitize the sort of traditionally non digital organizations. But Dana, you focused. I think it's it's accurate to say you're focused on even Mawr early stage investing now. And I want to understand why you feel it's important to be early. I mean, it's obviously riskier and reward e er, but what do you look for in companies and and founders like John >>Mhm, Um, you know, I think they're different styles of investing all the way up to public market investing. I've always been early stage investors, so I like to work with founders and teams when they're, you know, just starting out. Um, I happened to also think that we were just really early in the whole digital transformation of this world. You know, John and team have been, you know, back from solid works, etcetera around the space for a long time. But again, the downstream impact of what they're doing really changes the whole industry. And and so we're pretty early and in digitally transforming that market. Um, so that's another reason why I wanna invest early now, because I do really firmly believe that the next set of strong companies and strong returns for my own investors will be in the spaces. Um, you know, what I look for in Founders are people that really see the world in a different way. And, you know, sometimes some people think of founders or entrepreneurs is being very risk seeking. You know, if you asked John probably and another successful entrepreneurs, they would call themselves sort of risk averse, because by the time they start the company, they really have isolated all the risk out of it and think that they have given their expertise or what they're seeing their just so compelled to go change something, eh? So I look for that type of attitude experience a Z. You can also tell from John. He's fairly humble. So humility and just focus is also really important. Um, that there's a That's a lot of it. Frankly, >>Excellent. Thank you, John. You got such a rich history in the space. Uh, and one of you could sort of connect the dots over time. I mean, when you look back, what were the major forces that you saw in the market in in the early days? Particularly days of on shape on? And how is that evolved? And what are you seeing today? Well, >>I think I touched on it earlier. Actually, could I just reflect on what Dana said about risk taking for just a quick one and say, throughout my life, from blackjack to starting solid works on shape, it's about taking calculated risks. Yes, you try to eliminate the risk Sa's much as you can, but I always say, I don't mind taking a risk that I'm aware of, and I've calculated through as best I can. I don't like taking risks that I don't know I'm taking. That's right. You >>like to bet on >>sure things as much as you sure things, or at least where you feel you. You've done the research and you see them and you know they're there and you know, you, you you keep that in mind in the room, and I think that's great. And Dana did so much for us. Dana, I want to thank you again. For all that, you did it every step of the way, from where we started to to, you know, your journey with us ended formally but continues informally. Now back to you, Dave, I think, question about the opportunity and how it's shaped up. Well, I think I touched on it earlier when I said It's about helping product developers. You know, our customers of the people build the future off manufactured goods. Anything you think of that would be manufacturing factory. You know, the chair you're sitting in machine that made your coffee. You know, the computer you're using, the trucks that drive by on the street, all the covert product research, the equipment being used to make vaccines. All that stuff is designed by someone, and our job is given the tools to do it better. And I could see the problems that those product developers had that we're slowing them down with using the computing systems of the time. When we built solid works, that was almost 30 years ago. If people don't realize that it was in the early >>nineties and you know, we did the >>best we could for the early nineties, but what we did. We didn't anticipate the world of today. And so people were having problems with just installing the systems. Dave, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to install these systems. You need toe speck up a special windows computer, you know, and make sure you've got all the memory and graphics you need and getting to get that set up. You need to make sure the device drivers air, right, install a big piece of software. Ah, license key. I'm not making this up. They're still around. You may not even know what those are. You know, Dennis laughing because, you know, zero cool people do things like this anymore. Um, and it only runs some windows. You want a second user to use it? They need a copy. They need a code. Are they on the same version? It's a nightmare. The teams change, you know? You just say, Well, get everyone on the software. Well, who's everyone? You know, you got a new vendor today? A new customer tomorrow, a new employee. People come on and off the team. The other problem is the data stored in files, thousands of files. This isn't like a spreadsheet or word processor, where there's one file to pass around these air thousands of files to make one, even a simple product. People were tearing their hair out. John, what do we do? I've got copies everywhere. I don't know where the latest version is. We tried like, you know, locking people out so that only one person can change it At the time that works against speed, it works against innovation. We saw what was happening with Cloud Web and mobile. So what's happened in the years since is every one of the forces that product developers experience the need for speed, the need for innovation, the need to be more efficient with their people in their capital. Resource is every one of those trends have been amplified since we started on shape by a lot of forces in the world. And covert is amplified all those the need for agility and remote work cove it is amplified all that the same time, The acceptance of cloud. You know, a few years ago, people were like cloud, you know, how is that gonna work now They're saying to me, You know, increasingly, how would you ever even have done this without the cloud. How do you make solid works work without the cloud? How would that even happen? You know, once people understand what on shapes about >>and we're the >>Onley full SAS solution software >>as a service, >>full SAS solution in our industry. So what's happened in those years? Same problems we saw earlier, but turn up the gain, their bigger problems. And with cloud, we've seen skepticism of years ago turn into acceptance. And now even embracement in the cova driven new normal. >>Yeah. So a lot of friction in the previous environments cloud obviously a huge factor on, I guess. I guess Dana John could see it coming, you know, in the early days of solid works with, you know, had Salesforce, which is kind of the first major independent SAS player. Well, I guess that was late nineties. So his post solid works, but pre in shape and their work day was, you know, pre on shape in the mid two thousands. And and but But, you know, the bet was on the SAS model was right for Crick had and and product development, you know, which maybe the time wasn't a no brainer. Or maybe it was, I don't know, but Dana is there. Is there anything that you would invest in today? That's not Cloud based? >>Um, that's a great question. I mean, I think we still see things all the time in the manufacturing world that are not cloud based. I think you know, the closer you get to the shop floor in the production environment. Um e think John and the PTC folks would agree with this, too, but that it's, you know, there's reliability requirements, performance requirements. There's still this attitude of, you know, don't touch the printing press. So the cloud is still a little bit scary sometimes. And I think hybrid cloud is a real thing for those or on premise. Solutions, in some cases is still a real thing. What what we're more focused on. And, um, despite whether it's on premise or hybrid or or SAS and Cloud is a frictionless go to market model, um, in the companies we invest in so sass and cloud, or really make that easy to adopt for new users, you know, you sign up, started using a product, um, but whether it's hosted in the cloud, whether it's as you can still distribute buying power. And, um, I would I'm just encouraging customers in the customer world and the more industrial environment to entrust some of their lower level engineers with more budget discretionary spending so they can try more products and unlock innovation. >>Right? The unit economics are so compelling. So let's bring it, you know, toe today's you know, situation. John, you decided to exit about a year ago. You know? What did you see in PTC? Other than the obvious money? What was the strategic fit? >>Yeah, Well, David, I wanna be clear. I didn't exit anything. Really? You >>know, I love you and I don't like that term exit. I >>mean, Dana had exit is a shareholder on and so it's not It's not exit for me. It's just a step in the journey. What we saw in PTC was a partner. First of all, that shared our vision from the top down at PTC. Jim Hempleman, the CEO. He had a great vision for for the impact that SAS can make based on cloud technology and really is Dana of highlighted so much. It's not just the technology is how you go to market and the whole business being run and how you support and make the customers successful. So Jim shared a vision for the potential. And really, really, um said Hey, come join us and we can do this bigger, Better, faster. We expanded the vision really to include this Atlas platform for hosting other SAS applications. That P D. C. I mean, David Day arrived at PTC. I met the head of the academic program. He came over to me and I said, You know, and and how many people on your team? I thought he'd say 5 40 people on the PTC academic team. It was amazing to me because, you know, we were we were just near about 100 people were required are total company. We didn't even have a dedicated academic team and we had ah, lot of students signing up, you know, thousands and thousands. Well, now we have hundreds of thousands of students were approaching a million users and that shows you the power of this team that PTC had combined with our product and technology whom you get a big success for us and for the teachers and students to the world. We're giving them great tools. So so many good things were also putting some PTC technology from other parts of PTC back into on shape. One area, a little spoiler, little sneak peek. Working on taking generative design. Dana knows all about generative design. We couldn't acquire that technology were start up, you know, just to too much to do. But PTC owns one of the best in the business. This frustrated technology we're working on putting that into on shaping our customers. Um, will be happy to see it, hopefully in the coming year sometime. >>It's great to see that two way exchange. Now, you both know very well when you start a company, of course, a very exciting time. You know, a lot of baggage, you know, our customers pulling you in a lot of different directions and asking you for specials. You have this kind of clean slate, so to speak in it. I would think in many ways, John, despite you know, your install base, you have a bit of that dynamic occurring today especially, you know, driven by the forced march to digital transformation that cove it caused. So when you sit down with the team PTC and talk strategy. You now have more global resource is you got cohorts selling opportunities. What's the conversation like in terms of where you want to take the division? >>Well, Dave, you actually you sounds like we should have you coming in and talking about strategy because you've got the strategy down. I mean, we're doing everything said global expansion were able to reach across selling. We got some excellent PTC customers that we can reach reach now and they're finding uses for on shape. I think the plan is to, you know, just go, go, go and grow, grow, grow where we're looking for this year, priorities are expand the product. I mentioned the breath of the product with new things PTC did recently. Another technology that they acquired for on shape. We did an acquisition. It was it was small, wasn't widely announced. It, um, in an area related to interfacing with electrical cad systems. So So we're doing We're expanding the breath of on shape. We're going Maura, depth in the areas were already in. We have enormous opportunity to add more features and functions that's in the product. Go to market. You mentioned it global global presence. That's something we were a little light on a year ago. Now we have a team. Dana may not even know what we have. A non shape, dedicated team in Barcelona, based in Barcelona but throughout Europe were doing multiple languages. Um, the academic program just introduced a new product into that space that z even fueling more success and growth there. Um, and of course, continuing to to invest in customer success and this Atlas platform story I keep mentioning, we're going to soon have We're gonna soon have four other major PTC brands shipping products on our Atlas Saas platform. And so we're really excited about that. That's good for the other PTC products. It's also good for on shape because now there's there's. There's other interesting products that are on shape customers can use take advantage of very easily using, say, a common log in conventions about user experience there, used to invest of all they're SAS based, so they that makes it easier to begin with. So that's some of the exciting things going on. I think you'll see PTC, um, expanding our lead in SAS based applications for this sector for our our target, uh, sectors not just in, um, in cat and data management, but another area. PTC's Big and his augmented reality with of euphoria, product line leader and industrial uses of a R. That's a whole other story we should do. A whole nother show augmented reality. But these products are amazing. You can you can help factory workers people on, uh, people who are left out of the digital transformation. Sometimes we're standing from machine >>all day. >>They can't be sitting like we are doing Zoom. They can wear a R headset in our tools, let them create great content. This is an area Dana is invested in other companies. But what I wanted to note is the new releases of our authoring software. For this, our content getting released this month, used through the Atlas platform, the SAS components of on shape for things like revision management and collaboration on duh workflow activity. All that those are tools that we're able to share leverage. We get a lot of synergy. It's just really good. It's really fun to have a good time. That's >>awesome. And then we're gonna be talking to John MacLean later about that. Let's do a little deeper Dive on that. And, Dana, what is your involvement today with with on shape? But you're looking for you know, which of their customers air actually adopting. And they're gonna disrupt their industries. And you get good pipeline from that. How do you collaborate today? >>That sounds like a great idea. Um, Aziz, John will tell you I'm constantly just asking him for advice and impressions of other entrepreneurs and picking his brain on ideas. No formal relationship clearly, but continue to count John and and John and other people in on shaping in the circle of experts that I rely on for their opinions. >>All right, so we have some questions from the crowd here. Uh, one of the questions is for the dream team. You know, John and Dana. What's your next next collective venture? I don't think we're there yet, are we? No. >>I just say, as Dana said, we love talking to her about. You know, Dana, you just returned the compliment. We would try and give you advice and the deals you're looking at, and I'm sort of casually mentoring at least one of your portfolio entrepreneurs, and that's been a lot of fun for May on, hopefully a value to them. But also Dana. We uran important pipeline to us in the world of some new things that are happening that we wouldn't see if you know you've shown us some things that you've said. What do you think of this business? And for us, it's like, Wow, it's cool to see that's going on And that's what's supposed to work in an ecosystem like this. So we we deeply value the ongoing relationship. And no, we're not starting something new. I got a lot of work left to do with what I'm doing and really happy. But we can We can collaborate in this way on other ventures. >>I like this question to somebody asking With the cloud options like on shape, Wilmore students have stem opportunities s Oh, that's a great question. Are you because of sass and cloud? Are you able to reach? You know, more students? Much more cost effectively. >>Yeah, Dave, I'm so glad that that that I was asked about this because Yes, and it's extremely gratified us. Yes, we are because of cloud, because on shape is the only full cloud full SAS system or industry were able to reach. Stem education brings able to be part of bringing step education to students who couldn't get it otherwise. And one of most gratifying gratifying things to me is the emails were getting from teachers, um, that that really, um, on the phone calls that were they really pour their heart out and say We're able to get to students in areas that have very limited compute resource is that don't have an I T staff where they don't know what computer that the students can have at home, and they probably don't even have a computer. We're talking about being able to teach them on a phone to have an android phone a low end android phone. You can do three D modeling on there with on shape. Now you can't do it any other system, but with on shape, you could do it. And so the teacher can say to the students, They have to have Internet access, and I know there's a huge community that doesn't even have Internet access, and we're not able, unfortunately to help that. But if you have Internet and you have even an android phone, we can enable the educator to teach them. And so we have case after case of saving a stem program or expanding it into the students that need it most is the ones we're helping here. So really excited about that. And we're also able to let in addition to the run on run on whatever computing devices they have, we also offer them the tools they need for remote teaching with a much richer experience. Could you teach solid works remotely? Well, maybe if the student ran it had a windows workstation. You know, big, big, high end workstation. Maybe it could, but it would be like the difference between collaborating with on shape and collaborate with solid works. Like the difference between a zoom video call and talking on the landline phone. You know, it's a much richer experience, and that's what you need. And stem teaching stem is hard, So yeah, we're super super. Um, I'm excited about bringing stem to more students because of cloud yond >>we're talking about innovation for good, and then the discussion, John, you just had it. Really? There could be a whole another vector here. We could discuss on diversity, and I wanna end with just pointing out. So, Dana, your new firm, it's a woman led firm, too. Two women leaders, you know, going forward. So that's awesome to see, so really? Yeah, thumbs up on that. Congratulations on getting that off the ground. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, so thank you guys. Really appreciate It was a great discussion. I learned a lot and I'm sure the audience did a swell in a moment. We're gonna talk with on shaped customers to see how they're applying tech for good and some of the products that they're building. So keep it right there. I'm Dave Volonte. You're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader in digital tech event coverage. Stay right there. >>Oh, yeah, it's >>yeah, yeah, around >>the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of PTC company. We're live today really live tv, which is the heritage of the Cube. And now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Furberg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors, which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early, if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, So this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yeah. So you said that I hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um, and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers. They by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities Do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched Well, five years ago, >>it was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operation with at the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined, um, So this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things take time. >>It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow From the beginning, I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem P office building and empty labs. And very quickly we had something running about. It's amazing eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work attire being of the pandemic in March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project, Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down. We could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the order of 100 and 50,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created that testing system that would serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down. >>All right. Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe describe a little bit more about silver sod detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part thio keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by import border crossing places like that. They can help make sure that people aren't smuggling. Shall we say very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you could do things. Like what? A detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's a It's much more than, you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge or I kind of i o t application for what you guys >>do. We do both its's to plowshares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville City schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering and um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outset was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more, more students and stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John Herstek and integrate gration about this is Do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or diverse base? And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career, and sometimes that that funnel is kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible. And we've definitely seen the first of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club that eventually is what led to our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also our eyes a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line and we e in Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids enter the program and be successful, >>that's final. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd, and they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar. I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, so There are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses, with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do. Onda. We also have a lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing. Um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication than would have been done. Previous technologies. Um, you know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston, but another one that was held out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than they would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the Force march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow. Rafael. What if you could describe the process that you use to better understand diseases? And what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um in a way that foster so the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology, how the human body functions, and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create tissues in the body. On Ben, it has this set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology rated. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientist on. We have a genomics platform that it's all about sequencing DNA and are gonna, um and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and developed technologies to marry computation on microscopy. So, um, the scientists set the agenda and the platforms, we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O. For example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins on is being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus Onda. We're sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. Um, so some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, eso Matt. I mean, you gotta be listening to this and thinking about Okay, So someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like like, like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people they're just don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than you know, the financial angles and it z e. I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order we nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering >>is about >>making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so um, dude, yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining, uh, eventually, you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line by Jeff Hammer Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. I think we're really generally generationally, finally, at the point where young students and engineering a really, you know, a passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that. But I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. Um, but very quickly my engineers started loving it, Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes. That's something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic, especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody ever remembers, what they are, the person left. And now nobody knows which version is the right one. A mess with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home, and they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a person in accounting on shape and then magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way that is absolutely fantastic. >>Feel what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know some of the traditional cloud stuff, and I'm curious as to how, How, whether any of those act manifested really that you had to manage. What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team to learn to use the system like it and buy into it? Because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy, and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some server and on site, but that That's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift, but very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive. Like, I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape, right? Is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, the concern was the learning curve, right? Is like, how is he Will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed. And there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on, they were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on, shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah, >>Great. Thank you for that, Philip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey within shape. >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped silver side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks. Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design. Have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new how we congrats modules from things that we already have put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together, and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing and I really don't want to design in any other platform. After after getting on Lee, a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I'll have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how I used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that daytime, er I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google maps eso we get anywhere, I don't know, but, uh but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month that zip through the roof in, But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program, and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ. 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this. Programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of K 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that That was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um and so one of my dreams And it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say, someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing, on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and you know, March and you said the forced march, the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school issued chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of Academy. There's so much about it. Well, I >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer, I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, But but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software, and so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud. >>Philip. Rafael Anything you Dad, >>I think I mean, yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three d printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think this is a dream for kids. Teoh be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino on all of these electronic things that live kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip, please. >>We had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development in support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a in that's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based, taken important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see. See what your students are going to be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because, yeah, I think that Project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on day. I think it will give the kids a much better flavor. What engineering is really about Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept on they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So, you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform. And I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in the modern era, and so that Z it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is and like platform agnostic abilities, the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, That's super exciting. As far as things that, uh, to go from there, Um, I don't know, >>Other than price. >>You can't say >>I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on P. D. C. S that work with us. Really? Well, so I'm not complaining. There you there, >>right? Yeah. Yeah. No gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update. Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability. In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes. And now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where We're making those changes anyway when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward. Toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you, >>right? I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with convicts, necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I I'm being spoiled, >>you know? That's good. I've been doing this a long time, and I like toe ask that question of practitioners and to me, it It's a signal like when you're nit picking and that's what you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product, and and I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture. But are things like alternative processors. You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now. Then we maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics, obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition, climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good and be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. Who wants toe start? >>Not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics, education is the case. If you wanna. If you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think Stam is key to that. I mean, all of the ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries. Thanks to science and technology, right improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything to add? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody to be able to pull together instead of pulling separately and to be able to spur the ideas on words. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work. Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings, places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shape then is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them on. But it's amazing, right to have somebody, you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine, right? Because, um, you know, they have a three D printer. You can you can just give them the design and say like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also super important. I think for any of these efforts to improve some of the hardest part was in the world for climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, the point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. The answer is education and public policy that really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we could If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. Can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely, like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope. To look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful. And I we don't do this, but I have read quite a bit about how certain places air using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off a person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink. Earlier, strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular >>yet another. The advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, Radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at. Or like Raphael said, I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is AWS re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Uh, certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software product by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting, you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these air the anomalies. You need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that they're going to result in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then the software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back. >>Okay? Okay. Yeah. Okay. >>From around >>the globe, it's the Cube. Presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, welcome back to innovation. For good. With me is John McElheny, who is one of the co founders of On Shape and is now the VP of strategy at PTC. John, it's good to see you. Thanks for making the time to come on the program. Thanks, Dave. So we heard earlier some of the accomplishments that you've made since the acquisition. How has the acquisition affected your strategy? Maybe you could talk about what resource is PTC brought to the table that allowed you toe sort of rethink or evolve your strategy? What can you share with us? >>Sure. You know, a year ago, when when John and myself met with Jim Pepperman early on is we're we're pondering. Started joining PTC one of things became very clear is that we had a very clear shared vision about how we could take the on shape platform and really extended for, for all of the PTC products, particular sort of their augmented reality as well as their their thing works or the i o. T business and their product. And so from the very beginning there was a clear strategy about taking on shape, extending the platform and really investing, um, pretty significantly in the product development as well as go to market side of things, uh, toe to bring on shape out to not only the PTC based but sort of the broader community at large. So So So PTC has been a terrific, terrific, um, sort of partner as we've we've gonna go on after this market together. Eso We've added a lot of resource and product development side of things. Ah, lot of resource and they go to market and customer success and support. So, really, on many fronts, that's been both. Resource is as well a sort of support at the corporate level from from a strategic standpoint and then in the field, we've had wonderful interactions with many large enterprise customers as well as the PTC channels. So it's been really a great a great year. >>Well, and you think about the challenges of in your business going to SAS, which you guys, you know, took on that journey. You know, 78 years ago. Uh, it's not trivial for a lot of companies to make that transition, especially a company that's been around as long as PTC. So So I'm wondering how much you know, I was just asking you How about what PCP TC brought to the table? E gotta believe you're bringing a lot to the table to in terms of the mindset, uh, even things is, is mundane is not the right word, but things like how you compensate salespeople, how you interact with customers, the notion of a service versus a product. I wonder if you could address >>that. Yeah, it's a it's a really great point. In fact, after we had met Jim last year, John and I one of the things we walked out in the seaport area in Boston, one of things we sort of said is, you know, Jim really gets what we're trying to do here and and part of let me bring you into the thinking early on. Part of what Jim talked about is there's lots of, you know, installed base sort of software that's inside of PTC base. That's helped literally thousands of customers around the world. But the idea of moving to sass and all that it entails both from a technology standpoint but also a cultural standpoint. Like How do you not not just compensate the sales people as an example? But how do you think about customer success? In the past, it might have been that you had professional services that you bring out to a customer, help them deploy your solutions. Well, when you're thinking about a SAS based offering, it's really critical that you get customers successful with it. Otherwise, you may have turned, and you know it will be very expensive in terms of your business long term. So you've got to get customers success with software in the very beginning. So you know, Jim really looked at on shape and he said that John and I, from a cultural standpoint, you know, a lot of times companies get acquired and they've acquired technology in the past that they integrate directly into into PTC and then sort of roll it out through their products, are there just reached channel, he said. In some respects, John John, think about it as we're gonna take PTC and we want to integrate it into on shape because we want you to share with us both on the sales side and customer success on marketing on operations. You know all the things because long term, we believe the world is a SAS world, that the whole industry is gonna move too. So really, it was sort of an inverse in terms of the thought process related to normal transactions >>on That makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned Sharon turns the silent killer of a SAS company, and you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, in the entrepreneurial community because you live this, you know what's the best path? I mean today, You see, you know, if you watch Silicon Valley double, double, triple triple, but but there's a lot of people who believe, and I wonder, if you come in there is the best path to, you know, in the X Y axis. If if it's if it's uh, growth on one and retention on the other axis. What's the best way to get to the upper right on? Really? The the best path is probably make sure you've nailed obviously the product market fit, But make sure that you can retain customers and then throw gas on the fire. You see a lot of companies they burn out trying to grow too fast, but they haven't figured out, you know that. But there's too much churn. They haven't figured out those metrics. I mean, obviously on shape. You know, you were sort of a pioneer in here. I gotta believe you've figured out that customer retention before you really, You know, put the pedal to the >>metal. Yeah, and you know, growth growth can mask a lot of things, but getting getting customers, especially the engineering space. Nobody goes and sits there and says, Tomorrow we're gonna go and and, you know, put 100 users on this and and immediately swap out all of our existing tools. These tools are very rich and deep in terms of capability, and they become part of the operational process of how a company designs and builds products. So any time anybody is actually going through the purchasing process. Typically, they will run a try along or they'll run a project where they look at. Kind of What? What is this new solution gonna help them dio. How are we gonna orient ourselves for success? Longer term. So for us, you know, getting new customers and customer acquisition is really critical. But getting those customers to actually deploy the solution to be successful with it. You know, we like to sort of, say, the marketing or the lead generation and even some of the initial sales. That's sort of like the Kindle ing. But the fire really starts when customers deploy it and get successful. The solution because they bring other customers into the fold. And then, of course, if they're successful with it, you know, then in fact, you have negative turn which, ironically, means growth in terms of your inside of your install. Bates. >>Right? And you've seen that with some of the emerging, you know, SAS companies, where you're you're actually you know, when you calculate whatever its net retention or renew ALS, it's actually from a dollar standpoint. It's up in the high nineties or even over 100%. >>So >>and that's a trend we're gonna continue. See, I >>wonder >>if we could sort of go back. Uh, and when you guys were starting on shape, some of the things that you saw that you were trying to strategically leverage and what's changed, you know, today we were talking. I was talking to John earlier about in a way, you kinda you kinda got a blank slate is like doing another startup. >>You're >>not. Obviously you've got installed base and customers to service, but But it's a new beginning for you guys. So one of the things that you saw then you know, cloud and and sas and okay, but that's we've been there, done that. What are you seeing? You know today? >>Well, you know, So So this is a journey, of course, that that on shape on its own has gone through it had I'll sort of say, you know, several iterations, both in terms of of of, you know, how do you How do you get customers? How do you How do you get them successful? How do you grow those customers? And now that we've been part of PTC, the question becomes okay. One, There is certainly a higher level of credibility that helps us in terms of our our megaphone is much bigger than it was when we're standalone company. But on top of that now, figuring out how to work with their channel with their direct sales force, you know, they have, um, for example, you know, very large enterprises. Well, many of those customers are not gonna go in forklift out their existing solution to replace it with with on shape. However, many of them do have challenges in their supply chain and communications with contractors and vendors across the globe. And so, you know, finding our fit inside of those large enterprises as they extend out with their their customers is a very interesting area that we've really been sort of incremental to to PTC. And then, you know, they they have access to lots of other technology, like the i o. T business. And now, of course, the augmented reality business that that we can bring things to bear. For example, in the augmented reality world, they've they've got something called expert capture. And this is essentially imagine, you know, in a are ah, headset that allows you to be ableto to speak to it, but also capture images still images in video. And you could take somebody who's doing their task and capture literally the steps that they're taking its geo location and from their builds steps for new employees to be, we'll learn and understand how todo use that technology to help them do their job better. Well, when they do that, if there is replacement products or variation of of some of the tools that that they built the original design instruction set for they now have another version. Well, they have to manage multiple versions. Well, that's what on shape is really great at doing and so taking our technology and helping their solutions as well. So it's not only expanding our customer footprint, it's expanding the application footprint in terms of how we can help them and help customers. >>So that leads me to the tam discussion and again, as part of your strategist role. How do you think about that? Was just talking to some of your customers earlier about the democratization of cat and engineering? You know, I kind of joked, sort of like citizen engineering, but but so that you know, the demographics are changing the number of users potentially that can access the products because the it's so much more of a facile experience. How are you thinking about the total available market? >>It really is a great question, You know, it used to be when you when you sold boxes of software, it was how many engineers were out there. And that's the size of the market. The fact that matter is now when, When you think about access to that information, that data is simply a pane of glass. Whether it's a computer, whether it's a laptop, UH, a a cell phone or whether it's a tablet, the ability to to use different vehicles, access information and data expands the capabilities and power of a system to allow feedback and iteration. I mean, one of the one of the very interesting things is in technology is when you can take something and really unleash it to a larger audience and builds, you know, purpose built applications. You can start to iterate, get better feedback. You know there's a classic case in the clothing industry where Zara, you know, is a fast sort of turnaround. Agile manufacturer. And there was a great New York Times article written a couple years ago. My wife's a fan of Zara, and I think she justifies any purchases by saying, You know, Zara, you gotta purchase it now. Otherwise it may not be there the next time. Yet you go back to the store. They had some people in a store in New York that had this woman's throw kind of covering Shaw. And they said, Well, it would be great if we could have this little clip here so we can hook it through or something. And they sent a note back toe to the factory in Spain, and literally two weeks later they had, you know, 4000 of these things in store, and they sold out because they had a closed loop and iterative process. And so if we could take information and allow people access in multiple ways through different devices and different screens, that could be very specific information that, you know, we remove a lot of the engineering data book, bring the end user products conceptually to somebody that would have had to wait months to get the actual physical prototype, and we could get feedback well, Weaken have a better chance of making sure whatever product we're building is the right product when it ultimately gets delivered to a customer. So it's really it's a much larger market that has to be thought of rather than just the kind of selling A boxes software to an engineer. >>That's a great story. And again, it's gonna be exciting for you guys to see that with. The added resource is that you have a PTC, Um, so let's talk. I promise people we wanna talk about Atlas. Let's talk about the platform. A little bit of Atlas was announced last year. Atlas. For those who don't know it's a SAS space platform, it purports to go beyond product lifecycle management and you You're talking cloud like agility and scale to CAD and product design. But John, you could do a better job than I. What do >>we need to know about Atlas? Well, I think Atlas is a great description because it really is metaphorically sort of holding up all of the PTC applications themselves. But from the very beginning, when John and I met with Jim, part of what we were intrigued about was that he shared a vision that on shape was more than just going to be a cad authoring tool that, in fact, you know, in the past these engineering tools were very powerful, but they were very narrow in their purpose and focus. And we had specialty applications to manage the versions, etcetera. What we did in on shape is we kind of inverted that thinking. We built this collaboration and sharing engine at the core and then kind of wrap the CAD system around it. But that collaboration sharing and version ING engine is really powerful. And it was that vision that Jim had that he shared that we had from the beginning, which was, how do we take this thing to make a platform that could be used for many other applications inside of inside of any company? And so not only do we have a partner application area that is is much like the APP store or Google play store. Uh, that was sort of our first Stan Shih ation of this. This this platform. But now we're extending out to broader applications and much meatier applications. And internally, that's the thing works in the in the augmented reality. But there'll be other applications that ultimately find its way on top of this platform. And so they'll get all the benefits of of the collaboration, sharing the version ing the multi platform, multi device. And that's an extremely extremely, um, strategic leverage point for the company. >>You know, it's interesting, John, you mentioned the seaport before. So PTC, for those who don't know, built a beautiful facility down at the Seaport in Boston. And, of course, when PTC started, you know, back in the mid 19 eighties, there was nothing at the seaport s. >>So it's >>kind of kind of ironic, you know, we were way seeing the transformation of the seaport. We're seeing the transformation of industry and of course, PTC. And I'm sure someday you'll get back into that beautiful office, you know? Wait. Yeah, I'll bet. And, uh and but I wanna bring this up because I want I want you to talk about the future. How you how you see that our industry and you've observed this has moved from very product centric, uh, plat platform centric with sass and cloud. And now we're seeing ecosystems form around those products and platforms and data flowing through the ecosystem powering, you know, new innovation. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of what the future looks like to you from your vantage point. >>Yeah, I think one of the key words you said there is data because up until now, data for companies really was sort of trapped in different applications. And it wasn't because people were nefarious and they want to keep it limited. It was just the way in which things were built. And, you know, when people use an application like on shape, what ends up happening is there their day to day interaction and everything that they do is actually captured by the platform. And, you know, we don't have access to that data. Of course it's it's the customer's data. But as as an artifact of them using the system than doing their day to day job, what's happening is they're creating huge amounts of information that can then be accessed and analyzed to help them both improve their design process, improve their efficiencies, improve their actual schedules in terms of making sure they can hit delivery times and be able to understand where there might be roadblocks in the future. So the way I see it is companies now are deploying SAS based tools like on shape and an artifact of them. Using that platform is that they have now analytics and tools to better understand and an instrument and manage their business. And then from there, I think you're going to see, because these systems are all you know extremely well. Architected allow through, you know, very structured AP. I calls to connect other SAS based applications. You're gonna start seeing closed loop sort of system. So, for example, people design using on shape, they end up going and deploying their system or installing it, or people use the end using products. People then may call back into the customers support line and report issues, problems, challenges. They'll be able to do traceability back to the underlying design. They'll be able to do trend analysis and defect analysis from the support lines and tie it back and closed loop the product design, manufacture, deployment in the field sort of cycles. In addition, you can imagine there's many things that air sort of as designed. But then when people go on site and they have to install it. There's some alterations modifications. Think about think about like a large air conditioning units for buildings. You go and you go to train and you get a large air conditioning unit that put up on top of building with a crane. They have to build all kinds of adaptors to make sure that that will fit inside of the particulars of that building. You know, with on shape and tools like this, you'll be able to not only take the design of what the air conditioning system might be, but also the all the adapter plates, but also how they installed it. So it sort of as designed as manufactured as stalled. And all these things can be traced, just like if you think about the transformation of customer service or customer contacts. In the early days, you used to have tools that were PC based tools called contact management solution, you know, kind of act or gold mine. And these were basically glorified Elektronik role in Texas. It had a customer names and they had phone numbers and whatever else. And Salesforce and Siebel, you know, these types of systems really broadened out the perspective of what a customer relationship? Waas. So it wasn't just the contact information it was, you know, How did they come to find out about you as a company? So all of the pre sort of marketing and then kind of what happens after they become a customer and it really was a 3 60 view. I think that 3 60 view gets extended to not just to the customers, but also tools and the products they use. And then, of course, the performance information that could come back to the manufacturer. So, you know, as an engineer, one of the things you learn about with systems is the following. And if you remember, when the CD first came out CDs that used to talk about four times over sampling or eight times over sampling and it was really kind of, you know, the fidelity the system. And we know from systems theory that the best way to improve the performance of a system is to actually have more feedback. The more feedback you have, the better system could be. And so that's why you get 16 60 for example, etcetera. Same thing here. The more feedback we have of different parts of a company that a better performance, The company will be better customer relationships. Better, uh, overall financial performance as well. So that's that's the view I have of how these systems all tied together. >>It's a great vision in your point about the data is I think right on. It used to be so fragmented in silos, and in order to take a system view, you've gotta have a system view of the data. Now, for years, we've optimized maybe on one little component of the system and that sometimes we lose sight of the overall outcome. And so what you just described, I think is, I think sets up. You know very well as we exit. Hopefully soon we exit this this covert era on John. I hope that you and I can sit down face to face at a PTC on shape event in the near term >>in the seaport in the >>seaport would tell you that great facility toe have have an event for sure. It >>z wonderful >>there. So So John McElhinney. Thanks so much for for participating in the program. It was really great to have you on, >>right? Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And I want to thank everyone for participating. Today we have some great guest speakers. And remember, this is a live program. So give us a little bit of time. We're gonna flip this site over toe on demand mode so you can share it with your colleagues and you, or you can come back and and watch the sessions that you heard today. Uh, this is Dave Volonte for the Cube and on shape PTC. Thank you so much for watching innovation for good. Be well, Have a great holiday. And we'll see you next time. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of BTC company. We're live today really live TV, which is the heritage of the Cuban. Now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Fribourg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, so this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yes. As you said, the Bio Hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers in by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched five years ago. It >>was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operations in the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined um, so this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things >>take time. It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow from the beginning. I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem p off his building and MP labs. And very quickly we had something running about from anything. Eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now, with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work, um, very being of the pandemic In March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project. Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down, we could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the road, 150,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which, at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created a testing system that will serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down, >>right? Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe you describe a little bit more about silver side detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part. Thio Keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by a port border crossing Places like that they can help make sure that people aren't smuggling, shall we say, very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you can do things like but a detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's It's much more than you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge, or I kind of i o t application for what you guys do. >>You do both Zito shares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville city schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, Um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering. And, um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outside was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building up a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more more students in stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John her stock and integrate Grayson about this is do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or, you know, diverse base and And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career. And sometimes that that funnels kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO. We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible, and we've definitely seen the fruits of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club That eventually is what led our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also are a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line, and we should I mean, Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids and or the program and be successful, >>that's phenomenal. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd. And they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, So there are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do Onda. We also have ah lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing, um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication then would have been done previous technologies. Mhm. You know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston. But another one that was held, uh, of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than there would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the forced march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow Raphael one. If you could describe the process that you used to better understand diseases and what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um, in a way that foster So the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology how the human body functions and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create teachers in the body. Um, and then it has the set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology. Read it. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientists on. We have a genomics platform. That is all about sequencing DNA in our DNA. Um, and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and the little technologies to marry computation on microscope. So, um, the scientists said the agenda and the platforms we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on. I have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O, for example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins, and it's being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus on Dwyer, sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. So some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, God s o mat. I mean, you gotta be listening to this in thinking about, Okay? Some. Someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like Like like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people that just have I don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than, you know, the financial angles and that z e I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order We nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering is about making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so, um do Yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like Day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining eventually you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line By Jeff Hammond Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. E. I think we're really generally generationally finally, at the point where you know young students and engineering and really you know it passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that, but I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. But very quickly my engineers started loving it. Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed, and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Um, now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes that something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic. Especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings, eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody remembers, what they are, the person left and now nobody knows which version is the right one m s with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home. And they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a personal account on shape. And then, magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way, that is absolutely fantastic. >>Rafael, what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know, some of the traditional cloud stuff and I'm curious as to how How whether any of those act manifested were they really that you had to manage? What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team? to learn to use the system like it and buy into it because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some serving on site, but that that's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift. But very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive like I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape? Right is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, their concern was the learning curve right is like how is he will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed and there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on. They were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Phillip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey with on shape? >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped Silver Side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so and we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks? Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design, have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new. How we congrats modules from things that we already have. Put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing. And I really don't want to design in any other platform after after getting on Lee a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I will have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how e used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that day, timer, I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google Maps. Eso did we get anywhere? I don't know, but, uh, but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, um, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month It's through the roof in. But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of k 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that that was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um, and so one of my dreams and it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and, you know, march in, um, you said the forced march the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing. Cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school shoot chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of the cat. And there's so much about it, E >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer. I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, but but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software. And so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud >>Philip or Rafael anything. Your dad, >>I think I mean yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three D printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think there's a dream for kids Thio to be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino and all of these electronic things that live. Kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip Way >>had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development and support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a That's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based. It's an important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see See what your students are gonna be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do. Building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because yeah, I think that project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on. And I think he will give the kids a much better flavor What engineering is really about. Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept, and they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that. Hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform and I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in a modern era. And so that's, you know, it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is, and, like, platform agnostic abilities the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, that's super exciting as far as things that it to go from there, Um, I don't know. >>Other than price, >>you can't say I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on a PTC s that worked with us. Really well, so I'm not complaining. There. You there? >>Yeah. Yeah. No Gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Um, something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes, and now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where we're making those changes anyway, when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you. >>I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with comics necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like to. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I'm being spoiled, >>you know. That's good. I've been doing this a long time and I like toe Ask that question of practitioners and to me, it it's a signal like when you're nit picking and that you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product. And And I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture, But are things like alternative processors? You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe a helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now, then would maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics. Obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good can be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. But who wants toe start >>not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics education is the case If you wanna if you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think stem is key to that. I mean, all of the, ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries, thanks to science and technology, right, improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything they had? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody doing ableto pull together instead of pulling, pulling separately and to be able to spur the idea is onwards. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work? Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shaped and is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them. Andi, that's amazing. Right? To have somebody you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine. Right? Because, um, you know, they have a three d printer. You can you just give them the design and say, like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also so super important, I think, for any of these efforts to improve, um, some of the hardest part was in the world from climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, that point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. Uh, the answer is education and public policy. That really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we can. If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. What can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely. Like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can, to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope to look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful, and I we don't do this. But I have read quite a bit about how certain places air, using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off. A person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink earlier strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular, >>yet another, uh, advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at or like Raphael said. I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is aws re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know, Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software products by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these are the anomalies you need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that air going to result in, uh in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans, air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. You're welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE virtual coverage of re:Invent 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person, this year because of the pandemic we're doing remote interviews and we've got a great coverage here of the APN, Amazon Partner Network experience. I'm your host John Furrier, we are theCUBE virtual. Got a great guest from Tel Aviv remotely calling in and videoing, Nimrod Vax, who is the chief product officer and co-founder of BigID. This is the beautiful thing about remote, you're in Tel Aviv, I'm in Palo Alto, great to see you. We're not in person but thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Great to see you as well. >> So you guys have had a lot of success at BigID, I've noticed a lot of awards, startup to watch, company to watch, kind of a good market opportunity data, data at scale, identification, as the web evolves beyond web presence identification, authentication is super important. You guys are called BigID. What's the purpose of the company? Why do you exist? What's the value proposition? >> So first of all, best startup to work at based on Glassdoor worldwide, so that's a big achievement too. So look, four years ago we started BigID when we realized that there is a gap in the market between the new demands from organizations in terms of how to protect their personal and sensitive information that they collect about their customers, their employees. The regulations were becoming more strict but the tools that were out there, to the large extent still are there, were not providing to those requirements and organizations have to deal with some of those challenges in manual processes, right? For example, the right to be forgotten. Organizations need to be able to find and delete a person's data if they want to be deleted. That's based on GDPR and later on even CCPA. And organizations have no way of doing it because the tools that were available could not tell them whose data it is that they found. The tools were very siloed. They were looking at either unstructured data and file shares or windows and so forth, or they were looking at databases, there was nothing for Big Data, there was nothing for cloud business applications. And so we identified that there is a gap here and we addressed it by building BigID basically to address those challenges. >> That's great, great stuff. And I remember four years ago when I was banging on the table and saying, you know regulation can stunt innovation because you had the confluence of massive platform shifts combined with the business pressure from society. That's not stopping and it's continuing today. You seeing it globally, whether it's fake news in journalism, to privacy concerns where modern applications, this is not going away. You guys have a great market opportunity. What is the product? What is smallID? What do you guys got right now? How do customers maintain the success as the ground continues to shift under them as platforms become more prevalent, more tools, more platforms, more everything? >> So, I'll start with BigID. What is BigID? So BigID really helps organizations better manage and protect the data that they own. And it does that by connecting to everything you have around structured databases and unstructured file shares, big data, cloud storage, business applications and then providing very deep insight into that data. Cataloging all the data, so you know what data you have where and classifying it so you know what type of data you have. Plus you're analyzing the data to find similar and duplicate data and then correlating them to an identity. Very strong, very broad solution fit for IT organization. We have some of the largest organizations out there, the biggest retailers, the biggest financial services organizations, manufacturing and et cetera. What we are seeing is that there are, with the adoption of cloud and business success obviously of AWS, that there are a lot of organizations that are not as big, that don't have an IT organization, that have a very well functioning DevOps organization but still have a very big footprint in Amazon and in other kind of cloud services. And they want to get visibility and they want to do it quickly. And the SmallID is really built for that. SmallID is a lightweight version of BigID that is cloud-native built for your AWS environment. And what it means is that you can quickly install it using CloudFormation templates straight from the AWS marketplace. Quickly stand up an environment that can scan, discover your assets in your account automatically and give you immediate visibility into that, your S3 bucket, into your DynamoDB environments, into your EMR clusters, into your Athena databases and immediately building a full catalog of all the data, so you know what files you have where, you know where what tables, what technical metadata, operational metadata, business metadata and also classified data information. So you know where you have sensitive information and you can immediately address that and apply controls to that information. >> So this is data discovery. So the use case is, I'm an Amazon partner, I mean we use theCUBE virtuals on Amazon, but let's just say hypothetically, we're growing like crazy. Got S3 buckets over here secure, encrypted and the rest, all that stuff. Things are happening, we're growing like a weed. Do we just deploy smallIDs and how it works? Is that use cases, SmallID is for AWS and BigID for everything else or? >> You can start small with SmallID, you get the visibility you need, you can leverage the automation of AWS so that you automatically discover those data sources, connect to them and get visibility. And you could grow into BigID using the same deployment inside AWS. You don't have to switch migrate and you use the same container cluster that is running inside your account and automatically scale it up and then connect to other systems or benefit from the more advanced capabilities the BigID can offer such as correlation, by connecting to maybe your Salesforce, CRM system and getting the ability to correlate to your customer data and understand also whose data it is that you're storing. Connecting to your on-premise mainframe, with the same deployment connecting to your Google Drive or office 365. But the point is that with the smallID you can really start quickly, small with a very small team and get that visibility very quickly. >> Nimrod, I want to ask you a question. What is the definition of cloud native data discovery? What does that mean to you? >> So cloud native means that it leverages all the benefits of the cloud. Like it gets all of the automation and visibility that you get in a cloud environment versus any traditional on-prem environment. So one thing is that BigID is installed directly from your marketplace. So you could browse, find its solution on the AWS marketplace and purchase it. It gets deployed using CloudFormation templates very easily and very quickly. It runs on a elastic container service so that once it runs you can automatically scale it up and down to increase the scan and the scale capabilities of the solution. It connects automatically behind the scenes into the security hub of AWS. So you get those alerts, the policy alerts fed into your security hub. It has integration also directly into the native logging capabilities of AWS. So your existing Datadog or whatever you're using for monitoring can plug into it automatically. That's what we mean by cloud native. >> And if you're cloud native you got to be positioned to take advantage of the data and machine learning in particular. Can you expand on the role of machine learning in your solution? Customers are leaning in heavily this year, you're seeing more uptake on machine learning which is basically AI, AI is machine learning, but it's all tied together. ML is big on all the deployments. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. So data discovery is a very tough problem and it has been around for 20 years. And the traditional methods of classifying the data or understanding what type of data you have has been, you're looking at the pattern of the data. Typically regular expressions or types of kind of pattern-matching techniques that look at the data. But sometimes in order to know what is personal or what is sensitive it's not enough to look at the pattern of the data. How do you distinguish between a date of birth and any other date. Date of birth is much more sensitive. How do you find country of residency or how do you identify even a first name from the last name? So for that, you need more advanced, more sophisticated capabilities that go beyond just pattern matching. And BigID has a variety of those techniques, we call that discovery-in-depth. What it means is that very similar to security-in-depth where you can not rely on a single security control to protect your environment, you can not rely on a single discovery method to truly classify the data. So yes, we have regular expression, that's the table state basic capability of data classification but if you want to find data that is more contextual like a first name, last name, even a phone number and distinguish between a phone number and just a sequence of numbers, you need more contextual NLP based discovery, name entity recognition. We're using (indistinct) to extract and find data contextually. We also apply deep learning, CNN capable, it's called CNN, which is basically deep learning in order to identify and classify document types. Which is basically being able to distinguish between a resume and a application form. Finding financial records, finding medical records. So RA are advanced NLP classifiers can find that type of data. The more advanced capabilities that go beyond the smallID into BigID also include cluster analysis which is an unsupervised machine learning method of finding duplicate and similar data correlation and other techniques that are more contextual and need to use machine learning for that. >> Yeah, and unsupervised that's a lot harder than supervised. You need to have that ability to get that what you can't see. You got to get the blind spots identified and that's really the key observational data you need. This brings up the kind of operational you heard cluster, I hear governance security you mentioned earlier GDPR, this is an operational impact. Can you talk about how it impacts on specifically on the privacy protection and governance side because certainly I get the clustering side of it, operationally just great. Everyone needs to get that. But now on the business model side, this is where people are spending a lot of time scared and worried actually. What the hell to do? >> One of the things that we realized very early on when we started with BigID is that everybody needs a discovery. You need discovery and we actually started with privacy. You need discovery in route to map your data and apply the privacy controls. You need discovery for security, like we said, right? Find and identify sensitive data and apply controls. And you also need discovery for data enablement. You want to discover the data, you want to enable it, to govern it, to make it accessible to the other parts of your business. So discovery is really a foundation and starting point and that you get there with smallID. How do you operationalize that? So BigID has the concept of an application framework. Think about it like an Apple store for data discovery where you can run applications inside your kind of discovery iPhone in order to run specific (indistinct) use cases. So, how do you operationalize privacy use cases? We have applications for privacy use cases like subject access requests and data rights fulfillment, right? Under the CCPA, you have the right to request your data, what data is being stored about you. BigID can help you find all that data in the catalog that after we scan and find that information we can find any individual data. We have an application also in the privacy space for consent governance right under CCP. And you have the right to opt out. If you opt out, your data cannot be sold, cannot be used. How do you enforce that? How do you make sure that if someone opted out, that person's data is not being pumped into Glue, into some other system for analytics, into Redshift or Snowflake? BigID can identify a specific person's data and make sure that it's not being used for analytics and alert if there is a violation. So that's just an example of how you operationalize this knowledge for privacy. And we have more examples also for data enablement and data management. >> There's so much headroom opportunity to build out new functionality, make it programmable. I really appreciate what you guys are doing, totally needed in the industry. I could just see endless opportunities to make this operationally scalable, more programmable, once you kind of get the foundation out there. So congratulations, Nimrod and the whole team. The question I want to ask you, we're here at re:Invent's virtual, three weeks we're here covering Cube action, check out theCUBE experience zone, the partner experience. What is the difference between BigID and say Amazon's Macy? Let's think about that. So how do you compare and contrast, in Amazon they say we love partnering, but we promote our ecosystem. You guys sure have a similar thing. What's the difference? >> There's a big difference. Yes, there is some overlap because both a smallID and Macy can classify data in S3 buckets. And Macy does a pretty good job at it, right? I'm not arguing about it. But smallID is not only about scanning for sensitive data in S3. It also scans anything else you have in your AWS environment, like DynamoDB, like EMR, like Athena. We're also adding Redshift soon, Glue and other rare data sources as well. And it's not only about identifying and alerting on sensitive data, it's about building full catalog (indistinct) It's about giving you almost like a full registry of your data in AWS, where you can look up any type of data and see where it's found across structured, unstructured big data repositories that you're handling inside your AWS environment. So it's broader than just for security. Apart from the fact that they're used for privacy, I would say the biggest value of it is by building that catalog and making it accessible for data enablement, enabling your data across the board for other use cases, for analytics in Redshift, for Glue, for data integrations, for various other purposes. We have also integration into Kinesis to be able to scan and let you know which topics, use what type of data. So it's really a very, very robust full-blown catalog of the data that across the board that is dynamic. And also like you mentioned, accessible to APIs. Very much like the AWS tradition. >> Yeah, great stuff. I got to ask you a question while you're here. You're the co-founder and again congratulations on your success. Also the chief product officer of BigID, what's your advice to your colleagues and potentially new friends out there that are watching here? And let's take it from the entrepreneurial perspective. I have an application and I start growing and maybe I have funding, maybe I take a more pragmatic approach versus raising billions of dollars. But as you grow the pressure for AppSec reviews, having all the table stakes features, how do you advise developers or entrepreneurs or even business people, small medium-sized enterprises to prepare? Is there a way, is there a playbook to say, rather than looking back saying, oh, I didn't do with all the things I got to go back and retrofit, get BigID. Is there a playbook that you see that will help companies so they don't get killed with AppSec reviews and privacy compliance reviews? Could be a waste of time. What's your thoughts on all this? >> Well, I think that very early on when we started BigID, and that was our perspective is that we knew that we are a security and privacy company. So we had to take that very seriously upfront and be prepared. Security cannot be an afterthought. It's something that needs to be built in. And from day one we have taken all of the steps that were needed in order to make sure that what we're building is robust and secure. And that includes, obviously applying all of the code and CI/CD tools that are available for testing your code, whether it's (indistinct), these type of tools. Applying and providing, penetration testing and working with best in line kind of pen testing companies and white hat hackers that would look at your code. These are kind of the things that, that's what you get funding for, right? >> Yeah. >> And you need to take advantage of that and use them. And then as soon as we got bigger, we also invested in a very, kind of a very strong CSO that comes from the industry that has a lot of expertise and a lot of credibility. We also have kind of CSO group. So, each step of funding we've used extensively also to make RM kind of security poster a lot more robust and invisible. >> Final question for you. When should someone buy BigID? When should they engage? Is it something that people can just download immediately and integrate? Do you have to have, is the go-to-market kind of a new target the VP level or is it the... How does someone know when to buy you and download it and use the software? Take us through the use case of how customers engage with. >> Yeah, so customers directly have those requirements when they start hitting and having to comply with regulations around privacy and security. So very early on, especially organizations that deal with consumer information, get to a point where they need to be accountable for the data that they store about their customers and they want to be able to know their data and provide the privacy controls they need to their consumers. For our BigID product this typically is a kind of a medium size and up company, and with an IT organization. For smallID, this is a good fit for companies that are much smaller, that operate mostly out of their, their IT is basically their DevOps teams. And once they have more than 10, 20 data sources in AWS, that's where they start losing count of the data that they have and they need to get more visibility and be able to control what data is being stored there. Because very quickly you start losing count of data information, even for an organization like BigID, which isn't a bigger organization, right? We have 200 employees. We are at the point where it's hard to keep track and keep control of all the data that is being stored in all of the different data sources, right? In AWS, in Google Drive, in some of our other sources, right? And that's the point where you need to start thinking about having that visibility. >> Yeah, like all growth plan, dream big, start small and get big. And I think that's a nice pathway. So small gets you going and you lead right into the BigID. Great stuff. Final, final question for you while I gatchu here. Why the awards? Someone's like, hey, BigID is this cool company, love the founder, love the team, love the value proposition, makes a lot of sense. Why all the awards? >> Look, I think one of the things that was compelling about BigID from the beginning is that we did things differently. Our whole approach for personal data discovery is unique. And instead of looking at the data, we started by looking at the identities, the people and finally looking at their data, learning how their data looks like and then searching for that information. So that was a very different approach to the traditional approach of data discovery. And we continue to innovate and to look at those problems from a different perspective so we can offer our customers an alternative to what was done in the past. It's not saying that we don't do the basic stuffs. The Reg X is the connectivity that that is needed. But we always took a slightly different approach to diversify, to offer something slightly different and more comprehensive. And I think that was the thing that really attracted us from the beginning with the RSA Innovation Sandbox award that we won in 2018, the Gartner Cool Vendor award that we received. And later on also the other awards. And I think that's the unique aspect of BigID. >> You know you solve big problems than certainly as needed. We saw this early on and again I don't think that the problem is going to go away anytime soon, platforms are emerging, more tools than ever before that converge into platforms and as the logic changes at the top all of that's moving onto the underground. So, congratulations, great insight. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it Nimrod. Okay, I'm John Furrier. We are theCUBE virtual here for the partner experience APN virtual. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBEConversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeffrey here with theCUBE we're in our Palo Alto Studios the calendar has turned to late September I still can't believe it. We're still getting through the COVID issue and as we've seen in the news companies are taking all different types of tacts and how they're announcing kind of their go forward strategy with the many of them saying they're going to continue to have work from home or work from anywhere policies. And we're really excited to have our next guest from Citrix. He's Tim Minahan, the EVP of Strategy and the CMO of Citrix, Tim great to see you. >> Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Yeah so love having you guys on we had Tamara on and Amy Haworth this back in April when this thing was first starting and you know we had this light switch moment and everyone had to deal with a work from anywhere world. Now, it's been going on for over six months, people are making announcements, Google, Facebook, Twitter I'm out in the Valley so a lot of the companies here locally saying we're probably not going to have you back for a very long period of time. You guys have been in the supporting remote workers for a really long time, you're kind of like Zoom right place, right time, right market and then suddenly this light switch moment, it's a whole lot more important than it was before. We're six months into this thing what can you share that you've seen from your customers and kind of the transition that we've gone from kind of the shock and awe back in March to now we're in late September almost to October and this is going to continue for a while. >> Yeah, Jeff well, if there is any silver lining to the global crisis that we're all living through, it's that it has indeed caused organizations in all industries really to accelerate their digital transformation and to rethink how they work. And so at Citrix we've done considerable crisis scenario modeling. Engaging with our own customers, with government officials, with influencers around the globe really to determine how will the current environment change, cause companies to change their operating models and to prioritize their IT investments. And it really boils down to while there's variations by geography and sector, our modeling points to three major shifts in behavior. The first is looking for greater agility in their operations companies are adopting more variable operating models, literally in everything from their workforce strategy to the real estate strategy, to their IT strategy to allow them to scale up quickly to the next inevitable, unplanned event or opportunity. And for IT this typically means modernizing their application environment and taking that kind of one to three year cloud transition plan and accelerating it into a few months. The second thing we're seeing is because of the pandemic companies are realizing they need to prioritize employee experience to provide a consistent and secure work experience wherever work needs to get done. Whether that's in the office, whether that's on the road or increasingly whether that's at home and that goes beyond just traditional virtualization applications but it's also for delivering in a secure and unified environment. Your virtual apps alongside your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, et cetera. And then finally, as companies rapidly move to the cloud and they adopt SaaS and they moved to these more distributed IT operating models, their attack surface from a security standpoint expands and they need to evolve their security model to one that is much more contextual and understands the behaviors and the access behaviors of individuals so if you're going to apply security policies and you'll keep your company information and application secure no matter where work is getting done. >> That's a great summary and you know there's been lots of conversation about security and increased attack surface but now you had a blog post that you published last month, September 15th, really interesting. And you talked about kind of COVID being this accelerant in work from home and we talk a lot about consumerization of IT and apps but we haven't talked a lot about it in the context of the employee experience. And you outlined some really great specific vocabulary those people need to be able to sit and think and create and explore the way they want so they can become what they can be free from the distractions at the same time you go through the plethora of I don't know how many business apps we all have to interact with every single day from Salesforce to Asana to Slack to Outlook to Google Drive to Box to et cetera, et cetera. And as you point out here the distractions in I think you said, "People are interrupted by a text, a chat or application alert every two minutes." So that there's this real battle between trying to do higher value work and less minutiae versus this increasing number of applications that are screaming for my attention and interrupting me anytime I'm trying to get something done. So how do you guys look at that and say, hey, we've got an opportunity to make some serious improvements so that you can get to that and cut the employee experience so they can deliver the higher value stuff and not just moving paper down the line. >> Yeah, absolutely Jeff, to your point you know a lot of the tools that we've introduced and adopted and the devices we've used in the like over the years certainly provide some advantages in helping us collaborate better, helping us execute business transactions and the like. However, they've also added a lot of complexity, right? As you said, typical employees use more than a dozen apps to get work done often four or more just to complete a single business process like submitting an expense or a purchase order or approving time off. They spend another 20% of their time searching for information they need to do their jobs across all of these different applications and collaboration channels and they are interrupted by alerts and texts and chats every few minutes. And that really keeps them from doing their core jobs and so Citrix is committed to delivering a digital workspace solutions that help companies transform employee experience to drive better business outcomes. And we do that in three ways. Number one is leveraging our heritage around delivering a unified and secure work environment. We bring all of the resources and employee needs together, your virtual apps and desktops, your SaaS apps, your web apps, your mobile apps, your information and your content into one unified experience. We wrapper that in a contextualized security model that doesn't get in the way of employees getting their job done but understands that employees, their behavior, their access protocols and assigns additional security policies, maybe a second level of authentication or maybe turning off certain features if they're behaving a little bit differently. But the key thing I think is that the third component we've also over the past several years infused within this unified workspace, intelligence, machine learning, workflows or micro apps that really remove that noise from your day, providing a personalized work stream to that individual employee and only offering up the individual tasks or the insights that they need to get their job done. Really guiding them through their day and automating some of that noise out of their day so they can really focus on being creative, focus on being innovative and to your point, giving them that space they need to succeed. >> Yeah, it's a great point, Tim and you know one of the hot buzz words that we hear all the time right now is artificial intelligence and machine learning. And people talk about it, it's kind of like big data where that's not really where the opportunity is in kind of general purpose AI as we've talked to people in natural language processing and video processing. It's really about application specific uses of AI to do something and I know you guys commissioned looks like a report called Work 2035. There's a nice summary that I was able to pull off the internet and there's some really positive things in here. It's actually, you know it got some good news in it about work being more flexible and new jobs will be created and productivity will get a major boost but the piece  I wanted to focus on which piggybacks on what you're just talking is the application of AI around a lot of specific tasks whether that's nudges, personal assistance, wearables that tell you to get up and stretch. And as I think and what triggered as you said, as this person is sitting at their desk trying to figure out what to do now, you've got your calendar, you've got your own tasks but then you've got all these notifications. So the opportunity to apply AI to help me figure out what I should be focusing on that is a tremendous opportunity and potential productivity enhancer, not to mention my mental health and positive attitude and engagement. >> Yeah, absolutely Jeff, and this Work 2035 project that we undertook is from a year long effort of research, quantitative research of business executives, IT executives supplemented with qualitative research with futurist work experts and the like to really begin a dialogue together with governments, with enterprises, with other technology companies about how we should be leveraging technology, how we should be changing our operating models and how we should be adapting our business culture to facilitate a new and better way to work. And to your point, some of the key findings are it's not going to be Skynet out there in the future. AI is not going to overtake all of our jobs and the like it is going to actually help us, you're going to see more of the augmented worker that really not only offers up the insights and the tasks like we just talked about when they're needed but actually helps us through decision-making helps us actually assess massive amounts of data to better engage with customers, better service healthcare to patients and the like. To your point, because of this some jobs certainly will be lost but new jobs will be created, right? And some people will need to be the coaches or trainers for these bots and robots. You'll see things like advanced data scientists becoming more in demand, virtual reality managers, privacy and trust managers. And then to your point, work is going to be more flexible we already talked about this but the ability to allow employees to perform at their best and give them all the resources they need to do so wherever work needs to happen, whether that's in the office, in the field or at home but importantly for businesses and even for employees this actually changes the dynamic of what we think about as a workforce. We can now tap into new pools of talent not just in remote locations but entire segments that had because of our traditional work hub model where I build a big office building or a call center and people have to commute there. Now they can work anywhere so you think about recent retirees that have a lot of domain expertise can get back into the workforce, stay at home parents or stay at home caregivers can actually engage and use their skills and expertise to reengage in that workforce. These are really, really exciting things and then the last thing is, it will help us improve employee engagement, improve wellness and improve productivity by having AI help us throughout our day, guiding us to the right decisions and automating tasks that typically added noise to our day so that we can focus on where we as humans are great which is some of the key decision-making, the creativity, the innovation to drive that next wave of growth for our companies. >> Yeah it's really interesting the kind of divergence that you're seeing with people in this opportunity, right? One of the benefits is that there is no script in how to move forward today, right? This has never happened before, especially at the scale so people are trying all kinds of things and you're talking about is a lot of positive uses of technology to an aide or to get blockers out of the way and help people do a better job. Unfortunately, there's this whole other track that we hear about, you know monitoring, are you in front of your desk, monitoring how many Zoom calls are you on a day, monitoring all these silly things that are kind of old school management of activity versus kind of new school managing of output. And we've done a lot of interviews on this topic, one of Darren Murph from GitLab great comments, does it now as a boss, your job should be removing blockers from your people to help them do a better job, right? That's such a different kind of mentality than managing their tasks and managing the minutiae. So really a lot of good stuff and we could go for a very long time and maybe we'll have a followup, but I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about the other big delta that impacts both of you and I pretty dramatically and that's virtual events or the fact that basically March 15th there was no more gatherings of people, period. And you guys we've covered Citrix Synergy in the past but this year you guys have gone a different kind of tact. And again, I think what's so interesting about it is there is no right answer and everyone is trying to experiment and we're seeing all different ways to get your message to the market. But then the other really important part of events is getting leads, right? And getting engagement with your audience whether that's customers, whether that's partners, whether it's prospects, whether it's press and analysts and everything else. So I wonder if you can share with us kind of the thinking you had the benefit of kind of six months into this thing versus a couple of weeks which a few people had in early May, you know how did you kind of look at the landscape and how did you come to the conclusion that for you guys, it's this three event you've got Citrix Cloud on October 8th, Citrix Workspace Summit on October 22nd and Citrix Security Summit on October 29th. What did you think about before you came to this decision? >> Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff and certainly we put a lot of thought into it and to your point what helped clarify things for us is we always put the customer first. And so, like many other companies we did have our Big User Conference scheduled for the May timeframe, but you know considering the environment at that time and companies were just figuring out how to get their employees home and working securely and safely, how to maintain business continuity. We felt the inappropriate at time to be able to be talking about future innovations and so on and so forth. So we made the decision to kind of put an end to our Citrix Synergy for the year and instead, we went through all this scenario modeling as I mentioned and we've accelerated our focus and our investments and our partnerships to develop new innovations to help our customers achieve the three things that they prioritize which is accelerating that cloud transition, that hybrid multicloud transition plan, advancing their digital workspace and employee experience strategies and embracing a new, more contextual security framework. And so when we thought about how do we bring those announcements to market, how do we help educate our customers around these topics? It became very clear that we needed to design for digital attention spans which means it's not everything in the kitchen sink and we hope that we're bringing a whole bunch of different buying segments together and customer segments together and hope that they glean out the key insights we want. Instead, we wanted to be very focused around the cloud acceleration, the workspace and employee experience strategies and the security strategies is we created three separate summits. And even within the summits we've designed them for digital attention spans, no individual segment is going to be more than 20 minutes long. There'll be very descriptive so you can almost choose your own pathway as you go through the conference rather than having to commit a whole day or the likes you can get the information you need, it's supplemented by knowledge centers so you can go deeper if you want to and talk to some of our experts, if you want to. And it's certainly something we'll use to facilitate ongoing dialogue long after the day of event. >> Really interesting 20 minutes is the longest session. That is really progressive and again I think it's great to hear you say that you started from the perspective of the customer. I think so many people have basically started from the perspective of what did we do for the SaaS convention May five through eight in 2019 and then try to replicate that kind of almost one-to-one in a digital format which isn't really doing justice to either of the formats, I think and not really looking at the opportunity that digital affords that physical doesn't and we just getting together and grabbing a coffee or a drink or whatever in those hallways but there's a whole lot of things that you can do on a digital event that you can't do in a physical event. And we're seeing massive registration and more importantly, massive registration of new people that didn't have the ability couldn't afford it, couldn't get away from the shop whatever the reason is that that the physical events really weren't an option. So I think instead of focusing on the lack of hallway chatter spend your time focusing on the things you can do with this format that you couldn't before. And I think removing the space-time bounds of convention space availability and the limited number of rooms that you can afford, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the budget this really does open up a very different way to get your message to market. >> It does, Jeff and what I'm excited about is what does it mean for the future of events overall? I think there's going to be some very valuable lessons learned for all of us in the industry and I expect just like work won't be the same when we return back to the office, post-pandemic. I don't think the events approach that companies take is going to be quite the same as it was previous and I think that'll be a good thing. There'll be a lot of lessons learned about how people want to engage, how to reach new segments, as you mentioned. And so I think you'll see a blended events strategy from companies across the industry going forward. >> Yeah. And to your point, event was part of your communication strategy, right? It was part of your marketing strategy it is part of your sales strategy so that doesn't necessarily all have to again be bundled into one week in May and can be separated. Well, Tim really, really enjoyed the conversation I have to say your blog posts had some really kind of really positive things in it in terms of the way people should be thinking about their employees not as resources but as people which is one of my pet peeves I'm not a big fan of the human resources word and I really was encouraged by some of the stuff coming out of this 2035 I think you said it's going to be an ongoing project so it'll be great to see what continues to come out because I don't know how much of that was done prior to COVID or kind of augmented after COVID but I would imagine the acceleration on the Delta is going to go up dramatically over the next several months or certainly over the next couple of years. >> Yeah, Jeff, I would say I think Winston Churchill said it best "Never waste a good crisis." And smart companies are doing that right now. I think there's going to be a lot of lessons learned there's going to be a lot of acceleration of the digital transformation and the work model transformations and the business model transformations that companies have had on the radar but haven't really been motivated to do so. And they're really accelerating those now I think that the world of work and the world of IT is going to look a heck of a lot different when we emerge from all of this. >> Yep, yep. I agree well, Tim thank you again for sharing your insight, sharing your information and is great to catch up. >> You too. >> Alright, take care. >> I know. >> He's Tim, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.

>>Hi, everyone. My name is my uncle. My uncle Poor I worked with Geo reminds you in India. We call ourselves Geo Platforms. Now on. We've been recently in the news. You've raised a lot off funding from one of the largest, most of the largest tech companies in the world. And I'm here to talk about Geos Cloud Journey, Onda Mantis Partnership. I've titled it the story often, Underdog becoming the largest telecom company in India within four years, which is really special. And we're, of course, held by the cloud. So quick disclaimer. Right. The content shared here is only for informational purposes. Um, it's only for this event. And if you want to share it outside, especially on social media platforms, we need permission from Geo Platforms limited. Okay, quick intro about myself. I am a VP of engineering a geo. I lead the Cloud Services and Platforms team with NGO Andi. I mean the geo since the beginning, since it started, and I've seen our cloud footprint grow from a handful of their models to now eight large application data centers across three regions in India. And we'll talk about how we went here. All right, Let's give you an introduction on Geo, right? Giorgio is on how we became the largest telecom campaign, India within four years from 0 to 400 million subscribers. And I think there are There are a lot of events that defined Geo and that will give you an understanding off. How do you things and what you did to overcome massive problems in India. So the slide that I want to talkto is this one and, uh, I The headline I've given is, It's the Geo is the fastest growing tech company in the world, which is not a new understatement. It's eggs, actually, quite literally true, because very few companies in the world have grown from zero to 400 million subscribers within four years paying subscribers. And I consider Geo Geos growth in three phases, which I have shown on top. The first phase we'll talk about is how geo grew in the smartphone market in India, right? And what we did to, um to really disrupt the telecom space in India in that market. Then we'll talk about the feature phone phase in India and how Geo grew there in the future for market in India. and then we'll talk about what we're doing now, which we call the Geo Platforms phase. Right. So Geo is a default four g lt. Network. Right. So there's no to geo three g networks that Joe has, Um it's a state of the art four g lt voiceover lt Network and because it was designed fresh right without any two D and three G um, legacy technologies, there were also a lot of challenges Lawn geo when we were starting up. One of the main challenges waas that all the smart phones being sold in India NGOs launching right in 2000 and 16. They did not have the voice or lt chip set embedded in the smartphone because the chips it's far costlier to embed in smartphones and India is a very price and central market. So none of the manufacturers were embedding the four g will teach upset in the smartphones. But geos are on Lee a volte in network, right for the all the network. So we faced a massive problem where we said, Look there no smartphones that can support geo. So how will we grow Geo? So in order to solve that problem, we launched our own brand of smartphones called the Life um, smartphones. And those phones were really high value devices. So there were $50 and for $50 you get you You At that time, you got a four g B storage space. A nice big display for inch display. Dual cameras, Andi. Most importantly, they had volte chip sets embedded in them. Right? And that got us our initial customers the initial for the launch customers when we launched. But more importantly, what that enabled other oh, EMS. What that forced the audience to do is that they also had to launch similar smartphones competing smartphones with voltage upset embedded in the same price range. Right. So within a few months, 3 to 4 months, um, all the other way EMS, all the other smartphone manufacturers, the Samsung's the Micromax is Micromax in India, they all had volte smartphones out in the market, right? And I think that was one key step We took off, launching our own brand of smartphone life that helped us to overcome this problem that no smartphone had. We'll teach upsets in India and then in order. So when when we were launching there were about 13 telecom companies in India. It was a very crowded space on demand. In order to gain a foothold in that market, we really made a few decisions. Ah, phew. Key product announcement that really disrupted this entire industry. Right? So, um, Geo is a default for GLT network itself. All I p network Internet protocol in everything. All data. It's an all data network and everything from voice to data to Internet traffic. Everything goes over this. I'll goes over Internet protocol, and the cost to carry voice on our smartphone network is very low, right? The bandwidth voice consumes is very low in the entire Lt band. Right? So what we did Waas In order to gain a foothold in the market, we made voice completely free, right? He said you will not pay anything for boys and across India, we will not charge any roaming charges across India. Right? So we made voice free completely and we offer the lowest data rates in the world. We could do that because we had the largest capacity or to carry data in India off all the other telecom operators. And these data rates were unheard off in the world, right? So when we launched, we offered a $2 per month or $3 per month plan with unlimited data, you could consume 10 gigabytes of data all day if you wanted to, and some of our subscriber day. Right? So that's the first phase off the overgrowth and smartphones and that really disorders. We hit 100 million subscribers in 170 days, which was very, very fast. And then after the smartphone faith, we found that India still has 500 million feature phones. And in order to grow in that market, we launched our own phone, the geo phone, and we made it free. Right? So if you take if you took a geo subscription and you carried you stayed with us for three years, we would make this phone tree for your refund. The initial deposit that you paid for this phone and this phone had also had quite a few innovations tailored for the Indian market. It had all of our digital services for free, which I will talk about soon. And for example, you could plug in. You could use a cable right on RCR HDMI cable plug into the geo phone and you could watch TV on your big screen TV from the geophones. You didn't need a separate cable subscription toe watch TV, right? So that really helped us grow. And Geo Phone is now the largest selling feature phone in India on it. 100 million feature phones in India now. So now now we're in what I call the geo platforms phase. We're growing of a geo fiber fiber to the home fiber toe the office, um, space. And we've also launched our new commerce initiatives over e commerce initiatives and were steadily building platforms that other companies can leverage other companies can use in the Jeon o'clock. Right? So this is how a small startup not a small start, but a start of nonetheless least 400 million subscribers within four years the fastest growing tech company in the world. Next, Geo also helped a systemic change in India, and this is massive. A lot of startups are building on this India stack, as people call it, and I consider this India stack has made up off three things, and the acronym I use is jam. Trinity, right. So, um, in India, systemic change happened recently because the Indian government made bank accounts free for all one billion Indians. There were no service charges to store money in bank accounts. This is called the Jonathan. The J. GenDyn Bank accounts. The J out off the jam, then India is one of the few countries in the world toe have a digital biometric identity, which can be used to verify anyone online, which is huge. So you can simply go online and say, I am my ankle poor on duh. I verify that this is indeed me who's doing this transaction. This is the A in the jam and the last M stands for Mobil's, which which were held by Geo Mobile Internet in a plus. It is also it is. It also stands for something called the U. P I. The United Unified Payments Interface. This was launched by the Indian government, where you can carry digital transactions for free. You can transfer money from one person to the to another, essentially for free for no fee, right so I can transfer one group, even Indian rupee to my friend without paying any charges. That is huge, right? So you have a country now, which, with a with a billion people who are bank accounts, money in the bank, who you can verify online, right and who can pay online without any problems through their mobile connections held by G right. So suddenly our market, our Internet market, exploded from a few million users to now 506 106 100 million mobile Internet users. So that that I think, was a massive such a systemic change that happened in India. There are some really large hail, um, numbers for this India stack, right? In one month. There were 1.6 billion nuclear transactions in the last month, which is phenomenal. So next What is the impact of geo in India before you started, we were 155th in the world in terms off mobile in terms of broadband data consumption. Right. But after geo, India went from one 55th to the first in the world in terms of broadband data, largely consumed on mobile devices were a mobile first country, right? We have a habit off skipping technology generation, so we skip fixed line broadband and basically consuming Internet on our mobile phones. On average, Geo subscribers consumed 12 gigabytes of data per month, which is one of the highest rates in the world. So Geo has a huge role to play in making India the number one country in terms off broad banded consumption and geo responsible for quite a few industry first in the telecom space and in fact, in the India space, I would say so before Geo. To get a SIM card, you had to fill a form off the physical paper form. It used to go toe Ah, local distributor. And that local distributor is to check the farm that you feel incorrectly for your SIM card and then that used to go to the head office and everything took about 48 hours or so, um, to get your SIM card. And sometimes there were problems there also with a hard biometric authentication. We enable something, uh, India enable something called E K Y C Elektronik. Know your customer? We took a fingerprint scan at our point of Sale Reliance Digital stores, and within 15 minutes we could verify within a few minutes. Within a few seconds we could verify that person is indeed my hunk, right, buying the same car, Elektronik Lee on we activated the SIM card in 15 minutes. That was a massive deal for our growth. Initially right toe onboard 100 million customers. Within our and 70 days. We couldn't have done it without be K. I see that was a massive deal for us and that is huge for any company starting a business or start up in India. We also made voice free, no roaming charges and the lowest data rates in the world. Plus, we gave a full suite of cloud services for free toe all geo customers. For example, we give goTV essentially for free. We give GOTV it'll law for free, which people, when we have a launching, told us that no one would see no one would use because the Indians like watching TV in the living rooms, um, with the family on a big screen television. But when we actually launched, they found that GOTV is one off our most used app. It's like 70,000,080 million monthly active users, and now we've basically been changing culture in India where culture is on demand. You can watch TV on the goal and you can pause it and you can resume whenever you have some free time. So really changed culture in India, India on we help people liver, digital life online. Right, So that was massive. So >>I'm now I'd like to talk about our cloud >>journey on board Animal Minorities Partnership. We've been partners that since 2014 since the beginning. So Geo has been using open stack since 2014 when we started with 14 note luster. I'll be one production environment One right? And that was I call it the first wave off our cloud where we're just understanding open stack, understanding the capabilities, understanding what it could do. Now we're in our second wave. Where were about 4000 bare metal servers in our open stack cloud multiple regions, Um, on that around 100,000 CPU cores, right. So it's a which is one of the bigger clouds in the world, I would say on almost all teams, with Ngor leveraging the cloud and soon I think we're going to hit about 10,000 Bama tools in our cloud, which is massive and just to give you a scale off our network, our in French, our data center footprint. Our network introduction is about 30 network data centers that carry just network traffic across there are there across India and we're about eight application data centers across three regions. Data Center is like a five story building filled with servers. So we're talking really significant scale in India. And we had to do this because when we were launching, there are the government regulation and try it. They've gotten regulatory authority of India, mandates that any telecom company they have to store customer data inside India and none of the other cloud providers were big enough to host our clothes. Right. So we we made all this intellectual for ourselves, and we're still growing next. I love to show you how we grown with together with Moran says we started in 2014 with the fuel deployment pipelines, right? And then we went on to the NK deployment. Pipelines are cloud started growing. We started understanding the clouds and we picked up M C p, which has really been a game changer for us in automation, right on DNA. Now we are in the latest release, ofem CPM CPI $2019 to on open stack queens, which on we've just upgraded all of our clouds or the last few months. Couple of months, 2 to 3 months. So we've done about nine production clouds and there are about 50 internal, um, teams consuming cloud. We call as our tenants, right. We have open stack clouds and we have communities clusters running on top of open stack. There are several production grade will close that run on this cloud. The Geo phone, for example, runs on our cloud private cloud Geo Cloud, which is a backup service like Google Drive and collaboration service. It runs out of a cloud. Geo adds G o g S t, which is a tax filing system for small and medium enterprises, our retail post service. There are all these production services running on our private clouds. We're also empaneled with the government off India to provide cloud services to the government to any State Department that needs cloud services. So we were empaneled by Maiti right in their ego initiative. And our clouds are also Easter. 