>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCube, covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back. We're reaching towards the end of theCube's coverage of AWS Summit in New York City. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Corey Quinn. Behind us, they're starting to roll out the beer trucks, but before we get there, we're really excited to have on the program first-time guest, Dmitry Traytel, who's the CTO of Timehop. Dmitry, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so Timehop, for our audience that's not familiar with it, I'm familiar with it on social media, is the "oh hey, here's your memory from a year ago, three years ago, five years ago." It's interesting always to know. I know I go to a lot of events, so it's like "Groundhog Day" to me. It's like, "oh hey, AWS New York City, I remember two years ago where I saw this person, this person, this person." We capture lots of videos and photos. We should probably figure out some partnership to bring some of those memories back when we do it, but >> Dmitry: Exactly. give us a little bit for those of us that might not know Timehop. Seems like there's more than just kind of the one thing. What's the company do? >> So, Timehop, the consumer product, the mobile app, is essentially a place for you to celebrate your digital memories, right? We are the nostalgia company, where you can look back on what you did on this day, and the kind of things that you posted on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. And relive those things, share them with your friends, and also look at what's on your phone, in your local device. Stuff you haven't shared. So, the thousand photos you took of your kid at year one, you'll see a year later, and the year after that, and you get to relive those moments. >> Okay, very cool. So, boy there must be some good metadata underneath there. You talk about the content creation that goes on with most people. It's nice that in 2019, I don't really think too much about the thousands of photos that I have in my library. Boy, I know people that are pretty noisy on social media, and boy, you'd think their feed would be overwhelmed looking back on certain days, especially the guy sitting next to me. If it's a keynote day at a conference, Corey would be like, "oh boy, did I say those things?" Is it just, I get all of it, or is there some intelligence behind that? Give us a little bit of insight. What happens? >> Sure, there's definitely some intelligence behind it, a random link you might've shared out probably won't make it, but photos and videos certainly do. And any sort of text posts, tweet threads, Facebook statuses that you might've added, particularly those from 10 plus years ago, those are the most interesting ones, because people used Facebook in a very different way back then, then they do these days. Some people used it more, some less, and we try to feature especially those that have the most engagement, we try to surface those ahead of everything else. >> Yeah, I remember back in the old days of Facebook, where it was like, "Stu is," and then it was my thing there, it's like wow. The engagement that you'd have, and photos were all very different on all of these platforms before Facebook realized, "oh hey, photos are a pretty important thing there." So, you're the CTO. Bring us a little bit inside. I'm sure architecture is something you're talking about at a show like this. I have to believe AWS is a piece, if not a major piece, of what goes behind the scenes. So, bring us inside the technology a little bit. >> Absolutely. AWS is the bedrock upon which everything is built. We run over 200 instances on EC2. We're probably running about 20 different back-end services across around 15 to 20 different AWS services, and we're doing all of this with four back-end engineers. We're a very small company. One of those engineers, Mark, he's here, he spoke earlier today about how we were able to leverage AWS to essentially spin-off a whole new line of business that's not a consumer product, but a B2B offering for the ad industry. And that's kind of what we're announcing and talking about this week. We launched a new website about it, we have some early partners that we're working with, and this is the sort of thing that saved us as a company, and allowed us to become financially independent. Amazon was the bedrock of our ability to do that without increasing staff at all. >> So, what is the capability story that AWS unlocked as a part of that, or Cloud to the larger point. We don't necessarily need to be vendor-specific, despite the room we're sitting in. What was it that empowered for you that unlocked, I guess, the opportunity? >> There were a few things. Skill ability for one thing. We were able to go from 115, 120 instances, up to 200 very quickly when our clients needed us to, because a lot of them are larger than Timehop is, in terms of user base and access. The second one would've been global reach. We expanded from one availability zone, or rather one region, out to seven, because some of them are international, or have an international user base that requires us to be global. And then beyond that, just the breadth of services, like Elasticsearch, Kinesis Firehose. All of those things that let us connect the data from what we import from social media services, over to the user themselves, when they send push notifications or show the memories. The breadth of services that Amazon as a Cloud provider offers, means we don't have to write this stuff ourselves. We can just leverage what's already there, and we can connect all those dots, and deploy quickly. >> Yeah, the undifferentiated heavy lifting is the phrase that they're in love with to describe that. I always used to frame it slightly differently, as far as you're spending time locally, solving a global problem, where the things that the infrastructure provider can do at massive scale, it just makes sense. There's no competitive value for anyone anymore, and