>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our exclusive coverage of, in Puerto, Rico for Blockchain Unbound. This is the industry conference room. People around the world from Silicon Valley, New York, and around the glove, coming to Puerto, Rico to talk about Blockchain decentralized internet cryptocurrency and really the future of society and global economic value creation of course our continuing coverage is focusing La Sierra for 2018. Our next guest is Mark Jeffery, CEO and Co-Founder of a company called Guardian Circle. Welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So you guys are doing something really interesting, so we, first of all, we like to geek out, as Fred say, "We're alpha-geeks." But we love IoT, cloud computing. You're doing something really interesting right now with Blockchain and this new decentralized internet around something of a critical infrastructure nature. Take a minute to talk about Guardian Circle's product, the coin, token that you're doing, and what it all means. >> So, Guardium is the token, the company's called Guardian Circle. Together they comprise global decentralized emergency response. So, six billion people on earth have no 911, There's just no magic number you can call, right? So hold that in your mind for a second. The other one billion of us, we do have 911, but it's not very good, it hasn't been really updated since the 60's. If you call 911 and if you're lucky enough to not get a busy signal, they have no idea where you are. Your location information is not transmitted. Which Uber can find you more easily than 911. Which is just insane, but that is the way it is. So, nevermind, so throw all that out >> So 911 is broken? 911 is broken. >> Yep If you have it, it's broken, and most people don't have it, so throw the whole thing out the window, let's start over. What would we build today? The way the world should work is whenever you're in trouble, no matter where you are on the globe, all you should have to do is press a button, that button sends an alert up to the Cloud, the Cloud looks down and sees what people and resources are already nearby, and then activates, coordinates, pushes all that help to you as quickly as possible. So, ten people in three minutes. That's what were, that's our-- >> So a couple things going on. So to me when you say, what should we start from scratch, put in my little operating system design network solutions add on, all kind of rolled into one as a stable, fault-tolerant, resilient, robust, always on network. >> Yes. >> Database that is fully interoperable and updated in real time of every number, every location, every persons capability to understand the discovery and resolution of a number. >> Yeah, so >> So that sounds like the internet. That sounds like the internet. >> (laughs) Well that's a little bit, probably further than we're going right now, but yes. Ultimately, you're correct. That would be the ultimate-- >> So no legacy baggage, 1960's Telco. >> No >> We're talking about immobile, in Africa for instance, there's more mobile penetration than anything else. That's what they got. >> Yes. >> So every country is their own sovereign kind of architecture? >> Yes >> Are you guys looking at it from a global perspective or regional? >> Global, so we think that, I mean, this is, this thing should be mobile native, location aware, and the alert should go out to multiple parties. And the phone number is your identifier in this system, but it's effectively an IP based system, really, so you're right. We have to balance that against privacies, so you get to decide who is on your alert grid, right? So you have to emphatically say, yes my friends, family and neighbors, and the subscription services, and if available, these official services. >> So Blockchain can solve the immutability privacy issue? >> Yes. >> The decentralized nature of network effect is a dynamic that people look for in good deals or good architecture. That's in place. >> Yes. >> People have a social graph, interest graphs connections. So the analog world is going digital. I mean, the old days was, is there a doctor in the house? But you were limited by how far you could yell. >> Right. >> So here you're saying literally, if you connect properly, the users in charge are their, their data. >> Yeah. >> They can dictate what they want to connect to, where, is that kind of how it works, is it peer to peer? >> Yeah, it's sort of peer to peer. I mean, a lot of people think, a lot of people mishear me a little bit and think that when you press that button, the alert goes out to everybody that's nearby, right? So total strangers that may or may not be trustworthy are suddenly coming, that's not what I'm saying. That is not what we're doing because we don't want to accidentally summon Jack the Ripper, like that's, you don't want to make a bad situation worse, right? So, you explicitly invite people into your protection grid, we call them guardians, hence, Guardian Circle, that would be your guardian circle. And you can have an unlimited number of them, so six, 6000, however many friends you have. Then we will also feature paid subscription services where you will be able to subscribe to, like, your local EMT collective, or your local license and bonded arms security, or if you're in a remote corner of the world, you could subscribe to the guy with a truck, who could run you down the mountain, right? When you're having medical problems. So it's going to vary depending on where you are in the world. We're also working with the Women's Safety Xprize, we're a partner, we're the backend of that prize. Which is an IoT device contest to make a panic button device, right? So when you push the panic button, what happens? It goes into Guardian Circle. >> So how does token economics fit into this? So I'm getting why it's tokenizable, How does it work mechanically? Do I buy tokens for safety? Is it