20,000 certified 20,000 Colin one certified for software processes on 27,001 and said 27,017 slash 18 certified for security processes. Our clouds are also P our data centers Alsop a 942 be certified. So significant effort and investment have gone toe These data centers next. So this is where I think we've really valued the partnership with Morantes. Morantes has has trained us on using the concepts of get offs and in fries cold, right, an automated deployments and the tool change that come with the M C P Morantes product. Right? So, um, one of the key things that has happened from a couple of years ago to today is that the deployment time to deploy a new 100 north production cloud has decreased for us from about 55 days to do it in 2015 to now, we're down to about five days to deploy a cloud after the bear metals a racked and stacked. And the network is also the physical network is also configured, right? So after that, our automated pipelines can deploy 100 0 clock in five days flight, which is a massive deal for someone for a company that there's adding bear metals to their infrastructure so fast, right? It helps us utilize our investment, our assets really well. By the time it takes to deploy a cloud control plane for us is about 19 hours. It takes us two hours to deploy a compu track and it takes us three hours to deploy a storage rack. Right? And we really leverage the re class model off M C. P. We've configured re class model to suit almost every type of cloud that we have, right, and we've kept it fairly generous. It can be, um, Taylor to deploy any type of cloud, any type of story, nor any type of compute north. Andi. It just helps us automate our deployments by putting every configuration everything that we have in to get into using infra introduction at school, right plus M. C. P also comes with pipelines that help us run automated tests, automated validation pipelines on our cloud. We also have tempest pipelines running every few hours every three hours. If I recall correctly which run integration test on our clouds to make sure the clouds are running properly right, that that is also automated. The re class model and the pipelines helpers automate day to operations and changes as well. There are very few seventh now, compared toa a few years ago. It very rare. It's actually the exception and that may be because off mainly some user letter as opposed to a cloud problem. We also have contributed auto healing, Prometheus and Manager, and we integrate parameters and manager with our even driven automation framework. Currently, we're using Stack Storm, but you could use anyone or any event driven automation framework out there so that it indicates really well. So it helps us step away from constantly monitoring our cloud control control planes and clothes. So this has been very fruitful for us and it has actually apps killed our engineers also to use these best in class practices like get off like in France cord. So just to give you a flavor on what stacks our internal teams are running on these clouds, Um, we have a multi data center open stack cloud, and on >>top of that, >>teams use automation tools like terra form to create the environments. They also create their own Cuba these clusters and you'll see you'll see in the next slide also that we have our own community that the service platform that we built on top of open stack to give developers development teams NGO um, easy to create an easy to destroy Cuban. It is environment and sometimes leverage the Murano application catalog to deploy using heats templates to deploy their own stacks. Geo is largely a micro services driven, Um um company. So all of our applications are micro services, multiple micro services talking to each other, and the leverage develops. Two sets, like danceable Prometheus, Stack stone from for Otto Healing and driven, not commission. Big Data's tax are already there Kafka, Patches, Park Cassandra and other other tools as well. We're also now using service meshes. Almost everything now uses service mesh, sometimes use link. Erred sometimes are experimenting. This is Theo. So So this is where we are and we have multiple clients with NGO, so our products and services are available on Android IOS, our own Geo phone, Windows Macs, Web, Mobile Web based off them. So any client you can use our services and there's no lock in. It's always often with geo, so our sources have to be really good to compete in the open Internet. And last but not least, I think I love toe talk to you about our container journey. So a couple of years ago, almost every team started experimenting with containers and communities and they were demand for as a platform team. They were demanding community that the service from us a manage service. Right? So we built for us, it was much more comfortable, much more easier toe build on top of open stack with cloud FBI s as opposed to doing this on bare metal. So we built a fully managed community that a service which was, ah, self service portal, where you could click a button and get a community cluster deployed in your own tenant on Do the >>things that we did are quite interesting. We also handle some geo specific use cases. So we have because it was a >>manage service. We deployed the city notes in our own management tenant, right? We didn't give access to the customer to the city. Notes. We deployed the master control plane notes in the tenant's tenant and our customers tenant, but we didn't give them access to the Masters. We didn't give them the ssh key the workers that the our customers had full access to. And because people in Genova learning and experimenting, we gave them full admin rights to communities customers as well. So that way that really helped on board communities with NGO. And now we have, like 15 different teams running multiple communities clusters on top, off our open stack clouds. We even handle the fact that there are non profiting. I people separate non profiting I peoples and separate production 49 p pools NGO. So you could create these clusters in whatever environment that non prod environment with more open access or a prod environment with more limited access. So we had to handle these geo specific cases as well in this communities as a service. So on the whole, I think open stack because of the isolation it provides. I think it made a lot of sense for us to do communities our service on top off open stack. We even did it on bare metal, but that not many people use the Cuban, indeed a service environmental, because it is just so much easier to work with. Cloud FBI STO provision much of machines and covering these clusters. That's it from me. I think I've said a mouthful, and now I love for you toe. I'd love to have your questions. If you want to reach out to me. My email is mine dot capulet r l dot com. I'm also you can also message me on Twitter at my uncouple. So thank you. And it was a pleasure talking to you, Andre. Let let me hear your questions.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host. We're here during this time where everyone's sheltering in place during the COVID-19 crisis. We're getting the interviews out and getting the stories that matter for you. It's theCUBE's mission just to share and extract the data from, signal from the noise, and share that with you. Of course the conversation here is about how the data analytics are being used. We have a great friend and CUBE alum, Bruno Kurtic, VP, founding VP of Product and Strategy for Sumo Logic, a leader in analytics. We've been following you guys, kind of going back I think many, many years, around big data, now with AI and machine learning. You guys are an industry leader. Bruno, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE, I know you're sheltering in place. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome, pleasure. >> Obviously with the crisis, the work at home has really highlighted the at-scale problem, right? We've been having many conversations on theCUBE of cybersecurity at scale, because now the endpoint protection business has been exploding, literally, a lot of pressure of malware. A convenient crime time for those hackers. You're starting to see cloud failure. Google had 18 hours of downtime. Azure's got some downtime. I think Amazon's the only one that haven't had any downtime. But everything is being at scale now, because the new work environment is actually putting pressure on the industry, not only just the financial pressure of people losing their jobs or the hiring freezes, but now the focus is staying in business and getting through this. But the pressure points of scale are starting to show. And working at home is one of them. Analytics has become a big part of it. Can you share your perspective of how people using analytics to get through this, because now the scale of the problem-solving is there with analytics. It's in charts on the virus, exponential curves, people want to know the impact of their business in all this. What's your view on this situation? >> Yeah. The world has changed so quickly. Analytics has always been important. But there are really two aspects of analytics that are important right now. A lot of our enterprises today, obviously, as you said, are switching to this sort of remote workforce. Everybody who was local is now remote, so, people are working from home. That is putting stress on the systems that support that working from home. It's putting stress on infrastructure, things like VPNs and networks and things like that because they're carrying more bits and bytes. It's putting stress on productivity tools, things like cloud provider tools, things like Office 365, and Google Drive, and Salesforce, and other things that are now being leveraged more and more as people are remote. Enterprises are leveraging analytics to optimize and to ensure that they can facilitate course of business, understand where their issues are, understand where their failures are, internal and external, route traffic appropriately to make sure that they can actually do the business they need. But that's only half of the problem. In fact, I think the other half of the problem is maybe even bigger. We as humans are no longer able to go out. We're not supposed to, and able to go shopping and doing things as we normally do, so all of these enterprises are not only working remotely, leveraging productivity tools and quote-unquote "digital technologies" to do work. They're also serving more customers through their digital properties. And so their sites, their apps, their retail stores online, and all of the digital aspects of enterprises today are under more load because consumers and customers are leveraging those channels more. People are getting groceries delivered at home, pharmaceuticals delivered at home. Everything is going through online systems rather than us going to Walgreens and other places to pick things up. Both of those aspects of scale and security are important. Analytics is important in both figuring out how do you serve your customers effectively, and how do you secure those sites. Because now that there's more load, there's more people, and it's a bigger honeypot. And then also, how do you actually do your own business to support that in a digital world? >> Bruno, that's a great point. I just want to reiterate that the role of data in all this is really fundamental and clear, the value that you can get out of the data. Now, you and I, we've had many conversations with you guys over the years. For all of us insiders, we all know this already. Data analytics, everyone's instrumenting their business. But now when you see real-life examples of death and destruction, I mean, I was reporting yesterday that leaked emails from the CDC in the United States showed that in January, they saw that people didn't have fevers with COVID-19. The system was lagging. There was no real-time notifications. This is our world. We've been living in this for this past decade, in the big data world. This is highlighting a global problem, that with notifications, with the right use of data, is a real game-changer. You couldn't get any more clear. I have to ask you, with all this kind of revelations, and I don't mean to be all gloom-and-doom, but that's the reality, highlights the fact that instrumenting and having the data analytics is a must-have. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You're right. Like you said, we are insiders here, and we've been espousing this world of what we internally in Sumo call the continuous intelligence, which essentially means to us and to our customers, that you collect and process all signals that are available to you as a business, as a government, as a whatever entity that is dealing with critical things. You need to process all of that data as quickly as you can. You need to mine it for insights. You need to, in an agile fashion, just like software development, you need to consume those insights, build them into your processes to improve, to react, to respond quickly, and then deliver better outcomes. The sooner you understand what the data is telling you, the sooner you can actually respond to whatever that data is telling you, and actually avoid bad outcomes, improve good outcomes, and overall, react to whatever is forcing you to react. >> I was just talking with Dave Vellante last week about this, my co-host, and also Jeff Frick, my general manager, who interviewed you in the past on theCUBE, about the transition and transformation that's happening. I want to just get your reaction to what we're seeing, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it. There's transitions and there's transformations. Yeah, we've been kind of in this data transition around analytics. You pointed out, as insiders, we've been pointing this out for years. But I think now there's more of a transformative component to this. I think it's becoming clear to everyone the role of data, and you've laid out some good things there. Now I want to ask you, on this transformation. Do you agree with it, and if you do, how does that change the roles? Because if I'm going to react to this as a business, whether small, medium, and large business, large enterprise or government, I now realize that the old world's over. I need to get to the new way. That means new roles, new responsibilities, new outcomes, new ways to measure. Can you share your thoughts on that? Do you agree with the transformation, and two, what are some of those new role changes? How should a business manager or technologist make that transformation? >> Yeah. If it was ever more clear, getting a switch, or a transformation as you say, from the old way we did business and we did technology to the new way, is only being highlighted by this crisis. If you are an enterprise, and you are trying to do everything yourself, running your own IT stacks and all of that, it is clear today that it is much more difficult to do that than if you were leveraging next generation technologies: clouds, SaaS, PaaS, and other things, because it is hard to get people even to work. I think if we have ever been in a place where this sort of transformation is a must, not a slow choice or an evolution, it is now. Because enterprises who have done that, who have done that already, are now at an advantage. I think this is a critical moment in time for us all as we all wake up to this new reality. It is not to say that enterprises are going to be switched over after this specific crisis, but what's going to happen, I believe, is that, I think the philosophies are going to change, enterprises are going to think of this as the new normal. They're going to think about, "Hey, if I don't have the data "about my business, about my customers, "about my infrastructure, about my systems, "I won't be able to respond to the next one." Because right now there's a lot of plugging the holes in the dam with fingers and toes, but we are going to need to be ready for this, because if you think about what this particular pandemic means, this isn't going to end in April or May. Because without a treatment, or without a vaccination, it's going to continue to resurface. Unless we eradicate the entire population of the virus, any new incident is going to start up like a small flare-up, and that is going to continue to bring us back into the situation. Over this time, we're going to have to continue to respond to this crisis as we are, and we need to plan for the future ones like this. That might not be a pandemic type of crisis. It could be a change in the business. It could be other types of world events, whatever it might be. But I think this is the time when enterprises are going to start adopting these types of procedures and technologies to be able to respond. >> It's interesting, Bruno, you bring up some good points. I think about all the conversations that I've had over the years with pros around "disaster recovery" and continuous operations. This is a different vector of what that means, because when you highlighted earlier, IT, it's not like a hurricane or a power outage. This is a different kind of disruption. We talked about scale. What are some of the things that you're seeing right now that businesses are being faced with, that you guys are seeing in the analytics, or use cases that have emerged from this new normal that is facing today's business with this crisis. What's changed? What is this new challenge? When you think about the business continuity and how continuous operations need to be sustained because, again, it's a different vector. It's not a blackout, it's not a hurricane. It's a different kind of disruption. It's one where the business needs to stay on more than ever. >> Yep. Correct. True. What's really interesting, and there are some relatively straightforward use cases that we're seeing. People are dealing with their authentication, VPN network issues, because everybody is low on bandwidth. Everybody is, all of these systems are at their breaking point because they're carrying more than they ever did. These are use cases that existed all along. The problem with the use cases that existed all along is that they've been slowly picking up and growing. This is the discontinuity right now. What's happened right now, all of a sudden you've got double, triple, quadruple the load, and you need to both scale up your infrastructure, scale up your monitoring, be much more vigilant about that monitoring, speed up your recovery because more is at stake, and all of those things. That's the generic use case that existed all along, but have not been in this disruptive type of operating environment. Second is, enterprises are now learning very quickly what they need to do in terms of scaling and monitoring their production, customer-facing infrastructure, what used to be in the data center, the three-tier world, adding a few notes to an application, to your website over time, worked. Right now everybody is realizing that this whole bent on building our microservices, building for scale, rearchitecting and all that stuff, so that you can respond to an instantaneous burst of traffic on your site. You want to capture that traffic, because it means revenue. If you don't capture it, you miss out on it, and then customers go elsewhere, and never come back, and all that stuff. A lot of the work loads are to ensure that the systems, the mission-critical systems, are up and running. It's all about monitoring real-time telemetry, accelerating root cause analysis across systems that are cloud systems, and so on. >> It's a great point. You actually were leading into my next question I wanted to ask you. You know, the old saying goes, "Preparation meets opportunity. Those are the lucky ones." Luck is never really there. You're prepared, and opportunity. Can you talk about those people that have been prepared, that are doing it right now, or who are actually getting through this? What does preparation look like? What's that opportunity? Who's not prepared? Who's hurting the most? Who's suffering, and what could they do differently? Are you seeing any patterns out there, that people, they did their work, they're cloud native, they're scaled out, or they have auto-scaling. What are some of the things where people were prepared, and could you describe that, and on the other side where people weren't prepared, and they're hurting. Can you describe those two environments? >> Sure. Yeah. You think about the spectrum of companies that are going through digital transformation. There are companies who are on the left side. I don't know whether I'm mirroring or not. Basically, on the left side are people who are just making that transformation and moving to serving customers digitally, and on the right side are the ones that are basically all in, already there, and have been building modern architectures to support that type of transformation. The ones that are already all the way on the right, companies like us, right? We've been in this business forever. We serve customers who are early adopters of digital, so we've had to deal with things like November 6th, primary elections, and all of our media and entertainment customers who were spiking. Or we have to deal with companies that do sporting events like World Cup or Super Bowl and things like that. We knew that our business was going to always demand of us to be able to respond to both scheduled and unscheduled disruptions, and we needed to build systems that can scale to that without many human interactions. And there are many of our customers, and companies who are in that position today, who are actually able to do business and are now thriving, because they are the ones capturing market share at this point in time. The people who are struggling are people who have not yet made it to that full transformation, people who, essentially, assume business as normal, who are maybe beginning that transformation, but don't have the know-how, or the architecture, or the technology yet to support it. Their customers are coming to them through their new digital channels, but those digital channels struggle. You'll see this, more often than not you're going to find these still running in a traditional data center than in the cloud. Sometimes they're running in the cloud where they've done just a regular lift-and-shift instead of rearchitecting and things like that. There's really a spectrum, and it's really funny and amazing how much it maps to the journey in digital transformation, and how this specific thing is essentially, what's happening right now, it looks like the business environment demands everybody to be fully digital, but not everybody is. Effectively, the ones that are not are struggling more than the ones that are. >> Yeah. Certainly, we're seeing with theCUBE, with the digital events happening on our side, all events are canceled, so they've got to move online. You can't just take a physical, old way of doing something, where there's content value, and moving it to digital. It's a whole different ball game. There's different roles, there's different responsibilities. It's a completely different set of things. That's putting pressure on all these teams, and that's just one use case. You're seeing it in IT, you're seeing it happen in marketing and sales, how people are doing business. This is going to be very, very key for these companies. The data will be, ultimately, the key. You guys are doing a great job. I do want to get to the news, and I want to get the plug in for Sumo Logic. I want to say congratulations to you guys. A press release went out today from Sumo Logic. You guys are offering free cloud-based data analytics to support work from home and online classroom environments. That's great news. Can you just share and give a plug for that, PSA? >> Sure! We basically have a lot of customers who, just like us, are now starting to work from home. As soon as this began, we got inbound demands saying, "Oh, could you get, do you have an application for this, "do you have some analytics for that, "things that support our work from home." We thought hey, why don't we just make this as a package, and actually build out-of-the-box solutions that can support people who have common working from home technologies that they used to use for 10% of their workforce, and now work for 100% of their workforce. Let's package those, let's push those out. Let's support educational institutions who are now struggling. I have two kids in here who are learning. Everything is online, right? We had to get another computer for them and all this stuff. They're younger, they're in fourth grade. They are doing this, I can see personally how the schools are struggling, how they're trying to learn this whole new model. They need to have their systems be reliable and resilient, and this is not just elementaries, but middle school, high schools, colleges have all expanded their on-premise teaching. So we said, "Okay. Let's do something to help the community "with what we do best." Which is, we can help them make sure that the things that they do, that they need to do for this remote workforce, remote learning, whatever it might be, is efficient, working, and secure. We packaged several bundles of these solutions and offered those for free for a while, so that both our customers, and non-customers, and educational institutions have something they can go and reach for when they are struggling to keep their systems up and running. >> Yeah, it's also a mindset change, too. They want comfort. They want to have a partner. I think that's great that you guys are doing for the community. Can you just give some color commentary on how this all went down? Did you guys have a huddle in your room, said, "Hey, this is a part of our business. "We could really package this up "and really push it out and help people." Is that how it all came together? Can you share some inside commentary on how this all went down and what happened? >> Yeah. Basically, we had a discussion, literally, I think, the first or the second day when we all were sent home. We got on our online meeting and sat down, and essentially learned about this inbound demand from our customers, and what they were looking to do. We were like, "Okay, why don't we, "why don't we just offer this? "Why don't we package it?" It was a cross-functional team that just sat there. It was a no-brainer. Nobody was agonizing over doing this for free or anything like that. We were just sitting there thinking, "What can we do? "Right now is the time for us to all "pull each other up and help each other. "It'll all sort itself out afterwards." >> You know, during the bubonic plague, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during that time. You guys are being creative during this time, as the coronavirus, so props to you guys at Sumo Logic. Congratulations, and thanks for taking the time. Can you give some parting thoughts on it, for the folks who are working at home? Just some motivational inspiration from you guys? What's going to come next for you guys? >> Sure. And thank you for having me on this video. I would say that we have been making slow transition towards remote workforce as it is. In a lot of places around the world, it's not that easy to make it to an office. Traffic is getting worse, big centers are getting populated, real estate is getting more expensive, all of this stuff. I think, actually, this is an opportunity for enterprises, for companies, and for people to figure out how this is done. We can actually practice now. We're forced to practice. It might actually have positive impact on all industries. We are going to probably figure out how to travel less, probably figure out how to actually do this more effectively, the cost of doing business is going to go down, ability to actually find new jobs might broaden, because you might be able to actually find jobs at companies who never thought they could do this remotely, and now are willing to hire remote workforces and people. I think this is going to be all good for us in the end. Right now it feels painful, and everybody's scared, and all that stuff, but I think long term, both the transformation into digitally serving our customers and the transformation towards remote workforce is going to be good for business. >> Yeah. It takes a community, and we really appreciate the effort you guys make, making that free for people, the classrooms. Remember, Isaac Newton discovered gravity and calculus while sheltering in place. A lot of interesting, new things are going to happen. I appreciate it. >> Bruno: Absolutely. >> Bruno, thank you for taking the time and sharing your insights from your place, sheltering. I made a visit into the studio to get this interview and a variety of other interviews we're doing digitally here. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Appreciate you as well. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here. CUBE conversation with Bruno from Sumo Logic sharing his perspective on the COVID-19. The impact, the disruption and path to the future out of this, and the new normal that is going to change our lives. Thanks for watching.