being able to go down to the data center, and replace a failing hard drive. So, why not make that someone who can get economies and scale out of it? And focus on >> Exactly. the way they're doing things that drive business value. But, that said, you said this awhile as well, and then the slide deck yet again today for the keynote, in the future, the only code you write is business value. And then, in a very tiny font that no one except me could read was probably in JavaScript, but that's neither here nor there. How close are we to that future, based upon what you're seeing? >> Close. I know we demonstrated the CDK, and the demonstration was in TypeScript, so we're one step away from the JavaScript world. Everything that we do, we do in Go, obviously other than some of the descriptor files that allow us to spin-off that infrastructure. But, we're incredibly close to being there, and Go is so close to the hardware itself, that I'm assuming Amazon will eventually support Go for that kind of CDK as well. I know they already do for Lambda, and that's relatively recent. I think it'll take a lot of companies a long time to get there, because there's a lot of processes than some of the larger enterprise words. We're fairly small, and we can pivot very quickly, as we've proven with the ad server called Nimbus. But, we're not that far away, at least at Timehop. >> So Dmitry, we live in the enterprise world a lot, and I have to imagine that there's some companies that would be like, "why am I going to work with this consumer social media company?" So, is being on a public Cloud, and specifically AWS, does that help give credibility behind the new services that you're offering? >> I think so. I think from a reliability and dependability standpoint, when we tell a mobile app publisher that they can trust us to run their ads for them, they know because we're on AWS that that's always going to be there. And, because we monetize for them, we end up having to depend on that reliability in order to promise them four nines above time. And, the fact that they can keep a revenue stream going at all times to keep the lights on and the doors open. >> And it's funny we're having this conversation today, when Twitter was hard down globally for an hour. So, nothing is going to be impenetrable. Nothing's going to stay up forever. I don't believe in making fun of companies for their down time, but at some point, past a certain point, it's okay. If there is a region-wide outage in AWS, for example, on that day, the internet's not going to be working super great for an awful lot of people. Depending on what your business model is, and what your use case is, maybe that's acceptable. Maybe in the case of my nonsense, the world is better off if it's not on the internet for that hour or two. But, it is a difference, I think, in the business modeling, between life-critical things, versus things that people use as entertainment. It feels like the B2B story that you're telling is somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum. >> It certainly can be. One of the reasons we did go global is to prevent that sort of thing from happening. So, everything has a backup somewhere in a different hemisphere, which is awesome. But, depending on the kind of partner that we're working with, some of them are for looking through memories like us. Some of them are for reading short stories on the internet, which you can pause on that for an hour if Amazon goes down. For some others, they might be more mission-critical, like posting portfolios or resumes, and the free version might show ads. And in that case, you might be at a job interview, and you don't need that to go down. Now, the ad side can take a minute, and I'm sure whoever's depending on it has other fires to fight at the time. But for us, we have an obligation to all of our partners to make sure that we deliver on what we promised to them, and the same way that Amazon has to us. >> So Dmitry, what learnings can you share spinning off this new line of business, moving forward, working with Amazon there. What would you be talking to your peers about as to, is there anything you would've done a little bit differently, or now that you've gone through this, that you might recommend to them? >> I would say, build in-house what you can, if nobody else is doing it better than you can. I kind of wish that we had built Nimbus a lot earlier in our life cycle, because as soon as we built it, we prototyped it over a weekend, and we learned immediately that it was going to work better than any third-party ad-tech that we could've tried. At the same time, always evaluate what you're doing against your competition. Run those A/B tests, run them properly, measure, instrument everything, and in the end, understand where your dependencies are on third-parties. And eliminate them as much as possible. Again, we're so small that we do leverage as much third-party code. The best kind of code is the code you didn't have to write in the first place. But, in certain cases, you end up bringing a lot of value to the table by writing something proprietary, and kind of the way Amazon did with AWS when they built Rotor for themselves, and started offering it to everybody else. We're doing the same with Nimbus, where we wrote this Cloud-based ad platform, and we realized that it could help us. We're now realizing that it could help everybody else in our position. >> Okay. >> So Dmitry, we want to give you the final word here. Coming to an Amazon event like this, what's it mean to Timehop? What do you personally, you and the team, get out of it? >> It means a lot. It meant a lot to my colleague Mark to be able to speak today, to share with people some of our journey. Amazon is one of the partners that we work with, even on the ad side, 'cause that is a line of business Amazon has. And, we get to announce Nimbus as a service on adsbynimbus.com, with a website we just launched this week, to share with the world that Timehop is not just the consumer Timehop product. But, we are also this ad-tech company at this point that is growing very quickly, that is hiring. And, we want to continue to work with Amazon, and all of our other partners in order to scale that business. >> All right, well Dmitry, congratulations on the launch of the new product. We know a year from now what you'll be looking back at from this event. Apologies for that, but thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you too. >> All right. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We're at the end now of our day of coverage here from AWS New York City Summit for 2019. As always, go to thecube.net for all of the content here. We're at lots of AWS shows, many of the other Cloud infrastructure, big-data, AI, IOT, you name it. If there's a show out there with great information, great content, please contact us. Thank you as always for watching theCube.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE. We are live in Washington, D.C. at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is their big event, this is their reinvent for the public sector, but it's technically a summit. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Atkinson who is the CEO of JHC Technologies, small business partner doing huge deals. Great to have you on, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, you guys have a lot of experience working on the front lines with some really big deployments, implementations with cloud, working with some agencies. So, first question right out of the gate is, is this really happening, this cloud thing? >> Yeah absolutely, you know, we started the company in 2010 and one of my partners and I worked on recovery.gov as a cloud engineer and it was just something that, at the time, no one knew what the cloud was and we really looked at it as an opportunity when we started the business. This is where things are going to go. We didn't realize when we started the company, though, as a small business, you can't just get started and say, yeah, we know the cloud and can help you do these things. You have to have past performance, you have to have relationships. And so, it's taken so long for the government to get around to the point where they're really just starting now to put a lot of larger production workloads into the cloud. And it's been a long journey where you've had, it's like Groundhog Day, you have the same conversation over and over again with different people and different organizations about security, about compliance, about a variety of issues, how you procure it and everyone has the same questions, has the same problems and it's so much about education. >> Yeah, and saving time and there's a lot of upfront medicine you got to take. Like you said, if you're new, it's like a jungle, oh, wait a minute, I thought it was going to be easier. What was the key motivational point, how did you keep going, what was the driving force? Was it Amazon tailwind for you, was it more of... >> Our relationship with Amazon Web Services has been great. They've been a tremendous supporter of us. And, as a small business, you know, they really relied on their partners to be a force multiplier for them in the public sector space, And that's been tremendous for us. They've really allowed us to play... >> And that's true, that's actually, they're doing that. >> Absolutely, and not necessarily the case as much on the commercial side where they're more apt to deal directly with the customers. But, they really relied on the partner network, partner ecosystem, on the public sector space to really help them drive things forward. So, for us, to have that relationship has been tremendous value for us. But also, we do things and allow those to broaden the group and what we have from a vehicles perspective, small business set of size that allow us to do business with organizations that AWS can't. >> Well I think I'm going to explain what you guys do, great commentary on the cloud and your opportunity. What do you guys do for services, what kind of services are you providing, and can you take a minute to talk about the company. >> Sure, we started the company in 2010, really it was my two partners and I, we'd been consultants in the IT industry, and worked in the beltway, and felt like we should do a company that was different than everyone else, more of a commercial style focused entity, where it's about the technology and how do you bring that disruptive technology to government and business so that they can take advantage of it as opposed to being overwhelmed by it, and the cloud is really that underlying core technology that really affects, it's really a paradigm shift for how organizations do business. So for us, that's the area we wanted to get into, and we did a lot around mobility, a lot around collaboration, virtualization, virtual apps, virtual desktops, but really at the end of the day, the cloud-- >> Are you guys writing software, are you an integrator? >> Well, we're really, it was about building a company that technologists, who are in this area, there's some great smart people who work in the D.C. area, people will, in the Beltway, you'll sit at a desk, doing a job, for five years, your company will lose that contract to some other company, you'll stay in the same seat, you'll go work for a different company for the next five years. Somebody else will win the contract and you'll stay in that same seat. So, you're really working for the agency and not really working for the company that you're employed by, and we really wanted to build something that was more commercial-esque where it was about what do you bring to me as an organization, how do I put you in a position that you're challenged by the workload that's in front of you that you get to do different things and that you're more upwardly mobile as opposed to just being a butt in a seat, as with a lot of, what work they call it. >> So this morning, Theresa showed a slide, I think I counted 60 consulting partners. Now you guys have