>> Narrator: theCUBE presents KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain and KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, and we're continuing the conversation with builders, startups, large enterprise, customers, small customers, the whole community. Just got a interesting stat earlier in the day, 7.1 million community members in the CNCF foundation, and we're been interacting with 7,500 of them. But we're bringing the signal, separating the signal from the noise. We have a Kube alum who's been on both sides of the table, Omri Gazitt co-founder and CEO of Aserto. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much, Keith. >> So identity management, you know it's, it's critical need to the enterprise cloud native but there's plenty of solutions on the market, what unique problem are you solving you know how are you solving the problem in a unique way that we don't go to some of the big named vendors in this space? >> Yeah, we, my co-founder and I, were veterans of large clouds. We helped start Azure at Microsoft. We in fact helped build what became Azure Active Directory and those solutions entirely focus on one part, the "I" part, the identity part of the problem. They completely ignore the access management part and you could argue that is a larger problem and it is far from solved. So we completely agree. Identity management, a problem that's been solved over the last 15 years and solved well by great companies like Microsoft and Okta and Auth0. And we're best friends with them. We basically pick up where they leave off. We do the access management part. >> So the access management part, what specifically, what what am I getting when I engage with your team and your product? >> Yep. So basically I, authentication is all about proving that you are, who you say you are through a password or something else, you know, biometric. And that part is done. We basically pick up where that leaves off. So once you know who you are, once you've proven to a system that you are Keith. Now, what can Keith do? What roles, what permissions, , what operations can Keith perform on what resources? That's a harder problem. And that's the problem that we focus on. So for example, if you have a SaaS app - let's say you're building, you know an applicant tracking system and you Keith are an owner of some job descriptions and you have some candidates, but  somebody else has a different set of candidates and an admin, maybe has visibility at everything. How do you build that system? That actually is a pretty hard problem. And how do you build it to enterprise grade? That's where we come in. We basically have an end-to-end solution that gives you cloud native, end-to-end authorization that's built to enterprise grade. >> So when I think of this capability, I can't help but to think of AWS IAM and I'm in AWS IAM, I get my security role, and now I can assign to an EC2 instance, the ability to access some other AWS service or identity. So role based identity - are you giving me that type of capability? >> For everything else. So AWS IAM for AWS resources right? Google IAM for Google Resources. Azure has a similar system but they're all infrastructure focused. And what we're trying to do is bring that to your domain specific resources, right? So you, as an application builder, you have the things that correspond  you're not doing VMs, you're not doing storage arrays, you're not doing networks. You have higher level constructs, right. You know, like I said, if you're building Lever or Greenhouse, you have candidates and jobs and reports and things like that. So we basically allow you to create this fine grained access control, but for your own objects. >> So where's the boundaries? Let's say that I have a container or microservice that is a service and it has a role, it has an identity on my network. And there is a cloud based service, let's say a, a cloud SQL. And I want to do authentication across the two or can I only have the boundaries within my private infrastructure or does that boundary extend to the public cloud as well? >> It extends everywhere, right. So basically, you know, if you think about all the different hops here, you know, Zero Trust is the, the rage, right? And that encourages defense in depth. So you have an access proxy that does some type of authorization. Then you have an API Gateway that has a little bit more context, a little bit more authorization. For us we live inside of the application. So the application calls us, we give you a sidecar, you deploy it right next to your application. It gives you, you know, sub-millisecond response time, a hundred percent availability, all the authorization decisions are done with full context about who the user is and what resource they're trying to access. And so our sidecar will give you a response back, allow or deny, and then downstream from us, you could basically talk to another microservice. And at that point you're doing machine identities, right? So you may have a different authorization policy for those, only you know these particular services, are allowed to talk to these other services. And so we solve both the, you know authorization for machine identities as well as authorization for human identities. >> All right Omri are you ready for Q Clock? >> I sure am! >> Oh, I like the energy. >> Bring it on. >> You know, there have been many before you, they have failed the test. >> All right. I mean, they brought, they've brought the energy. You have the energy but do you have the ability to survive the clock? >> I'm going to do my best. >> So I'm going to say start the clock. I haven't said, said start cube clock yet, but when I say it, you have 60 seconds. There's no start overs. There's no repeats. The pressure's on, you ready? >> All right. I'm ready. >> Ready? Start Cube Clock. >> All right. If you are a VP of Engineering or a CTO or run a security or engineering organization what are you doing for roles and permissions? You're building it on your own, right? >> Tough times never last, tough people always do, and you're, you're delaying, you're letting me break you up. >> All right, I'm not going to let you break me up. Great. So you don't want to build it yourself. You don't want to build it yourself. Why would you spend engineering time? Why would you spend, you know, the- >> You deserve a seat at the table. >> No but look, why would you ever spend your time building something that is not differentiating your application? Instead use something like Aserto, just dear God use something, use a developer API. Don't build it yourself because what are you doing? You're reinventing the wheel, you know. You want to get out of the business of reinventing the wheel. >> Crawl before you walk. (Omri laughs) >> You think so? I think, I think you have to go you know, make sure that you spend your engineering resources on the things that matter and the things that matter are. >> Time up. >> Yep. >> You know what? You threw three great curve balls and struck me out. Great job. (Omri laughs) You, you, you just knocked it out the park. Great job Omri, I appreciate you coming in, stopping by, sharing your company's journey about authorization and authorization services and getting kind of this cloud capability, the cloud native. >> I appreciate your time as well Keith, always a pleasure. >> From Valencia Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (soft instrumental music)