(funk music) (funk music) (funk music) (funk music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every enterprise is responding to the opportunities of cloud with significant changes in people, process, how they think about technology, how they're going to align technology overall with their business and with their business strategies. Now those changes are affecting virtually every aspect of business but especially every aspect of technology. Especially security. So what does it mean to envision a world in which significant new classes of services are being provided through cloud mechanisms and modes, but you retain and in fact, even enhance the quality of security that your enterprise can utilize. To have that conversation, we're joined today by a great guest, Amit Sinha is president and CTO at Zscaler. Amit, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So before we get into it, what's new at Zscaler? >> Well, at Zscaler our mission is to make the internet and cloud a secure place for businesses and as I engage with our global 2000 customers and prospects, they are going through some of the digital transformation challenges that you just alluded to. Specifically for security, what is happening is that they had a lot of applications that were sitting in a data center or in their headquarters and that center of gravity is now moving to the cloud. They probably adopt their Office 365, and Box, and Salesforce, and these applications have moved out. Now in addition, the users are everywhere. They're accessing those services, not just from offices but also from their mobile devices and home. So if your users have left the building, and your applications are no longer sitting in your data center, that begs that question: Where should the security stack be? You know, it cannot be your legacy security appliances that sat in your DMZ and your IT closets. So that's the challenge that we see out there, and Zscaler is helping these large global organizations transform their security and network for a more mobile and a cloud-first world. >> Distributed world? So let me make sure I got this right. So basically, cause I think I totally agree with you >> Right. >> Just to test it, that many regarded the cloud as a centralization strategy. >> Correct. >> What we really see happening, is we're seeing enterprises more distribute their data, more distribute their processing, but they have not updated how they think about security so the presumption is, "yeah we're going to put more processing data out closer to the action but we're going to backhaul a whole bunch back to our security model," and what I hear you saying is no, you need to push those security services out to where the data is, out to where the process, out to where the user is. Have I got that right? >> You have nailed it, right. Think of it this way, if I'm a large global 2000 organization, I might have thousands of branches. All of those branches, traditionally, have used a hub-and-spoke network model. I might have a branch here in Palo Alto but my headquarters is in New York. So now I have an MPLS circuit connecting this branch to New York. If my Exchange server and applications and SAP systems are all there, then that hub-and-spoke model made sense. I am in this office >> Right. >> I connect to those applications and all my security stack is also there. But fast forward to today, all of those applications are moving and they're not just in one cloud. You know, you might have adopted Salesforce.com for CRM, you might have adopted Workday, you might have adopted Office 365. So these are SaaS services. Now if I'm sitting here in Palo Alto, and if I have to access my email, it makes absolutely no sense for me to VPN back to New York only to exit to the internet right there. What users want is a fast, nimble user experience without security coming in the way. What organizations want is no compromise in their security stack. So what you really need is a security stack that follows the user wherever they are. >> And the data. >> And the data, so my data...you know Microsoft has a front-door service here in Redwood City and if if you are a user here and trying to access that, I should be able to go straight with my entire security stack right next to it. That's what Gartner is calling SASE these days. >> Well, let's get into that in a second. It almost sounds as though what you're suggesting is that the enterprise needs to look at security as a SaaS service itself. >> 100 percent. If your users are everywhere and if your applications are in the cloud, your security better be delivered as a consistent "as-a-service," right next to where the users are and hopefully co-located in the same data center as where the applications are present so the only way to have a pervasive security model is to have it delivered in the cloud, which is what Zscaler has been doing from day one. >> Now, a little spoiler alert for everybody, Zscaler's been talking about this for 10-plus years. >> Right. >> So where are we today in the market place starting to recognize and acknowledge this transformation in the basic security architecture and platform that we're going through? >> I'm very excited to see that the market is really adopting what Zscaler has been talking about for over a decade. In fact, recently, Gartner released a paper titled "SASE," it stands for Secure Access Service Edge and there are, I believe, four principal tenets of SASE. The first one, of course, is that compute and security services have to be right at the edge. And we talked about that. It makes sense. >> For where the service is being delivered. >> You can't backhaul traffic to your data center or you can't backhaul traffic to Google's central data center somewhere. You need to have compute capabilities with things like SSL Interception and all the security services running right at the edge, connecting users to applications in the shortest path, right? So that's sort of principle number one of SASE. The second principle that Gartner talks about, which again you know, has been fundamental to Zscaler's DNA, is to keep your devices and your branch offices light. Don't shove too much complexity from a security perspective on the user devices and your branches. Keep it simple. >> Or the people running those user devices >> Absolutely >> in the branches >> Yeah, so you know, keep your branch offices like a light router, that forwards traffic to the cloud, where the heavy-lifting is done. >> Right. >> The third principle they talk about is to deliver modern security, you need to have a proxy-based architecture and essentially what a proxy architecture allows you to do is to look at content, right? Gone are the days where you could just say, stop a website called "evil.com" and allow a website "good.com," right? It's not like that anymore. You have to look at content, you know. You might get malware from a Google Drive link. You can't block Google now, right? So looking at SSL-encrypted content is needed and firewalls just can't do it. You have to have a proxy architecture that can decrypt SSL connections, look at content, provide malware services, provide policy-based access control services, et cetera and that's kind of the third principle. And finally what Gartner talks about is SASE has to be cloud-native, it has to be, sort of, born and bred in the cloud, a true multitenant, cloud-first architecture. You can't take, sort of, legacy security appliances and shove it in third-party infrastructure like AWS and GCP and deliver a cloud service and the example I use often is, just because you had a great blu-ray player or a DVD player in your home theater, you can't take 100,000 of these and shove it into AWS and become a Netflix. You really need to build that service from the ground up. You know, in a multitenant fashion and that's what we have done for security as a service through the cloud. >> So we are now, the market seems to be kind of converging on some of the principles that Zscaler's been talking about for quite some time. >> Right. >> When we think about 2020, how do you anticipate enterprises are going to respond as a consequence of this convergence in acknowledging that the value proposition and the need are starting to come together? >> Absolutely, I think we see the momentum picking up in the market, we have lots of conversations with CIO's who are going through this digital transformation journey, you know transformation is hard. There's immune response in big organizations >> Sure. >> To change. Not much has changed from a security and network architecture perspective in the last two decades. But we're seeing more and more of that. In fact, over 400 of global 2000 organizations are 100 percent deployed on Zscaler. And so that momentum is picking up and we see a lot of traction with other prospects who are beginning to see the light, as we say it. >> Well as you start to imagine the relationship between security and data, between security and data, one of the things that I find interesting is many respects to cloud, especially as it becomes more distributed, is becoming better acknowledged almost as a network of services. >> Right. >> As opposed to AWS as a data center here and that makes it a cloud data center. >> Right. >> It really is this network of services, which can happen from a lot of different places, big cloud service providers, your own enterprise, partners providing services to you. How does the relationship between Zscaler and kind of an openness >> Hm-mm. >> Going to come together? Hm-mm. >> So that you can provide services from a foreign enterprise to the enterprise's partners, customers, and others that the enterprise needs to work with. >> That's a great question, Peter and I think one of the most important things I tell our customers and prospects is that if you look at a cloud-delivered security architecture, it better embrace some of the SASE principles. One of the first things we did when we built the Zscaler platform was to distribute it across 150 data centers. And why did we do that? We did that because when a user is going to destinations, they need to be able to access any destination. The destination could be on Azure, could be on AWS, could be Salesforce, so by definition, it has to be carrier-neutral, it has to be cloud-neutral. I can't build a service that is designed for all internet traffic in a GCP or AWS, right. So how did we do that? We went and looked at one of the world's best co-location facilities that provide maximum connectivity options in any given region. So in North America, we might be in an Equinix facility and we might use tier one ISPs like GTT and Zayo that provide excellent connectivity to our customers and the destinations they want to visit. When you go to China, there's no GCP there, right so we work with China Unicom and China Telecom. When we are in India, we might work with an Airtel or a Sify, when we are in Australia, we might be working with Telstra. So we work with, you know, world class tier one ISPs in best data centers that provide maximum connectivity options. We invested heavily in internet exchange connectivity. Why? Because once you come to Zscaler, you've solved the physics problem by building the data center close to you, the next thing is, you want quickly go to your application. You don't want security to be in the way >> Right. >> Of application access. So with internet exchange connectivity, we are peered in a settlement-free way or BGP with Microsoft, with Akamai, with Apple, with Yahoo, right. So we can quickly get you to the content while delivering the full security stack, right? So we had to really take no shortcuts, back to your point of the world is very diverse and you cannot operate in a walled garden of one provider anymore and if you really build a cloud platform that is embracing some of the SASE principles we talked about, you have to do it the hard way. By building this one data center at a time. >> Well, you don't want your servicers to fall down because you didn't put the partnerships in place >and hardend them Correct. >> As much as you've hardened some of the other traffic. So as we think about kind of, where this goes, what do you envision Zscaler's, kind of big customer story is going to be in 2020 and beyond? Obviously, the service is going to be everywhere, change the way you think about security, but how, for example, is the relationship between the definition of the edge and the definition of the secure service going to co-evolve? Are people going to think about the edge differently as they start to think more in terms of a secure edge or where the data resides and the secure data, what do you think? >> Let's start off with five years and go back, right? >> We're going forward. >> Work our way back. Well, five years from now, hopefully everyone is on a 5G phone, you know, with blazing-fast internet connections, on devices that you love, your applications are everywhere, so now think of it from an IT perspective. You know, my span of control is becoming thinner and thinner, right? my users are on devices that I barely control. My network is the internet that I really don't control. My applications have moved to the cloud or either hosted in third-party infrastructure or run as a SaaS application, which I really don't control. Now, in this world, how do I provide security? How do I provide user experience? Imagine if you are the CIO and your job is to make all of this work, where will you start, right? So those are some of the big problems that we are helping our customers with. So this-- >> Let me as you a question 'cause here's where I was going with the question. I would start with, if I can't control all these things, I'm going to apply my notion of security >> Hm-mm. >> And say I am going to control that which is within >> Right. >> my security boundaries, not at a perimeter level, not at a device level, but at a service level. >> Absolutely and that's really the crux of the Zscaler platform service. We build this Zero Trust architecture. Our goal is to allow users to quickly come to Zscaler and Zscaler becomes the policy engine that is securely connecting them to all the cloud services that they want to go to. Now in addition, we also allow the same users to connect to internal applications that might have required a traditional VPN. Now think of it this way, Peter. When you connect to Google today, do you VPN to Google's network? To access Gmail? No. Why should you have to VPN to access an internal application? I mean, you get a link on your mobile phone, you click on it and it didn't work because it required a separate form of network access. So with Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access, we are delivering a beautiful service that works across 150 data centers. Users connect to the service and the service becomes a policy engine that is securely connecting you to the destinations that you want. Now, in addition, you asked about what's going to happen in a couple of years. The same service can be extended for partners. I'm a business, I have hundreds of partners who want to connect to me. Why should I allow legacy VPN access or private circuits that expose me? I don't even know who's on the other end of the line, right? They come onto my network and you hear about the Target breaches because some HVAC contract that had unrestricted access, you hear about the Airbus breach because another contract that had access. So how do we build a true Zero Trust cloud platform that is securely allowing users, whether it's your employees, to connect to named applications that they should, or your partners that need access to certain applications, without putting them on the network. We're decoupling application access from network access. And there's one final important linchpin in this whole thing. Remember we talked about how powerless organizations >> Right. >> feel in this distributed model? Now imagine, your job is to also ensure that people are having a good user experience. How will you do that, right? What Zscaler is trying to do now is, we've been very successful in providing the secure and policy-based connectivity and our customers are asking us, hey, you're sitting in between all of this, you have visibility into what's happening on the user's device. Clearly you're sitting in the middle in the cloud and you see what's happening on the left-hand side, what's happening on the right-hand side. You know, you have the cloud effect, you can see there's a problem going on with Microsoft's network in the China region, right? Correlate all of that information and give me proactive intelligence around user experience and that's what we launched recently at Zenith Live. We call it Zscaler Digital Experience, >> Hmm. >> So overall the goal of the platform is to securely connect users and entities to named applications with Zero Trust principles. We never want security and user experience to be orthogonal requirements that has traditionally been the case. And we want to provide great user experience and visibility to our customers who've started adopting this platform. >> That's a great story. It's a great story. So, once again, I want to thank you very much for coming in and that's Amit Sinha, who is the president and CTO at Zscaler, focusing a lot on the R&D types of things that Zscaler's doing. Thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> It's my pleasure, Peter. Always enjoy talking to you. >> And thanks for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (funk music) (funk music)

from San Mateo its the cube covering scaler innovation day brought to you by scaler Livan welcome to the special innovation day with the cube here in San Mateo California heart of Silicon Valley John for the cube our next guest as Steve Newman the co-founder scaler congratulations thanks for having us you guys got a great company here Thanks yeah go ahead glad to have you here so tell the story what's the backstory you guys found it interesting pedigree of founders all tech entrepreneurs tech tech savvy tech athletes as we say tell the backstory how'd it all start and had it all come together so I also traced the story back to I was part of the team that built the original Google Docs and a lot of the early people here at scaler either were part of that Google Docs team or you know they're people we met while we were at Google and really scaler is an outgrowth of the it's a solution to problems we were having trying to run that system at Google you know Google Docs of course became part of a whole ecosystem with Google Drive and Google sheets and there's that you know all these applications working together it's a very complicated system and keeping that humming behind the scenes became a very complicated problem well congratulate ago Google Docs is used by a lot of people so been great success scale is different though you guys are taking a different approach than the competition what's unique about it can you share kind of like the history of where it's going and where it came from and where it's going yeah so you know maybe it'd be helpful like just to kind of set the context a little bit to the blackboard yeah so you know I you know I talked about it's kind of probably put a little flesh on what I was saying about you know there's a very complicated system that we're trying to run in the whole Google Drive ecosystem too there are all these trends in the industry nowadays you know the move to the cloud and micro services and kubernetes and serverless and can use deployment is all everything like these are all great innovations makes you know people are building more complex applications they're evolving faster but it's making things a lot more complicated and to make that concrete imagine that you're running an e-commerce site back in the calm web 1.0 era so you're gonna have a web server maybe a patchy you've got a MySQL database behind that with your inventory and your shopping carts you may be an email gateway and some kind of payment gateway and that's about it that's your that's your system each one of these pieces involved you know going to Fry's buying a computer driving it over the data center slotting it into a rack you know a lot of sweat went into every one of those boxes but there's only about four boxes it's your whole system if you wanted to go faster you threw more hardware at it more ram exactly and like and you know not literally through but literally carried you literally brought in more hardware and so you know took a lot of work just to do the you know that simple system fast forward a couple of decades if you're running uh running an e-commerce site today well you know you're certainly not seeing the inside of a data center you know stripe will run the payments for you you know somebody's on will run the database server and say you know like this is much much you know you know one guy can get this going in an afternoon literally but nobody's running this today this is not a competitive operation today if you're an e-commerce today you also have personalization and advertising based on the surf service history or purchase history and you know there's a separate flow for gifts and you know then printing the you know interfacing to your delivery service and and you know you've got 150 blocks on this diagram and maybe your engineering team doesn't have to be so much larger because each one of those box is so much easier to run but it's still a complicated system and trying to actually understand what's working what's not working why isn't it working and and tracking that down and fixing it this is the challenge day and this and this is where we come in and that's the main focus for today is that you can figure it out but the complexity of the moving parts is the problem exactly so you know and so you see oh you know 10% of the time that somebody comes in to open their shopping cart it fails well you know the problem pops out here but the the root cause turns out to be a problem with your database system back here and and figuring that out you know that's that's the challenge okay so with cloud technology economics has changed how is cloud changing the game so it's interesting you know changes changes the game for our customers and it changes the game for us so for a customer you know kind of we touched on this a little bit like things are a lot easier people run stuff for you you know you're not running your own hardware you're not you know you're often you're not even running your own software you're just consuming a service it's a lot easier to scale up and down so you can do much more ambitious things and you can move a lot faster but you have these complexity problems for us what it presents an an economy of scale opportunity so to you know we step in to help you on the telemetry side what's happening in my system why is it happening when did it start happening what's causing it to happen that all takes a lot of data log data other kinds of data so every one of those components is generating data and by the way for our customers know that they're running a hundred and 50 services instead of four they are generating a lot more data and so traditionally if you're trying to manage that yourself running your own log management cluster or whatever solution you know it's a real challenge to you as you scale up as your system gets more complex you've got so much data to manage we've taken an approach where we're able to service all of our customers out of a single centralized cluster meaning we get an economy of scale each one of our customers gets to work with a basically log management engine that's to scale to our scale rather than the individual customers scale so the older versions of log management had the same kind of complexity challenges you just drew a lot ecommerce as the data types increase so does their complexity is that so the complexity increases and but you also get into just a data scale problem you know suddenly you're generating terabytes of data but you don't you know the you only want to devote a certain budget to the computing resources that are gonna process that data because we can share our processing across all of our customers we we fundamentally changed economics it's a little bit like when you go and run a search and Google thousands literally thousands of servers in that tenth of a second that Google is processing the query 3,000 servers on the Google site may have been involved those aren't your 3,000 servers you know you're sharing those with you know 50 million other people in your data center region but but for a millisecond there those 3,000 servers are all for you and that's that's a big part of how Google is able to give such amazing results so quickly but in still economically yeah economically for them and that's basically on a smaller scale that's what we're doing is you know taking the same hardware and making it all of it available to all of the customers people talk about metrics as the solution to scaling problems is that correct so this is a really interesting question so you know metrics are great you know basically the you know if you look up the definition of a metric it's basically just a measurement on number and you know and it's a great way to boil down you know so I've had 83 million people visit my website today and they did 163 million things in this add mirror and that's you can't make sense of that you can boil it down to you know this is the amount of traffic on the site this was the error rate this was the average response time so these you know these are great it's a great summarization to give you an overall flavor of what's going on the challenge with metrics is that they tend to measure they can be a great way to measure your problems your symptoms sites up it's down it's fast its slow when you want to get to then to the cause of that problem all right exactly why is the site now and I know something's wrong with the database but what's the error message and what you know what's the exact detail here and a metric isn't going to give that to you and in particular when people talk about metrics they tend to have in mind a specific approach to metrics where this flood of events and data very early is distilled down let's count the number of requests measure the average time and then throw away the data and keep the metric that's efficient you know throwing away data means you don't have to pay to manage the data and it gives you this summary but then as soon as you want to drill down you don't have any more data so if you want to look at a different metric one that you didn't set up in advance you can't do it and if you need to go into the the details you can't do an interesting story about that you know when you were at Google you mentioned you the problem statements came from Google but one of things I love about Google is they really kind of nailed the sre model and they clearly decoupled roles you know developers and site reliability engineers who are essentially one-to-many relationship with all the massive hardware and that's a nice operating model it's had a lot of efficiencies was tied together but you guys are kind of saying in a way that does developers use the cloud they become their own sres in a way because this cloud can give them that kind of Google like scale and in smaller ways not like Google size but but that's similar dynamic where there's a lot of compute and a lot of things happening on behalf of the application or the engineers developer as developers become the operator through their role what challenges do they have and what do you see that happening because that's interesting trim because as applications become larger cloud can service them at scale they then become their own sres what yeah well how does that roll out most how do you see that yes I mean and so this is something we see happening at more and more of our customers and one of the implications of that is you have all these people these developers who are now responsible for operations but but they're not special you know they're not that specialist SRE team they're specialists in developing code not in operations they're you know they they minor in operations and and they don't think of it as their real job you know that's the distraction something goes wrong all right they're they're called upon to help fix it they want to get it done as quickly as possible so they can get back to their real job so they're not gonna make the same mental investment in becoming an expert at operations and an expert at the operations tools and the telemetry tools you know they're not gonna be a log management expert on metrics expert um and so they need they need tools that have a gentle learning Kurt have a gentle learning curve and are gonna make it easy for them to get Ian's not really know what they're doing on this side of things but find an answer solve the problem and get back out and that's kind of a concept you guys have of speed to truth exactly so and we mean a couple of things by that sort of most literally we our tool is it's a high performance solution you you hand us your terabytes of log data you ask some question you know what's the trend on this error in this service over the last day and we you know we give you a quick answer Big Data scan through a give you a quick answer but really it's you know that's just part of the overall chain of events which goes from the you know the developer with a problem until they have a solution so they they have to figure out even how to approach the problem what question to ask us you know they have to pose the query and in our interface and so we've done a lot of work to to simplify that learning curve where instead of a complicated query language you can click a button get a graph and then start breaking down that just visually break that down which okay here's the error rate but how does that break down by server