achieved a premier consulting partners status, you're not like a everyday name, like some of the big guys that are on there, so how did you achieve that, how do you differentiate, in that sea of really world-class consultants, and how do you achieve that premier status with AWS? >> It's been a lot of work for us. There are some organizations that have gotten it just based off their size. AWS needs to have those larger partners. But we, I think we really did earn it, we've met every requirement to get to that status and for us, it's a huge badge of honor that we've achieved that, and it's a lot of hard work for a small company. We're coming up on 70 employees, so we're not 10,000, 20,000 employee environment, so for us to achieve that and have the level of sales that we do in the space, it's certainly not easy, it's really being singularly focused on the vision of how we want to run the company and sticking to that, even though the market may try to push you other directions, and even your customers say we're not ready for cloud, you have to really stick to it and be focused on that being your core business. >> You talked about moving production workloads to the cloud earlier. I wonder if you could help us sort of squint through that because when you talk to what Andy Jassy calls the Old Guard, John, right, they all say, people aren't moving production workloads to the cloud. When you talk to AWS, you just referenced, production workloads are going into the cloud. I like to talk to consultants that are at least quasi-independent. What's really happening there? What kind of production workloads are going into the cloud? >> I think we're just now hitting that part of the market, where we're starting to see more of the large scale production workloads being moved to the cloud. We moved our first organization, 2500 user environment, that we moved to the cloud three, four years ago, so for us, being able to do that kind of workload to be all in on the cloud, isn't something that we shied away from. But when you started to deal with a lot of these organizations, we have prime contracts with NOAA, which has massive data, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and working with the USGS, some of these agencies have massive data, they're just weren't really built as an organization to be able to adopt that cloud technology, so we really looked at it a couple years ago, and made a bit of a conscious effort to help to push them as an organization to help them understand the structure of how they need to really build their organization. We're very much an I till shop, how you build an IT process, but even with that, it doesn't really take in innovative technology. The speed at which AWS innovates and produces new technology, new features, is something that I don't think that anyone has seen before in an IT realm, so, building an organization that's able to understand that, to be able to implement that technology and be in a compliant manner to make it available to their application owners and their users is something that you really have to have the right organizational structure to be able to achieve. >> And why is that not a problem for AWS customers, your customers, because if a legacy IT vendor, first of all, they can't innovate that fast, but if they were to innovate that fast, they tend to move at a much slower speed, the IT organizations that buy from them. Why is that pace of innovation not problematic for your customers? >> I think it is, and again I think, our challenge has been to help them to build the type of an organization that can respond to that, knowing that there's one constant in IT technology today, which is change. Whatever's here today is going to be different tomorrow. There's going to be new features, and you have to be able to build an organization that isn't just we're going to build a data center, build a bunch of firewalls around it, put our data there and we're going to be safe. Today's IT landscape moves too quickly. You really have to build, look to the way it's done in the commercial enterprises, the way a Netflix builds really to be destructive and how they build their technology, knowing it's going to fail, and look to do that same type of implementation, help build your security within a federal organization. >> You're going to change the culture and process, everything all at once with new tech, so I want to ask you the question that's in everyone's mind, mine included, what's your observation of the current state of affairs with respect to the cloud native and cloud because you've got people who might jump on it, say I love this, some'll be fearful, you're there, what's the new aha moment that people are having, can you share some insight into (laughs) what's going on in the mind and the actual implementations, what's changed, what's the most important story that we should be telling? >> We're right now at that point. I think I've heard reports less than 7% of the data center workloads have been moved to infrastructures of service. I think that's probably even on the high side, 7%, but you're now starting to get all of the work that we've done, a lot of these organizations is they've been pilots, proof of concepts, really dipping their toe, large organizations just dipping their toe in the water. We're getting to the point now where these organizations are approaching their primary applications for their organization saying we're ready to move that too. For us it's a lot, it's been so much education so much work to try to help get them there, so for us we're just excited to actually see it come to fruition. >> In 2010, around the time you started your company, I remember, John, VM Ware, at the time Paul Moritz was saying any app, any workload will run on VM Ware, and there were a lot of skeptics, and they've largely achieved that, remember they used to talk about the software mainframe. You know with the cloud, similar kind of narrative. Now it's a little different now, let's take the example of