like, I mean, take us through some of the use cases. >> Yeah sure, so there's five different ways in which we use the token. The first one is, obviously, to create the, to buy emergency response subscriptions. Now we're going to allow you, or provide a way for you to, as a consumer, just swipe your credit card in the app, and in the background you'll be purchase Guardium tokens, right? And it'll re-up every month if you don't have enough in, it'll be that sort of thing. So you might not even really be conscious of the fact that you're using cryptocurrency. If you are, there's a wallet that'll allow you to just use the cryptocurrency manually, the way you do any, any right now, right? >> And. >> So there's that. >> Okay so continue. >> Yep, the second thing we're going to do, we think that giving will be a big behavior in our universe, so you're going to be able to send Guardium directly to a beneficiary in the developing world. And what's cool about that is it doesn't go through a governments, a bank, or an organization. So remember Red Cross in Haiti? Can't happen here, and we're going to go even further than that, down the road, you're going to be able to track every dollar that you donated as easily as a FedEx, right? >> So you are creating a direct relationship between people who might want to help people and then a direct access for resources for the user. >> Correct. >> And so that's the primary, kind of a two >> That's one major flywheel. >> major flywheels going on. >> Just like people sponsor a child, safety is one of the biggest problems in the world. In fact, some people say, this guy named, Greg Hahn, who says it's the number one problem in the world that all other problems flow from the fact that people in the developing world aren't safe. Why don't they have water? Cause they're not safe. Why don't they have education? Cause they're not safe. Lawlessness has to be solved first. >> Trust is a huge part of this too. >> Yeah. >> So how do I set this up, where are you guys in the system, is there a product up and running, how do people get involved with your project? Take a minute to share that. >> Sure, so we have apps released today and they're distributed world-wide on IOS, Android, and Alexa. We also have an open API that lets anyone plug any alert device into our grid, obviously we have to, we want to know who you are first, but basically everyone is welcome. And so, and then our token sales site is at Guardium, Guardium.co. >> G, Guard, ium, Guardium. >> Yes, Guardium. >> And then Guardian Circle? >> Correct. >> Guardium with the m and the end of the token. What's the plan, what are you guys, how much have you raised, what's the story? Yeah, so we're selling ten million dollars worth of tokens, which represents 30% overall, 33% overall. We have a 100 million tokens in the sys, that, that's it, that will ever be distributed. It's on the NEO Blockchain, so we are, we are, we're sort of different from a lot of other folks. We're one of the very first western, we're not the first but we're one of the firsts. >> NEO has a good reputation of high performance. >> Yes >> Is that one of the considerations you had for them? >> Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, we deal in emergencies, so our tolerance for things like CryptoKitty swamping the network is very low. So yeah, so we liked what NEO had to say in a lot of ways because of that. >> I interviewed the CryptoKitties at Polycon, interesting story. It's a Pokemon moment for the internet stare. Well congratulations Mark, what's next for you guys, get through the sale, how's the team makeup look, what's going on with the company? >> Yeah, get through, I mean, definitely get through the sale is the biggest thing right now. We're a small team of, like about five people, plus some contractors. The next big thing that we have on our agenda is we're going out to India in four weeks to actually test the Xprize IoT panic button devices on the streets of Mumbai, so Guardian Circle plus device. >> Intense environment a lot of people there. >> Yeah. >> So let's talk about you. What is your background that got you here, or was there an itch you were scratching? Why this time, also the way to attract a lot of alph entrepreneurs, this is a disruptive time, but why Mark Jeffrey's, why now, why Guradian Circle, what's the passion behind it? >> So, well I started life as an engineer, but I won't bore you with all my adventures up until this moment. But in 2013, I became very interested in Bitcoin, wrote a book called, Bitcoin Explained Simply. Got the book, got the little crazy thoughts in my head. >> You're an author, speaker >> Right, same thing. >> distinguished influencer. (laughs) >> So that was sort of how that side began. In 2014, I basically, my girlfriend at the time had a stroke, she's fine, but at the time she was all alone. And she was on the floor of her garage, and I took her to the hospital, brought her back, and afterwards, I realized, she was alone for about a half an hour, if this had been a real stroke, this could have been very serious, she could have died, she could have been paralyzed. And she was drowning in help, there were about seven people who were either driving by or nearby while this was going on, within a 1000 yards. And she had no way to get to them. >> Yeah, yeah, a personal example of what you're doing. >> And I also realized, the other component was, all the help, I didn't know six, five of the other six people, they're her friends, they're not mine. But during her emergency, all of us need to be sharing location and in communication with each other immediately. And the importance of that just cannot be overstated in emergencies, seconds count. And so putting instant communications so that we can coordinate a response is the second-half of the problem. I initially did not intend to build an app. I went looking for this app and what I discovered was