>>Mm. Every CEO is trying to get hybrid, right? Most people, they've been working remotely for the better part of two years now, and we've spent a lot of time and thought on how to accommodate remote workers and providing tools to make them feel connected and more productive. We've also built remote and hybrid models into our hiring ethos, making it a feature, not a drawback. But what about the underlying infrastructure that powers hybrid work? How is that evolving to be as flexible, scalable and cost effective with the lowest latency possible? Recent survey data from Enterprise Technology Research shows that 56% of executives believe productivity continues to improve, with only 14% citing recent declines in productivity. 26% say it's holding steady. The question is, how do we maintain those positives and minimise the negatives? And what role does the network and underlying infrastructure play in evolving new work models? Welcome to the network powering hybrid work on the Cube, made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be your host today. In this programme, you're gonna hear from experts that are going to discuss and introduce new innovations that are specifically designed to energise and support hybrid work. My first guest is Lawrence Wang, who's the vice president of product management at Cisco. And we're going to dig into WiFi six e and what it all means to the future of work. Lawrence, welcome. Good to see you. >>Hey, great to be here. Dave. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today. >>You bet. Okay. My first big question is what's the big rush? It feels like we were just talking about the shift from y 55 to WiFi six just a few years ago. What's going on there? >>Yeah. I mean, you're right, right. We assets at Cisco. We introduced our first WiFi six access points back in 2019, and one of the things that we've seen is a tremendous rate of adoption moving from WiFi five to WiFi six over the past couple of years. In fact, it's one of our fastest transitions that we've seen between wireless standards. And a lot of the drivers, you know, for that were really just about, you know, making sure that there's better WiFi experiences for, you know, people in the office making sure that they can support. You know more of that. Have you got a set of clients? Reduce the amount of congestion. And over time, what we've seen is that migration has been tremendous. But it also means that we're starting to reach that capacity where five gigahertz is starting to become more crowded and so many of our customers are looking at. Well, what can I actually do to continue to expand? You know that you know that traffic, the number of lanes that I can actually support for wireless traffic And for many of them, they're looking to WiFi succeed as the answer to help them do that simply because six gigahertz as part of that standard introduces a whole new spectrum or a whole new highway that we can get client devices as long as >>well, So it sounds like you're thinking about a different role for offices and campuses going forward. So what your listeners expect to see kind of in the in the near term and the midterm and even a long term near term when they get back into the office and in the long term, how do you see this playing out? >>Yeah, that's an interesting question, right When you think about this context of hybrid work, work is not a place that you go to, but it's really a place that you could be where ultimately you are trying to get work done. It really is reporting that quality of experience, no matter where you choose to work from. And, yes, while the campus is going to evolve and play a different role, it is a critical part of that hybrid work future. And the way I see it here is that the role of the campus is going to change over time. It's not going to be the same that we saw prior to two years ago, and I think for many of our customers about what does it mean to invest in that infrastructure for us to continue to adapt, to support the ways that their employees that are expected or want to work? And a big part of that is investing in infrastructure to support new ways of working? >>Well, you know, Lawrence, I mean, I've personally been lucky because we go to studio and I've been able to come into the office since the pandemic started, but I know a lot of people. They're really excited to get back, to work in person and face to face events and the like. And I know others that say, You know what? I'm moving and I'm always gonna work remotely. I'll never work for another company that forces me to go in the office again. So this sounds like a tall order for it organisations to accommodate that diversity. How do you think they will be able to plan for and manage all this new complexity? >>Yeah. I mean, I think the reality is, you know, talent. It doesn't know any zip codes, right? And I think one of the boons of being able to support a more distributed workforce is to be able to bring in great talent no matter where they're based out of. And I think for I t team. So I think the interesting thing will be what are the drivers to bring people back into the office right? There has to be a purpose that's more meaningful than simply It's a place that I go to every single day. You know, what are the tools and applications I bring in to help support collaboration, And I think important part of making this a great experience in the context of hybrid work is that you do have to make the office a meaningful place for employees to gather, but also making sure that as you connect people around the world as part of the global employee workforce that they still have an equitable experience. So for it teams, it is about thinking about how do I actually manage this infrastructure that's more distributed? But I start to invest in my central campuses and at the same time making sure that I have great quality experiences for everyone. Unified security policies, visibility across all the clients and applications. But there's also increasing pressure from their its core constituency. We know that people are asking more of it. They want them to support you, use cases like safe return office that they want to help you contributor to global corporate initiatives like driving towards zero greenhouse gas emissions. So any number of these activities or initiatives is putting more pressure on teams. >>Interesting. I mean, so I gotta ask you, please don't hate me for this question. But was this just luck on Cisco's part that you got solutions ready for this sort of hybrid work model so quickly. In other words, was it something that you were maybe planning that was going to take years for the market to be ready for And it just got compressed because of the pandemic? Or was this architecture that allows you to be flexible? How did you land here and what appears to be a pretty strong position? >>Yeah, I mean, at Cisco, I think one of the things that we think about is, you know, it's always amazing when you look back at something and then you write the story. But I think if we're being honest with ourselves, if you look at what happened from where we were two years ago to where we are today, including our competitors and customers, I think that no one could have predicted the world that we're operating and living in. And so for us, the question becomes, How did we help our customers support this transition? And ultimately it's about investing in architectures and platforms that are flexible, that allows our customers support use cases that they were thinking of, as well as ones that they never anticipated, and I think that's really the exciting thing about what we've been doing here as part of our hybrid work investments now areas that, you know, I think we double down on and in some ways accelerated because of this. When I think about you know what our customers care about when they start bringing people back into the office. It is about some of these emerging use cases, whether it's more dynamic, way finding, be able to understand the density or the air quality of a given environment. And these are some of the technologies that we have embedded in some of our new, you know, WiFi 60 access points along with our management infrastructure era. So I think that it gives our customers and partners a lot more flexibility than what they had before to really adapt to the changing needs of today and even beyond. >>Well, that's something we've certainly learned throughout the pandemic. Is the ability to be flexible is fundamental? I gotta ask you, what's your preferred mode of work? You go back into the office, you're gonna stay remote. >>Great question. You know, I have come to appreciate, you know, working from home. You know, over the past couple years, got to spend a little more time with my kids at lunch. But I will say I am looking forward to the day when I can have the voice of being back in the office a few days a week as well as I continue to be remote as well as continued to visit my customers and partners all over this great country in the world. So looking forward to that, >>so you're a true hybrid. I guess I'm a hybrid, too. I like being in the office, but I'm travelling a lot when the world returns to the new abnormal anyway. Large. Thanks so much for kicking off the programme with me. Now in a minute, we're going to dig into the core of the network and understand the role it plays in supporting new and flexible work models. You're watching the network powering hybrid work made possible by Cisco on the Cube, your leader in global enterprise tech coverage. Mhm. Yeah,