Oracle in particular, you're seeing Oracle use for example its pricing power to really try to force people to use its own cloud jacking up prices if they want to use it on Amazon. What do you tell customers that are basically reliant on that Oracle database? Should they move that into the cloud, should they try to figure out okay let's go to Aurora or Redshift, or some other better, what's the right strategy? >> So I mean we're a technology agnostic, generally speaking-- >> Right that's why I can trust your answer here. >> But we really do lean to where what we call best in breed technologies. So AWS has been something that we've been all in on AWS since 2011, 2012. We made that a conscious effort and they've really done some things I think as part of their business model that we really appreciate as a partner, and as a customer. We've always had our infrastructure from day one on AWS. Also our infrastructure on Office 365. We understand where to focus those efforts. When it comes to an organization like an Oracle, I don't want to necessarily disparage them, but they're not necessarily focused on bringing the best value to their customers. A lot of times it seems that it's about what's right for the bottom line of their stockholders and what drives up the price of their stock as opposed to what's the best solution I could put forward to really be great at database. I think if you look at it, AWS has already built a roadmap to where you can get 70-80% of your database applications to be migrated to an open software database model, and you can massively reduce, so many of these large organizations, a large portion of their IT spend is on those Oracle and those specialty applications. >> It's the licenses too. >> So if you can drop that cost by 60, 70%. What we always tell those organizations, don't just throw that money away, take those savings, roll that into making a better application. Use that 60, 70% savings and fix how you deliver. Make your data more mobile, make it more available to your userbase. >> Invest in analytics. >> Invest back in how you're doing, using Redshift or whatever other analytics, to get better results. >> Awesome, Craig, great insight, congratulations on your success at JHC Technologies, you're the founder and CEO of, congratulations on all the hard work, you got to just, I don't want to say do your time, I've heard that quoted in the government sector, you got to do your time, time's shrinking with the cloud, so you've got a great opportunity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, for having me. >> You're watching theCUBE here live in Washington, D.C. I'm John Furrier, stay with us, day one here is continuing, be right back. (synth music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a Cube conversation in our Palo Alto studio, the conference season hasn't got to full swing yet, so we can have a little bit more relaxed atmosphere here in the studio and we're really excited, as part of our continuing coverage for the Data Makes Possible sponsored by Western Digital, looking at cool applications, really the impact of data and analytics, ultimately it gets stored usually on a Western Digital hard drive some place, and this is a great segment. Who doesn't like talking about sports, and football, and advanced analytics? And we're really excited, I have John Pollard here, he is the VP of Business Development for Zebra Sports, John, great to see you. >> Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so before we jump into the fun stuff, just a little bit of background on Zebra Sports and Zebra Technologies. >> Okay well, first, Zebra Technologies is a publicly traded company, we started in the late 1960s, and really what we do is we track enterprise assets in industries typically like healthcare, retail, travel and logistics, and transportation. And what we've done is take that heritage and bring that over into the world of sports, starting four years ago with our relationship with the NFL as the official player tracking technology. >> It's such a great story of an old-line company, right? based in Illinois-- >> Yeah, Lincolnshire. >> Outside of Chicago, right? RFID tags, and inventory management, and all this kind of old-school stuff. But then to take that into this really dynamic world, A, of sports, but even more, advanced analytics, which is relatively new. And we've been at it for a few years, but what a great move by the company to go into this space. How did they choose to do that? >> Well it was an opportunity that just came to them through an RFP, the NFL had investigated different technologies to track players including optical and a GPS-based technologies, and now of course with Zebra, our location and technologies are based on RFID. And so we just took the heritage and our capabilities of really working at the edge of enterprises in those traditional industries from transactional moments, to inventory control moments, to analytics at the end, and took that model and ported it over to football, and it's turned out to be a very good relationship for us in a couple of ways. We've matured as a sports business over the four years, we've developed more opportunities to take our solutions, not just in-game but moving them into the practice facilities for NFL teams, but it's also opened up the aperture for other industries to now appreciate how we can track minute types of information, like players moving around on the football field, and translating it into usable information. >> So, for the people that aren't familiar, they can do a little homework. But basically you have a little tag, a little sensor, that goes onto the shoulder pads, right? >> There's two chips. >> Two chips, and from that you can tell where that player is all the time and how they move, how they fast they move, acceleration and all the type of stuff, right? >> Correct, we put two chips inside of the shoulder pads for down linemen, or people who play with their hands on the ground, we put a third chip between the