or user or whatever dimension and be able to drill down and explore in a you know very kind of straightforward way how would you describe the culture at scaler I mean you guys been around for a while you still growing fast growing startup you haven't done the B round yet got any you guys self-funded it got customers early they pushed you again now 300 plus customers what's the culture like here so you know it's been this has been a fun company to build in part because you know we're into you know the the heart of this company is the engineering team our customers our engineers so you know we're kind of the kind of the same group and that keeps the you know it kind of keeps the inside in the outside very close together and I think that's been a part of the culture we've built is you know we all know why we're building this what it's for you know we use scalar extensively internally but you but even you know even if we weren't we're it's the kind of thing we've used in the past and we're gonna use in the future and so you know I think people are really excited here because you know we understand why and you have an opinion of the future on how it should roll out what's the big problem statement you guys are solving as a company what's it how would you boil that down if asked so by a customer and engineer out there what real problem are you solving that's core problem big problem that's gonna be helping me you know at the end of the day it's giving people the confidence to keep you know building these kind of complicated systems and move quickly because because and this is the business pressure everyone is under you know whatever business you're in it has a digital element and your competitors are in the same you know doing the same thing and they are building these sophisticated systems and they're adding functionality and they're moving quickly you need to be able to do the same thing but it's easy then to get tangled up in this complexity so at the end of the day you know we're giving people the ability to understand those systems and and and the functionality and the software's getting stronger and stronger more complicated with service meshes and micro services as applications start to have these the ability to stand up and tear down services on the fly that's so annoying and they'll even wield more data exact you get more data it gets more complicated actually if you don't mind there's a little story I'd like to tell so hold on just will I clear this out this is going back back to Google and again you know kind of part of the inspiration of you know how he came to build scalar and this doesn't be a story of frustration of you know probably get ourselves into that operation and motivation yep so we were we were working on this project it was building a file system that could tie together Google Docs Google sheets Google Drive Google photos and the black diagram looks kind of like the thing I just erased but there was one particular problem we had that took us months and literally months and months and months to track down you know you'd like to solve a problem in a few minutes or a few hours but this one took months and it had to do with the the indexing system so you have all these files in Google Drive you wanna be able to search and so we had modeled out how we were gonna build this or this search engine you'd think you know Google searches a solve problem but actually so Google web search is four things the whole world can see there's also like Gmail search which is four things that only one person can see so it's lots of separate little indexes those are both solve problems at Google Google Drive is for things a few people can see you share it with your coworker or your whoever and it's actually a very different problem and but we looked at the statistics and we found that the average document our average file was shared with about 1.1 people in other words things were mostly private or maybe you share with one or two people so we said we're just gonna make if something's shared to three people we're just gonna make three copies of it and then now we have just the Gmail problem each copy is for one person and we did the math on how how much work is this going to be to build these indexes and in round numbers we were looking at something like at the time this would be so much larger now but at the time we had maybe one billion documents and files in the system each one was shared to about 1.1 people maybe it was a thousand words long on average and maybe it would change be edited once per day on average so we had about a trillion word updates per day if you multiply all that together and so we allocate it we put in a request and purchase machines to handle that much traffic and we started bringing up the system and immediately collapsed it was completely overloaded and we checked our numbers and we check them again yeah 1.1 about a billion whatever and but then work into the system with just way beyond them and we looked at our metrics so you know measuring the number documents measuring each of these things all the metrics looked right to make a month's long story short these metrics and averages were hiding some funny business there turned out there was this type of use case read of occasional documents that were shared to thousands of people and one of there was a specific example it was the signup sheet for the Google company picnic this is a spreadsheet it was shared to about 5,000 people so it wasn't the whole company but you know a big chunk of Mountain View which meant it was I don't know let's say 20 thousand words long because it had you know the name and a couple other things for each person this is one document but shared to 5,000 people and you know during the period people were signing up maybe it was changing a couple thousand times per day so you multiply out just this document and you get 200 billion word updates for that one document in a day where we're estimating a trillion for the whole earth and so there was something like a hundred documents in this kid Google was hamstringing your own thing we were hamstrung our own thing there were about a hundred examples like this so now we're up to 20 trillion and like that was the whole problem these hundred files and we would have never found that until we got way down into the details of the the logs which in this two months just took month so because we didn't have the tools because we didn't have scaler yeah and I think this is the kind of anomaly you might see with Web Services evolving with micro services which someone has an API interface with some other SAS as apps start to rely on each other this is a new dynamic we're seeing as SLA s are also tied together so the question is whose fault is it exactly you have to whose fault is it and also things get so much more varied now you know again web 1.0 e-commerce you buy a thing you buy a thing that's all the same now you're building a social media site or whatever you've got 8 followers you've got 8 million followers this person has three movies rented on Netflix this person has three thousand movies everything's different and so then you get these funny things hiding yeah you're flying blind if you don't get all the data exposed it's like it's like you know blind person trying to read Braille as we heard earlier see if thanks so much for sharing the insight great story I'm John furry you're here for the q4 innovation day at scalers headquarters thanks for watching

[Music] everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto California I'm John Fourier co-host of the cube were in the cube studios our next guest is Adam Weinstein who's the CEO of a company called cursor so introducing curse it's hot startup growing in the data analytics space doing something unique very innovative around changing the game on data data catalogs but more importantly how data is being used and consumed and also kind of revitalized so Adam welcome to the cube conversation thanks for joining us thanks for having me excited to be here so you guys are a young startup you're in a really good wave right now it's the cloud data the changing nature of data take him into explain what cursor does what's the company what's the focus how big you raise money start the update yeah yeah so I'll give you a quick background on me that sort of leads into that right so spent most of my career as an analyst I might say right so working with data living in data good the bad the ugly right and spent last couple years prior to this at LinkedIn working an analytics team there and one of the challenges we had as an organization was you know finding what was where and who worked on what so when you had literally a thousand people across the company of 10% of the business touching data on a daily basis one thing we struggled with was knowing you know who was working on what what was where what was accurate what was maybe outdated data was getting created it insane velocity was talking earlier little we were creating a trillion events a day inside the business and so you know as an analytics practitioner if you all it became increasingly difficult to get to a quick answer there was no search to go and say okay I want to look for this question as I've been asked before and if so where's the data so you know there was this new space called data cataloging at the time that seemed interesting with the cataloging was really only looking at how do we create like a yellow pages of data not necessarily how do you put it in the workflow of a person that's then taking that and acting on it and then you know feeding that insight that they may have created back into that sort of cataloging feel right so it's all an opportunity to create something new that really supported an analyst and really was you know mindful of how their day-to-day what job existed and you know that was that was cursor right what's the role of the analyst now because one of the things that's challenging the industry was this idea of and you just go back five years data science is the next big thing there are more open jobs in data science than there are people but then this also trend came on around humanizing data science and not requiring you to know hardcourt C++ or Python or having all this wrangling environments doing all this provisioning of stuff to get started to his idea of okay can we level up that and also can he make it easier almost like using Excel yeah I thought of the kind of the trend what's your thought on the current state of the data analyst role no I think that there is a lot of analytics work that maybe five years ago you know was being done and and there was no automation around it and in the next five years it'll get it wouldn't say automated away but I'll be at heavily automated away called 80% of the workload but that 20% use or 20% of data that it's really difficult to understand and may not be able to you know get an answer out of it automatically that that's not you know that needs people and someone that understands the business that's technical enough to go dive into the data and even though that may not be the hundred percent that existed before the amount of like effort that's needed to decipher it I think is is maybe even greater than it used to be because the rate of data getting created is so much greater to is the demand for more solutions how about cursor how big are you guys who's on the team what's the product is it SAS as a software sir give a quick overview now great so we're small or seven person team right now I started the company a little over a year and a half ago you know the idea was to get a solution to market that was lightweight enough that someone could come and download it and try it very quickly without having to go through a long enterprise sale cycle they could get something on their computer literally stand it up in five minutes start putting in a data and having it you know identify and help with their day-to-day job the team is is volunteering - me right so you know there's that we have folks from Salesforce where you know I came from a company called ExactTarget the tails for spot Pandora thumbtack were basically tried to bring people together that if all you know seen companies scale and data scale and and you know bring those insights alongside them so first generation data scale yet the classic you know web scale build it out on open source grow it have things break rebuild it yeah I mean we levered some open source I think you for us right now how do we get something that unique to market as quickly as possible right so there's things that we can use that that are out there that are that are available that are you know especially if they're you know standardized right we'll make use of them but other times well we've built quite a bit of stuff on our own and our solution lives you can't live in the cloud it can also live on premise and actually see a lot of customers deploy it in a hybrid manner so they may have this sort of collaboration layer live in the cloud but it's pointing at data that's both cloud-based and on-prem and even though that data may get migrated to the cloud over the next several years a lot of large enterprises are still so are you guys going to market by selling a product as freemium what's the and is it software they download on-premise is it SAS in the cloud you talk about the go to market and how people engage with the product no it's heavily SAS in the cloud right so I think sort of companies that are in a heavily regulated industry that really haven't yet figured out that cloud model you know our products SAS delivered there is a client that lives on the users local machine and the reason that exists is just for security purposes because data is still often behind the firewall so like you can ask your security guy hey poke a hole in the firewall for this company I've never heard of or you can have a tool that lives on the machine that sort of brokers that in a fall way you guys are flexible we're flexible right you don't necessarily need that right if you deploy it in your own infrastructure obviously there's there's no need to then have that client it can it can handle things so why curse or what are the market drivers for you guys what's driving your business yeah we saw this need errors I felt this needed very acutely LinkedIn which is you know with analysts are getting you know hundreds or thousands of questions as a team on a daily or weekly basis if they're within a large organization how do you address some meaningful portion of those with automation so if a questions been asked before and you've got you know great solutions like a tableau or a look or a thought spot or a power bi like you've got tons of reporting solutions around the business but there's no place to go and say hey where's the answer to this question which one of those is it in is it a Salesforce report is a tableau dashboard and and so you'd ask your friendly analysts who'd be happy to help but like that's taking them away from doing things that are new and so I I kind of became that switchboard unfortunately and so I saw an opportunity to create a solution that would sort of want to meet me and that's that's really obviously index all the questions kind of see what the frequency was the behavior you have the analytics kind of packaging it up in the catalog yeah and taking it a step further I think what are the topics how do you map topics and understand okay there's a fire in Aisle seven and that fire happens to be churn and it's q3 and why is fire on turn and how do we dig into the data behind turn and get some water they made an insight surround it and then you know but yes certainly the step one is being able to direct people on the right to the right place once you get beyond that doe to understanding what our company's data is and what the sort of you know size and shape and characteristics of it are you can actually take it a step further and you know really sort of recommend things which is what we want the alternatives I'm not having like a data catalog and a cursor is to go ask your resident analyst or hope that someone posted something on slack and then you search through slow I mean all kinds of I mean really not up not a viable no it's a hodgepodge of solutions right so one of the things we saw in this is interesting having been at LinkedIn is that you know more and more teams around organizations are hiring analyst talent they may not call it analyst I might call like a citizen data scientist they might call it a researcher they might even call it an engineer like a data engineer a lot of overlapping skills and what the real need is is like someone to be on that team that knows their data inside and out but yet can help answer like you said sort of the ad hoc question that comes up you know every day and and so for that like you know if they can use her sword answer 80% of those or you know as many as possible right we've got it's interesting I do see the same kind of knee-jerk reaction when LinkedIn and and other clients that have a similar profile where they have a lot of data I certainly see that when they get hired what's the kind of what's the marching orders go jump into the data and figure it out is there I mean because this is kind of an evolving new position that's growing very very fast what are they directed to do I mean what's this what's the job responsible it's a great question so I think one of the challenges is how do you onboard people when when there is no place to start right like it's okay here the hundred places we store data go figure it out with Lauren on your own we had built a little bit of a training and onboarding every college they really have start as a PowerPoint deck and then it expanded into some code and some additional training but you know there is no solution for that right I think our internally we had this notion that you know somewhere between three and six months the person was ramped enough to begin to be productive it was like how we how do you measure ROI on a person when you hire them right and that was LinkedIn where I think we were pretty you know we were out here we you know we have you know quite a few nerds right like I think we're pretty good at organizing things relatively speaking I can't imagine what that's like in productivity just write some Python code spit out some Angela is that good enough look yeah I guess then or sink-or-swim kind of mentality and then you know to get someone else in there yeah and the nuance of the data has gotten just because everyone's mindset is record everything right like it becomes harder and harder to actually get a quick answer so gonna give an example like you know looking at data do you know if something's you know test data if it's you know fake data if it's you know if there's something you need to be mindful of like in e-commerce how do you account for returns how do you account for you know fraud how do you account for things that you know if you look at the data and say I just want to add up all my orders and get some total amount of receipts like you would think oh that's my sales for the day but then you forget like there are all these things that if you don't know the data really well that you miss out on and so yeah multiply that by you know large corporates what's the phrasing needle in a stack of needles I'm trying to find it like everything in there so I mean data structures data cleanliness yep these are huge issues huge and you know we will address every single one of them many think we're courser wants to sit is in between a lot of best-of-breed solutions right so we're not building a new Hadoop we think we do a great job of storing data whether you want to call it a lake or you know something beyond a lake right like you know there are plenty of data stores in an organization to do a great job at storing data you know on the opposite end of the spectrum like in terms of visualizing data are actually generating you know insights they're a great bi solution to the market but in between those two sort of you know ends of the spectrum there's a lot of work that gets done and that's what we want to live Adam talked about the innovation and the tech behind cursor and then just you know innovation in general the way you see it and the team sees it because you're on the Front Range of a new trend bleeding edge cutting edge whatever you want to call it certainly you're pushing the envelope yeah yeah what's the core tech for cursor sir where's the innovation lie has it all tie together sure so we have a you know a couple different deployment models but our most common one is we have a you know a cloud layer that enables collaboration so anytime a company is using our product you know metadata we don't ever look at company data that's one promise we've made because we want to work in regulated industries we want to be in places where there are high security environments but we never pushed actual data to the cloud but met about a company's data so you know what's the name of a column you know what's the name of a database who's used often have they used it what dashboard names are using all those kinds of things could push to our cloud you know we use a language called Kotlin which is a java derivative to write most of our back-end code mostly because a lot of legacy data stores or you know designed to interoperate with Java and then you know we have a client component that lives on a user's machine and that's what facilitates a lot of the day-to-day work and we do that just for security purposes because you know because most data is behind a firewall whether it's cloud based or not is you know it gets independent of that it's oftentimes not publicly accessible we can't expect our cloud will be able to get directly to it right whether or in WSG CP or arouser we can work with any of them you know we you know expected the company's security policies requires some sort of you know local connectivity and so that's you know that that client it's actually just a product called electron that wraps you know react front ends are very very common and you know paradigms you know we try to pick packages that we think have some staying power cuz you know every time the wind blows there's a new framework that's you know the latest and greatest so that's that's awesome I talked about the marketplace and customer interactions you have up so you guys are a year and a half into this or so what's the feedback what are you seeing what are you learning what are the key signals from the marketplace that you're seeing that's supporting your company the direction you're going share some anecdotes and data around what you're seeing and hearing so we launched the the first personal product it was last May and what we were trying to do was get something out there in the wild that anybody could try and get value out of without having to go through like it's a sort of long enterprise sale cycle so download it you can use it you can share it with the guy next to you think of like an Evernote or a Google Drive style approach to actually being able to do something and you know so that that had some great success rate when we went out with announcement we announced we'd you know fun with the company we roughly we got 1500 users in the first four months just that we're trying it it was across about four to five hundred companies of four ish five ish users a company and that will let us get a bunch of feedback which was great right some of it was hey we don't like this and other words hey double down here and the key thing that we learned was they're sort of three audiences that we're serving right one is that traditional analysts which you know hopefully that was the case cuz that's where I came from and that was the goal there's also two other audiences I didn't expect as much of one being software engineers and software engineers that you know constantly pulled into you know like you said find the needle on the pile of needles and they don't want that to be their day job but they do want to like do it once and then share it with the rest organization and they don't have a place to do that today so there's a poly there's a great great you know audience of softwares and then the last one is actually business leaders that are the ones asking the questions and they want to find a place that they can go to that you know will answer the majority of them and so the feedback we've gotten is that there's probably three skins of the product that we're gonna have to build ones for that analysts the second a little bit more technical for an engineer and the third is actually very business-friendly which is just you know you don't care about sequel code you don't want Python code you don't want any code at all you just want to know the reports here or if it's not ask Danny that's interesting so the feedback of the marketplace is kind of lays out the workflow stakeholders yeah you know the analysts got to do their job and doesn't want to be coding so they bring the coder and coders once the kid put gets pulled into the project so they're doing their thing and they certainly want to get back to their coding but get pulled in for business reasons the business wants a search and discover yeah kind of all kind of coming together that seems to be the stakeholders it's the stakeholders exactly right I mean I think it's it almost lines up probably engineer analyst business leader right like in the engineer oftentimes is the one that has to go build a pipeline if that's what's needed right and the analyst is the one that consumes from it and then business leaders the one that looks the report every morning and says hope that's bad and really what you're getting down to his classic software development kind of thinking of DevOps and cloud computing which is you don't what you want to automate repetitive tasks and you don't want one offs all right so engineer doesn't want to do one office of constant one-off pipelining yep yep know that you hit the nail on the head like I think you know it like the whole notion of like self-service bi or self-service data like it it's aspirational I think it will be forever right even as you get into AI and yes automated AI and in you know a certain percentage of problems will always be able to be automated but a certain percentage won't be right it was get more point about the reporting is it's only good as the data being reported so you might feel good he's looking at a dashboard with underlying data that sucks and you're like you're dead in the water that's that's a very true thing unfortunately we saw that you know not just did like every company feels that but I talk about the environment and customer base okay as as you worked at linkedin which i think is a very acute example because you know linkedin is one of those magical companies where they really hit the data equation really well obviously it's like a resume for recruiters and it turned into a social network and then they got a treasure trove of data all kinds of gesture data they got great metadata on profiles now they've got a feed so again it's like Facebook analyst this data and so the unknowns probably got came came piling in so it's great proxy for as enterprises and businesses start thinking about how to think about the tsunami of new kinds of data not just grow the data but like hey there's all kinds of new data mobile the touch point gesture day all those kinda stuffs coming together how should they think about setting up a plan so if I'm a customer say hey you know I got a date I got Cuban of you data I got consumption data all these new things and what do I do yeah how do I create a holistic architecture yep take advantage of the different data silos or data sets but yet not screw up the operations of those days yes we can't stop right what's your advice on that cuz it seems to be a core problem it is and one of the things I think I've come to believe is that you know companies will get together and they'll spend months or even years coming up with like an architecture of the future right and and I don't believe that you can come up you know and sit in a room no matter how many days it takes and come up with something that's gonna be you know all things to all people like you're gonna basically need solutions that are nimble enough to be to be you know installed and get value very very quickly even if just a small amount of value and then grow with you over time so of course that's sort of the way we're set up right like you know you can come have a small team so take take on marketing operations D and they work with advertising data they're dealing with how do you get you know a lead and convert them into a sale they can use you know a product like cursor or I think any other good product in the marketplace should be you know you designed it this way where you you nibble on it you get some value and then you deploy it to other teams once you've learned how to how to best do that I think the like Big Bang approach of like hey this is our solution that's gonna you know work for everyone is really tough okay take an area we can get time to value quicker right and is it like a data Lake of model where you just kind of throw some data into one corpus or so we can have a base data doesn't actually live ever within cursor right we may you know if you're actually operating on it say you're an analyst you're writing some Python you're writing some sequel like yes I mean you for the sake of seeing in the UI it will temporarily be cached and encrypted there but we never actually store any company data we just point to it and when in in what we've built are these really intelligent connectors they can go mine what's there so if we're looking at a tableau instance we can say okay here all the dashboards there here all the code behind those dashboards here the table the data stores those dashboards are hitting here's are often they're consumed Oh every Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. 250 people in New York hit this dashboard and how do we learn from that and then hopefully make recommendations on it like what happens when data underlying a dashboard changes every Monday morning and all of a sudden it doesn't should that be a red flag somewhere that you know we should tell somebody that hey there's probably an issue with this so we're trying to really learn from things that are already there today as opposed to having you create new things what's next what's going on now how you going forward what's the key objectives for you guys yeah so I think there's two things really stage business like you can get sort of pulled into this hey we want to be a generic solution for everything what we found is that there probably a couple industries that are really they feel this problem really acutely and some of its financial services actually retail surprisingly just given you know dispersion of data inside retail so we've had pretty good success in both of those areas and I think our next step will be to actually probably formalize some you know sort of play books if you will and continue down that path and then integrations are that are the next thing right like we integrate with a bunch of stuff but we definitely won't agree with everything and there's you know an infinite amount of tools out there right so we want to continue to you know partner with companies that have you know Best of Breed solutions work with them to create deep integrations we're not trying to displace them what is trying to you know complement them and help drive you know the traffic to them that's looking for what's in there and so like that integration work is really never-ending why should the company keep up the old way to bring in the new way what's your what's your yeah I don't think they're actually having to give up the old way I think it's you know there are some things that you're gonna naturally be transitioning off of right there's there's always gonna be a bi solution that transitions from you know legacy to new whatever legacy may be defined as and as you're doing that there's there's there's this missing ingredient I feel like how do I track what's where when you could say that that was sort of solved by data catalog so I think the old data catalog is kind of dead and I think what's really happening is that you need something that works with you know where you are and every day whether you're an analyst a business leader or an engineer right and they can follow you along not disrupt you from your day-to-day workflow and also be intelligent about what's what what's where and that's sort of what we're trying to build well great to chat thanks for coming in spending the time talking about cursor congratulations on the venture thanks looking forward to seeing that be round coming soon yeah thanks for having you very much it's coming soon be round a round a round seed round and yeah it will definitely be on the on the near term horizon and Weinstein CEO cursor serial entrepreneur here inside the cube innovating around the data this is the new model this is what's going on it's the new wave that they're ride I'm John furry with the cube thanks for watching [Music]