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM, >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube, had a great line up here talking sustainability. Kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains, career great to see you and wayne both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you. What's driving? IBMS investment sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>you know, johN what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM is 100 10 year old company. We've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation, that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental, our stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. C. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense. It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson that IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error. How is that evolved in today's focus? Because you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have uh A I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So, you know, these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that. And that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they say, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. We supported the Paris agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council, which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term >>action. That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna. We leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you've got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're in the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right? Is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, all of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and the context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those needs. >>You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because this waste involved is also disruption to business a security issues. But when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne? Because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right? So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network, where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you onboard them and off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A. I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours, he uses maximum to really focus on the maintenance and sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection, actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging ai to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed um for our clients. >>It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, It's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh, how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now, thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation, which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, NGos and Academia. Some examples. There's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zar in that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment programs science policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'm just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under Call for Code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much, Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being in what we like to turn clients zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing, that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative. Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>From around the globe, it's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube. We had a great line up here talking sustainability, kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains going great to see you and wayne, both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you what's driving? IBMS investment in sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>You know, jOHn what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM 110 year old company, we've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's a long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental a stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. E. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence, really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense, It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson, the IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error, how has that evolved in today's focus? Because, you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have a I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials, waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that and that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they said, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. He supported the Paris Agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term action. >>That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna we leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're on the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, All of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those >>needs. You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about on the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because there's waste involved is also disruption to business, a security issues, but when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne, because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right. So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you on board in an off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours he uses maximum too rarely focus on the maintaining sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection. Actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging AI to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed for our >>clients. It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, it's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with Korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, Ngos and Academia. Some examples, there's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zarin that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment Programs science Policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of Environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'll just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under call for code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's, that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer, both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being and what we like to turn client zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative, Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Mm. Mhm.