shoulder blades. Those chips communicate with receiver boxes that have been installed across the perimeter or around the perimeter of a stadium, and they blink 12 times per second. And that does tell you who's on the field, where they are on the field, and in proximity to other players on the field. And once the play starts itself, we can see how fast they're going, we can calculate change of direction, acceleration and deceleration metrics, we can also see, as you know with football, interesting information like separation from a wide receiver in defensive back, which is critical when you're evaluating players' capabilities. >> So, this started about four years ago, right? >> Yes, we started our relationship with the league in-game, four years ago. >> Okay, so I'd just love to kind of hear your take on how the evolution of the introduction of this data was received by the league, received by the teams, something they'd never had before, right? Kind of a look and feel and you can look at film, but not to the degree and the tightness of tolerances that you guys are able to deliver. >> Well, like any new technology and information resource, it takes time to first of all determine what you want to do with that information, you have an idea when you start, and then it evolves over time. And so what we started with was tagging the players themselves and during the time, what we've really enjoyed in working with the NFL is that the league has to be very pragmatic and thoughtful when introducing new technologies and information. So they studied and researched the information to determine how much of this information do they share with the clubs, how much do they share with the fans and the media, and then what type of information sharing, what does that mean in terms of impact of the integrity of the game and fair competition. So, for the first two years it was more of a research and testing type of process, and starting in 2016 you started to see more of an acceleration of that data being shared with the clubs. Each club would receive their own data for in-game, and then we would start to see some of that trickle out through the NFL's Next Gen Stats brand banner on their NFL.com site. And so then we start to see more of that and then what I think we've really seen pick up pace certainly in 2017 is more utilization of this information from a media perspective. We're seeing it more integrated into the broadcasts themselves, so you have like kind of a live tracking set of information that keeps you contextually involved in the game. >> Right. And you were involved in advanced analytics before you joined Zebra, so you've been kind of in this advanced stats world for a while. So how did it change when you actually had a real-time sensor on people's bodies? >> Yeah it does feel a bit like Groundhog Day, right? I started more in the stats and advanced analytics when I worked for STATS LLC. In 2007, I developed a piece of software for the New Orleans Saints that they used to track observational statistics to game video. And it was a similar type of experience in starting in 2009 and introducing that to teams where it took about three or four years where teams started to feel like that new information resource was not a nice to have but a need to have, a premium ingredient that they could use for game planning, and then player evaluation, and also the technology could provide them some efficiencies. We're seeing that now with the tracking data. We just returned from the NFL Combine a couple weeks ago, and what I felt in all the conversations that we had with clubs was that there was a high level of appreciation and a lot of interest in how tracking data can help facilitate their traditional scouting and player evaluation processes, the technology itself how can it make the teams more efficient in evaluating players and developing game plans, so there's a lot of excitement. We've kind of hit that tipping point, if I may, where there's general acceptance and excitement about the data and then it's incumbent upon us as a partner with the league and with the teams for our practice clients to teach them how to use the analytics and statistics effectively. >> So I'm just curious, some of the specific data points that you've seen evolve over time and also the uses. I think you were talking about a little bit off camera that originally it was really more the training staff and it was really more kind of the health of the player. Then I would imagine it evolved to now you can actually see what's going on in terms of better analysis, but I would imagine it's going to evolve where coaches are getting that feedback in real-time on a per-play basis and are making in-game adjustments based on this real-time data. >> Well technically that's feasible today but then there's the rules of engagement with the league itself, and so the teams themselves, and the coaches, and the sideline aren't seeing this tracking data live, whether it be in the booth or on the sidelines. Now in a practice environment, that's what teams are using our system for. With inside of three seconds they're seeing real-time information show up about players during practice. Let's take an example, a player during practice who's coming back from injury. You might want to monitor their output during the week as they come back and they make sure that they're ready for the game on a week to week basis. Trainers are now able to see that information and take that over to a position coach or a head coach and make them aware of the performance of the player during practice. And I think sometimes people think with tracking data it's all about managing in the health of the player and making sure they don't overwork. Where really, the antithesis of that is you can actually also identify players who aren't necessarily reaching their maximum output that will help them build throughout the week from peak performance during a game. And so a lot of teams like to say okay, I have a wide receiver, I know their max miles