>> Live, from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering, Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington or, as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the Senior Director of Product Management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. >> Hi, how's it goin? >> Great. This is, been a very buzzy morning, for Jeff and I here on this side. Lot's of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so... >> Big growth in just a year. There's a, I think, Mark Mader, your CEO, shared some sats this morning. There are 1100 companies represented here customers. >> Correct. >> From twenty countries, there are more than fifty customer speakers, which is, I think there's no more validating voice, than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, was looking at, you guys are partners with, some of your competitors. One of things I wanted to understand is, where do you have integrations with technology, versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two, and how does is work >> Yeah. >> In a Smartsheet world. >> You know, I think, the integrations really are, where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So, maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or, I want to be able to connect to Google Drive, or 03 Secure, One Drive document, in those native stores. So, that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves, is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization, and I need data to flow between those tools. >> Like a Sales Force. >> Like a Sales Force, or a JEAR, or something like that. Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there, when something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet, or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems. Cause, those are the systems of record, that my company cares about. >> So, a connection is a much bigger step in integration? >> They're just different. >> Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interactions. So, things like Drive and Box and Dropbox, and Slack and Teams and, stuff like that. Or, the web content, which we just announced. We want to be able to embed a Youtube video in a dashboard. That's not integrations, it's not, there's no data flowing back and forth, it's just a link, right? >> Got it, thank you. >> Yeah. >> So, lot of customer's we have, I think fifty customer's presenting, which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's, (laughs), >> Yeah. >> Awfully large. So, just some of the all chatter here. You've been here for a couple of day now, you guys had some early training yesterday. What is some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customer's. Kind of, what's the buzz on some of the new offerings, and what are you hearing, amongst the constituent here? >> I mean, it's always, you know, this is only our second year. But the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away. By just the big list of things that we shipped, this week. And, as I was reflecting, like, I don't remember doing all that much. But then, when you see it all on one big slide, with everything listed out, it's incredible. So, it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product... >> Yes. >> Session, and we're really excited to have shipped, the multi-assign to feature, which has been our number one customer request for a while. But, it's not a, game-changing feature. Whereas, I think some of the Automation Rules ,and Updates there, and Workflow Builder, are really. People are going to go back and it's going to to change the way that they work. And, so people are really excited about that. But, really excited about Dynamic View. And being able to really, taylor the information that is shared across their organization. >> The word collaboration, like symbionic or bi-directional collaboration, popped into my mind. When Gene Pharaoh, your SVP of Product, who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience. In that, number of times, you mentioned, the audience broke into applause. And, it probably feels pretty good. Like, yes, we're listening to you, we're doing this. Enabling, them to have technology that allows them to collaborate with and amongst teams and functions within an organization. But, you're also taking their feedback, directly and collaborating with customer's, to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had, Margo Visitacion on from Forrester. And she was talking about the collaborative work management CW as an emerging market. With respect to collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I can be a licensed user, and share it with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for Smartsheet? >> Well, you know, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative where you can comment on them. Google Doc, and that's great. But, I think where Smaresheet really excels, is really in this free collaborator model. That's not bounded by your particular organization or your team. And it really allows you to create, to spread, and create connections across customer's and vendors and other orgs within your team. And, this is where you're starting to see this these sort of step function changes in these organizations. Where, you know, you see this Office Depot example. And, he talks about, you know, taking a workflow in their organization they, going from, you know, four to six weeks, down to twenty-four hours. And, enabling people who are putting in budget request, to take action on that request, the next day. And, those are the kinds of things, that are going to fundamentally change those businesses. And so, that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful. You can't get that kind of compression in time. Unless, you can really span those traditional business hours. >> So Robin, one of the great things that happens always is, with tech companies is the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important. You get an ecosystem, lot of stuff going on, but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? >> It's always, >> Correct >> Application centric, right. I got a problem, I've got to fix it. At the same time, you guys, you do have a platform. Meaning, you can go across a lot of different applications. So, when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform. Priority, in terms of more of, kind of a general purpose underly, versus and app priority, like you said, multi, how do you call... >> Multi-assignment. Yeah. >> Multi-assignment, you assign two people to the (laughs). To the no correct product management protocol, but everybody wants it, cause it's the real world. How do you kind of prioritize that? How do yo kind of look at the world when you're deciding, what are you going to roll out next, what are you going to roll out next, ware are you going to roll out next? >> It starts and ends with having conversations with real people. We've taken lots of data and we have enhancement request and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning, actually, was less than 3% of all answered request in the last couple of years. But, it's our number one request. And so, it sort of. >> Oh, Wait, wait wait. So it was less than 3%. >> Of all enhancement request. >> But it was number one? >> But it's our number one. >> So you've got a giant laundry list. >> Giant laundry list of things, right. So, we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually, have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers, and dedicated user experience. People that are going out, we're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them and we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases. Because, there're so many different ways people use the product. There not enough people asking for one thing. >> Right. >> They're all asking for slightly different things. So, we really have to dig in and have a real, qualitative conversation with them. To understand, and bring that back and say okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves, all of these problems in a compelling way. >> Well, it's definitely more than 3% of the people cheer. When, when that. (laughs) >> Yes. >> When the feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other, kind of (mumbles), that you've got to wrestle with is, kind of a low code, no code, we want to be for everybody, yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So, again, that's kind of a delicate, balancing act as well. Cause, you want to let everyone have access to be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it, pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those. >> Well we... >> Priorities. >> We just try to hide as much of that as possible. You know, Smartsheets always been this tool, where it's like, it sort of looks like a spreadsheet, and it sort of looks like project management. But it's got this underlying flexibility built into it. We don't force you to, you know, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there. If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD. Whereas, a lot of purpose built applications, their like, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format, or it doesn't work. We've always had this, sort of, flexibility and complexity trade off. The trade off is, if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt Chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more (mumbles) than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so, we've always sort of danced this line, with making the tool super flexible and assume the users know what they're doing. When they're interacting withhe tool we assume they an intention and they're trinna do something. And, we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that, sort of, plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do, is like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers. And we put stuff out there, well in advance in releasing it. In a situation like this, we announced a bunch a capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And, I think that's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board, than any feature I've seen at this company. But, it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever build, as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right, by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sit in a room and go, oh, we know that perfect solution to workflow management. >> Right. >> Most of our customer's don't even necessarily, use the term workflow. >> And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say. It says words and actions. You know? And little things with words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement. It's when this happens, do this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this. To try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. >> Right. >> You can't avoid it, but you know. >> So, in hiding it, the last thing which your going to do, going forward is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in the field, is for you to leverage that under the covers. To hide. >> Absolutely. >> The nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer. To help suggest the right path. So, that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap. Integrating those types of capabilities, underneath the covers. >> Yeah and, there's been a lot of, we've have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot Company back in January. And, that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. We feel that we have a lot of really good information. But, at the same time, there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI. And, the reality is, that relies on huge data sets. And it relies on a lot of analysis. And that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customer's data, security data privacy very seriously. And we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens, then say a consumer product. That's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data. And you don't really have a lot of recourse, other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it. But we want to enable you, to turn these types of features on. So, we need to look at more of like an off-end model, where a customer can say oh, if I'm a big enterprise user at Smartsheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users, knowing that that information is going to stay in our, is going to comply with our data governance, and our data privacy rules. That our IT team puts forward. >> So the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, Hiding it, (mumbles). I'm curious, when you walk into a customer. Cause here we are in Bellevue, we're not in Vegas, But, we're neighors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced Teams, about eighteen months, or so, ago. You partner with both, you compete, but you, also, you're competing with Teams. When you walk into a customer and an enterprise, likely has a mixture of, tons of different software appications, right. But they probably have, 360, Office 365, Para Bi, Excel... Why would a customer, who has such a familiarity with, say a Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus, well we'll just extend our Microsoft expertese and bring in something like Teams? >> Yeah. >> I'm just curious, what...You've seen in that? >> Well, you know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of, orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And, there's a lot of tools out there where, you're having conversations and tools out there where you're creating content, and there's not a lot of tools out there, that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together. In an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of, Gene will, you'll sometimes here hims say, use this term, shared fabric. The Smartsheet, really provides this shared fabric, that ties a bunch of these tool together. And we really, we want to partner with all these people, because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You talk to some customer, they're like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of ten apps. And, you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later, then they'll be like, I love Smartsheet, it allows me to work with all the tools that I've already got. Very different, and they just have to different coperate goals and objectives there. And so, I think that the reason people like Smartsheet, is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about things. It's going to say look, oh, if you want to use, if you want to us Teams for your communications vehicle, and One Drive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed a PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet, great. We want that to be the case. We do that internally, right, we use all those. If you look at us internally, we're just like every other mordern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using. And it's different from team to team and department to department. So, it's all about just embracing the reality, that as modern business and modern application, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. >> So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1100 companies represented here, at this event. 2,000 people or so, fifty plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind, whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> Yeah, no. I'm trinna think of a good. I don't know that I have a good standout example. I think that we hear little tidbits of that from everyone. And it's not, it's a very common theme. So, I don't know that. It's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, I hear things, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this. Or, I'm going to now pull, integrate with this tool because, you've added this. So, you sort of take some and give some, on the same sentence almost. >> Yeah. You can do both. >> Yeah. >> Well Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time. We're excited to be here. This is our first Smartsheet event. And we have some customers coming up, so looking forward to hearing some more these cases in action. >> Great, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smartsheet Engage, in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back, with our next guest. (tech music) (tech music) (tech music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live in San Francisco for Google Cloud's conference Next 18, #GoogleNext18. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Faizan Buzdar, Senior Director at Box, box.com, collaborative file sharing in the Cloud. No stranger to Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys have a relationship with Google. First talk about the relationship with Google, and you have some breakouts you're doing on machine learning, which I want to dig into, but. Take a step back. Take a minute to explain the relationship between Box and Google Cloud. >> So Box has partnered Google for a few years now, and we have actually two areas of key, sort of, collaboration. One is around the Google Productivity Suite that was actually announced last year. But we actually demoed it for the first time in public today. Where, if you look at a bunch of customers, like about 60% of the Fortune 500, that chose Box as their secure content layer. These guys can now go into Box and say, "Create a new Google doc, Google spreadsheet, Google slide." And it will open up. It will fire up the Google editors. You can do, get all of the benefit of the rich editing, collaboration, but your content is long-term stored in Box. So it does not leave Box. So from a security and compliance layer, if you've chosen Box, you now get to use all of the power of the Google collaboration and >> It's Google Drive inside Google Box, but natively, you guys have the control for that backend, so the user experience feels native. >> Yeah, so in this case it doesn't touch Google Drive. It's basically, it never leaves Box. So that's the key benefit if you're a Box customer. >> That's awesome. That's great for the user. Great for you guys. That's awesome. Okay, so take a step back now. What's your role there? What do you do? >> So I'm Senior Director for Product Management, and I basically look after two areas. One is our sort of best of breed integration strategies, such as the one with Google Suite or Gmail. And then the second area is machine learning, especially as machine learning relates to specific business process problems in the Enterprise. So that's one of the areas that I look after. >> So how do you use data? You talked about the integration. How are you using data to solve some of those business process problems? Maybe give some examples, and tie it back into the Google Cloud. >> So, for example, so for us, we announced a product called Box Skills last year at BoxWorks. And we're going to talk about it next month at BoxWorks, too. So, the strategy there was we will bring the best of breed machine learning to apply to your content in Box, and we will take care of all of the piping. So, I keep hearing machine learning is the new electricity. But if you talk to CIOs, it's a weird kind of electricity for them because it actually feels like I have to uproot all of my appliances in factory, and take it to where the electricity is. It doesn't feel like electricity came to my factory, right? Or appliances or whatever. So, our job, we looked at it, and we said, "Hey, we have probably one of the biggest, most valuable repositories of content, Enterprise content. How do we enable it so that companies can use that without worrying about that?" So Box Skills actually has two components to it. One is what we would call, sort of, skills that are readily available out of the box. So as an example, today we are in beta with Google Vision. And the way that the admin turns that on is literally, he goes into his admin panel and he just turns on two check boxes, chooses which folders to apply it to, maybe apply it to all of the images in the Enterprise. So if you're a marketing company, now all of your images start to show these tags, which were basically returned by Google machine learning. But to the end user, it's still Box, they're still looking at their images, it still has all of those permissioning, it's just that now, we have the capability for metadata, for humans to add metadata manually, now that metadata is being added by machine learning. But in terms of adoption for the Enterprise, we made it super simple. And then, the framework also enables you to connect with any sort of best of breed machine learning. And we look at it, if you were to sort of make a, look at it as two axis, number of users that would use it, and the amount of business value that it brings. There are some things which are horizontal, like, say, the basic Google Vision, basic Google Video, basic Google Audio. Everybody would like an audio transcript, maybe. Everybody wants some data from their images. And that's something that a bunch of users will benefit from, but it might not be immense change in business process. And then there's another example, we'll say you're a ride sharing company, and you have to scan 50,000 driving licenses in every city that you go into. And currently you have that process where people submit their photos, and then people manually add that metadata. And if now you apply Google Vision to it, and you're extracting the metadata out of that, I actually love scenarios like this. Like, enterprises often ask me like where we should start. Where we should start in terms of applying machine learning, and my sort of candid advice is don't start with curing cancer. Start with something where there is some manual data being added. It's being added at scale. And take those scenarios, such as this driving license example, and now apply machine learning to that, so where previously it would take a month for you to get the data entered for 50,000 driving licenses, now you can do it in 50 minutes. And, um, yeah. >> And what's the quality impact? I mean, presumably the machines are going to get it right more often. >> Yeah. >> But do you have any data you can share with regard to that? >> So that's, actually, that's such an awesome question. And I'll connect it to my sort of previous advice to enterprises, which is that's why I love these processes because these processes have exception handling built into them already. So humans have at minimum a 5% error rate. Sometimes a 30% error rate. So, when we looked at, you know, captioned videos and TV from like 10 years ago, we could clearly see errors in that, which humans had transcribed, right? So, most of these manual processes at scale already have two processes built in, data entry, data validation and exception handling. So the reason that I love replacing the data entry portion is that machine learning is never 100%, but to the validation process, it still looks like kind of the same thing. You still saved all of your money. Not just money, but you saved sort of the time to market. And that's also what Box does, right? Because if you use Box in combination with Google Cloud, we actually, one of the things that I didn't talk about before, we looked at all of these machine learning providers, and we came up with standard JSON formats of how to represent machine learning output. So, as an example, you could imagine that getting machine learning applied in audio is a different problem than getting machine learning applied in video, is a different problem than getting machine learning applied from images. So we actually created these visual cards, which are developer components. And you can just get, put data in that JSON format, we will take care of the end user interactivity. So as an example, if it's a video, and you have topics. Now when you click on a topic, you see a timeline, which you didn't in images because there was no timeline. >> You matched the JSON configuration for the user expectation experience. >> Exactly. So now if you're in Enterprise and you're trying to turn that on, you're now, you could already see the content preview, and now you can also see the machine learning output, but it's also interactive. So if you, if you were recording this video, and you were like, "When did he say BoxWorks?" You click on that little timeline, and you will be able to jump to those portions in the timeline. >> That's awesome. I mean, you guys doing some great work. What's next? Final question, what are you guys going to do next? You got a lot to dig in. You got the AI, machine learning, store with Google. You got the Skills with Box to merge them together. What's next? >> So I think for us, the machine learning thing is just starting, so it's sort of, you'll learn more at BoxWorks. But for us I think the biggest thing there is how do we enable companies to experience machine learning faster? Which is why when we look at this two axis image audio video, we enable organizations to experience that quickly. And it actually is like an introduction to the drug because the guy who has to process insurance claims or the car damage photos, or the drone photos, he looks at that Google Vision output, and then he says, "Oh, if I can get these ties, maybe I can get these specialized business process ties." And then now he's looking at AutoML, announced today, and, you know, the adoption of that really, really >> Autonomous driving, machine learning. It's going to happen. Great stuff. Real quick question for you. When is BoxWorks? I don't think it's on our schedule. >> Next month, yeah. >> I think it's August 28th or 29th. It's coming up, yeah, yeah. >> So I'm going to go check. I don't think theCUBE is scheduled to be there, but I'm going to make a note. Follow up. >> We'd love to have you. Check with Jeff Frick on that. I think we were talking about covering the event. It's going to be local in San Francisco area? >> Uh, Moscone, yeah. >> Moscone, okay great. Well, thanks for coming on. Machine learning, certainly the future. You got auto drive, machine learning, all kinds of new stuff happening. Machine learning changing integrations, changing software, changing operations, and building better benefits, expectations for users. Box doing a great job. Congratulations on the work you're doing. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for coming on. More CUBE coverage after the short break. We're going to wrap up day one. We got a special guest. Stay with us. One more interview, and then we got all day tomorrow. Be right back. (upbeat music)