per hour, is, let's use an example, 20.5 miles an hour. He hasn't hit his max yet during the entire week, so let's get him into some drills and some sessions, where he can start hitting that max so that we reduce the potential for injury on game day. >> Right, another area that probably a lot of people would never think is you also put sensors on the refs. So you know not only where the refs are, but are they in the right positions technically and kind of from a best practices to make the calls for the areas that they're trying to cover. >> Right. >> There's got to be, was their a union pushback on this type of stuff? I mean there's got to be some interesting kind of dynamics going on. >> Yeah as far as the referees, I know that referees are tagged and the NFL uses that information and correlates that with the play calls themselves. We're not involved in that process but I know they're utilizing the information. In addition to the referees I should add, we also have a tag in the ball itself. >> [Jeff] That's right. >> 2017 season was the first year that we had every single game had a tagged ball. Now that tagged information in the ball was not shared with the clubs yet, the league is still researching the information, like they did with the players' stuff. A couple years of research, then they decide to distribute that to the teams and the media. So we are tracking a lot of assets, we also have tags in the first down markers and the pylons and I'll just cut to the chase, there are people who will say okay, does that mean you can use these chips and this technology to identify first down marks or when a ball might break the plane for a potential touchdown? Technically you can do that, and that's something the league may be researching, but right now that's not part of our charter with them. >> Right, so I'm just curious about the conversations about the data and the use of the data. 'Cause as you said there's a lot of raw data, and there's kind of governance issues and rules of engagement, and then there's also what types of analytics get applied on top of that data, and then of course also it's about context, what's the context of the analytics? So I wonder if you could speak to the kind of the evolution of that process, what were people looking at when you first introduced this four years ago, and how has it moved over time in terms of adding new analytics on top of that data set? >> That's one of my favorite topics to talk about, when we first started with the league and engaging teams for the practice solution or providing them analytics, they in essence got a large raw data file of XY coordinates, you can imagine (laughs) it was a gigantic hard drive-- >> Even better, XY coordinates. >> And put it into a spreadsheet and go. There was some of that early on and really what we had to do through the power of software, is develop and application platform that would help teams manage and organize this data appropriately, develop the appropriate reports, or interesting reports and analysis. And over the last two or three years I think we've really found our stride at Zebra in providing solutions to go along with the capabilities of the technology itself. So at first it was strength and conditioning coaches, plowing through this information in great detail or analytics staffs, and what we've seen over the last 24 months is director of analytics now, personnel staff, coaches as well, a broadening group of people inside of a football organization start to use this data because the software itself allows them to do so. I'll give an example, instead of just tabular information, and charts and graphs, we now take the data and we can plot them into a play field schematic, which as you know as we talked off camera you're very familiar with football, that just automates the process of what teams do today manually, is develop play cards so they can do self-study and advanced scouting techniques. That's all automated today, and not only that, it's animated because we have the tracking information and we can merge that to game video. So we're just trying to make the tools with the software more functional so everybody in the organization can utilize it beyond strength and conditioning, which is important, but now we're broadening the aperture and appealing to everybody in the organization. >> Do you do, I can just see you can do play development too, if you plug in everybody's speeds and feeds, you have a certain duration of time, you can probably AB test all types of routes, and timing on drops and now you know how hard the guy throws the ball to come up with a pretty wide array of options, I would imagine within the time window. >> Exactly, a couple of examples I could give, when we meet with teams we have every player, let's say on a team and we know all the routes they ran during an entire season. So you can imagine on a visualization tool, you can imagine, it's like a spaghetti chart of different routes and then you start breaking down the scenarios of context like we talked about earlier, it's third down, it's in the red zone, it's receptions. And so that becomes a smaller set of lines that you see on the chart. I'll tell you Jeff, when we start meeting with teams at the Combine and we start showing them their X or a primary receiver, or their slot receiver tendencies visually, they start leaning forward a bit, oh my goodness, we spend way too much time on the same route when we're targeting for touch down passes. Or we're right-handed too much, we have to change that up. That's the most gratifying thing, is that you're taking a picture and you're really illuminating and those coaches who intrinsically know that, but once they see a visual cue, it validates something in their head that either they have to change or evolve something in their game plan or their practice regimen. >> Well, that's what I was going to ask, and you lead right into it is, what are some of the things that get the old-school person or the people that just don't get that, they don't get it, they don't have the time, they don't believe it, or maybe believe it but they don't have the time, they're afraid to understand. What are some of those kind of light bulb moments when they go okay, I get it, as you said, most of the time if they're smart, it's going to be kind of a validation of something they've already felt, but they've never actually had the data in front of them. >> Right, that's exactly right. So that, the first thing is just quantifying, providing a quantifiable empirical set of evidence to support what they intrinsically know as professional evaluators or coaches. So we always say that they data itself and the technology isn't meant to be a silver bullet. It's now a new premium ingredient that can help support the processes that existed in the past and hopefully provide some efficiency. And so that's the first thing, I think the visual, the example I showed about the wide receiver tendencies when they're thrown to in the red zone, that always gets people leaning forward a little bit. Also with running backs, third down in three plus yards, or third down in short situations, and my right-hander to left-hander when I'm on a certain hash. Again the visualization just allows them to really mark something in their head-- >> Just in the phase. >> Where it makes them really understand. Another example that's interesting is players who play on special teams who are also wide receivers, so as we know, linebackers and tight ends tend to be, and quarterbacks tend to be involved in special teams. Well is there an effect when they've covered kick offs and punts, a large amount of those in a game, did that affect them on side a ball play, for instance? Think about Julian Edelman two Superbowls ago, he played 93 snaps against the Atlanta Falcons. and when you look at the route-- >> [Jeff] He played 93 snaps? >> Yeah, between special, because it went into overtime, right? It was an offensive game-- >> And he's on all the-- >> He played a lot of snaps, he played 93 snaps. how does that affect his route integrity? Not only the types and quality of the route, but the depth and speed he gets to those points, those change over time. So this type of information can give the experts just a little bit more information to find that edge. And I have a great mentor of mine, I have to bring him up, Gill Brant, former VP of Personnel to Dallas Cowboys, with Tex Schramm and Tom Landry, he looks at this type of information and he says, what would a team pay for one more victory? >> So as we know, all coaches and professional organizations and college are looking for an edge, and if we can provide that with our technology through efficiencies and some type of support information resource then we're doing our job. >> I just wanted to, before I let you go, just the human factors on that. I mean, football coaches are notoriously crazy workers and, right, you can always watch more films. So now you're adding a whole new category of data and information. How's that being received on their side? Is it, are they going to have to put new staff and resources against this? I mean, there's only so many hours in a day and I can't help but think of the second tier or third tier coaches who are going to be on the hook for going through this. Or can you automate so much of it so it's not necessarily this additional burden that they have to take on? 'Cause I would imagine if the Cowboys are doing it, the Eagles got to do it, the Giants got to do it, and the Washington Redskins got to do it, right? >> Right, right, well each team as you might expect, their cultures are different. And I would say two or three years ago you started to see more teams hire literally by title, director of analytics, or director of football information, instead of sharing that responsibility between two or three people that already existed in the organization. So that staffing I think occurred a couple, two or three years ago or over the last two or three years. This becomes another element for those staffs to work with. But also along that process over the last two or three years is, really, I always try to say in talking to teams and I'll be on the road again here soon talking to clubs after pro days conclude, is forget about staffs and analytics and that idea. Do you want to be information driven, and do you want to be efficient? And that's something everybody can grasp onto, whether you're the strength and conditioning coach, personnel staff or scout, or a position coach, or a head coach, or a coordinator. So we try to be information driven, and then that seems to ease the process of people thinking I have to hire more people. What I really need to do is ask my people that are already in place to maybe be more curious about this information, and if we're going to invest in a resource that can help support them and make them more efficient, make sure we leverage it. And so that's our process that we work with, it varies by team, some teams have large, large expansive staffs. That doesn't necessarily mean, in my opinion the most effective staff is using information. Sometimes it's the organizations that run very lean with a few set of people, but very focused and moving in one direction. >> I love it, data for efficiency, right? In God we trust, everybody else bring data. One of my favorite lines that we hear over and over and over at these shows. >> In fact, I might borrow that next week. >> You could take that one, alright. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> Well John, thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by and participating in this Western Digital program, because it is all about the data and it is about efficiency, so it's not necessarily trying to kill people with more tools, but help them be better. >> That's what we're trying to do, I appreciate the opportunity and love to talk to you more. >> Absolutely, well hopefully we'll see you again. He's John Pollard, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)