there are a ton of panic button apps, but all of them neglected solving the second-half of the problem, which is organizing the response. >> Yeah. >> And getting people on, in the same-- >> Mobilizing resources. >> Yeah, getting everyone into a war room without requiring them to know each other ahead of time, that was the big thing, no one had thought of that, so. >> It's like rolling up services when you need it instantly. It's like a compiler. >> It's at hawk services. >> You know, compile everything >> Yes, exactly. >> at real time assembly. >> Real time assembly, yeah >> Operating system. (laughs) >> that's exactly, it's great. That's actually a really good way to put it, yeah. >> No, but this is also pretty important, so it was a great personal example, thanks for sharing that personal story. But you know, there's a avalanches, whether you're a skier, it's people who go rock climbing, there's all kinds of use cases where a mountain biker is missing, all kinds of-- >> Remote locations are really big ones. >> I'm scuba diving, where are people, where were they last? So a lot of this is, are location based, and no one knows what the situation is, so the alerting is only one step to the value chain. >> It is, but I think, sorry you have a question. >> No, no, I was going to ask you, where does it go from there? >> Well I think, I think there are a lot of, I think safety check-ins, I think there's other things that we can do, but the one thing that, the one lesson that I've seen again, and again, and again, and again is that the companies that fail invariably, oh, the companies that don't focus always fail. So you got to pick one thing and be the best in the world at that one thing. And the emergency situation is our one thing, and that's big enough. >> Well, I think you have a great opportunity and we'll splint through the, as the evolution of this market grows, it's kind of a moving train, but the value promises is legit. I was talking to Fred Krueger, your friend and colleague in the business, it's a marketplace of these days, so it's money and marketplaces, in your case it's safety, marketplace. I could envision a day with your services where I publish and subscribe to services, I got in a catalog. >> Yes. >> Hey, I know my risks, everyone knows what they do in vanity, or risk factors whether you're jumping out of an airplane, or double black diamond skier. I would love to go to Lake Tahoe, or a mountain, or a place like this, and saying, I'm going to take some chances, here's what I'm going to subscribe to. >> (laughs) You're going to have to subscribe to some extra tokens while you're there. >> I would use Guardium. It could be more, I'm just brainstorming, thinking out loud, but I mean, that's the kind of web services framework you could bring. >> That's exactly right. >> Is that they way you guys are thinking about it? >> I do, I do, I'm so focused on this sort of food and shelter stage of our life right now. >> Yeah, get an ICO done. So yeah, we've got tons of all those ideas written done but we're not quite there yet, but when we get there, great ideas, absolutely. >> Well the use cases are changing because the peoples expectations are changing and now technology can meet these cases. So I'm seeing a lot of social entrepreneurship being done that are coming in through a funding vehicles that never would have got funded on venture capital funding. >> Totally correct. >> Whether it's battered women applications, human trafficking, safety apps, stuff that can make money, not be a kazillion, billion dollar business, but really change society and makeup. >> You've hit the nail on the head. There are a lot of Blockchain companies or ICO companies, this stuff, the venture guys, would never fund it because their model doesn't allow for it. They have, all these things have to be Facebook potentially, or they just have no tolerance for it. >> And the philanthropy world is not incented on economics, and also when the project loses its grant or funding the stack just gets thrown away. >> So this allows for sustainability for mission-based investing and developing. Slowly, I see societal entrepreneurship categorically going to boom from this wave. >> Yeah, totally agree. >> Across the board. >> The world will become a better place, we'll have better companies. >> Mark Jeffery, Guardian Circle, co-founder and CEO. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here on the ground in Puerto, Rico for Blockchain Unbound. A lot of great stuff here, a lot of great start-ups, investors, of course theCUBE. 2018 will be covering all the shows. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBEs live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer. I'm John Furrier with my host, Dave Vellante. Two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We got a great guest, Scott Baker, CMO at IBM, VP of Infrastructure at IBM. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, good to see you guys as well. It's always a pleasure. >> ()Good time last night at your event? >> Great time last night. >> It was really well-attended. IBM always has the best food so that was good and great props, magicians, and it was really a lot of fun, comedians. Good job. >> Yeah, I'm really glad you came on. One of the things we were chatting, before we came on camera was, how much changed. We've been covering IBM storage days, back on the Edge days, and they had the event. Storage is the center of all the conversations, cyber security- >> ()Right? >> ... But it's not just pure cyber. It's still important there. And just data and the role of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and data and security are the two hottest areas, that I won't say unresolved, but are resolving themselves. And people are talking. It's the most highly discussed topics. >> Right. >> ()Those two areas. And it's just all on storage. >> Yeah, it sure does. And in fact, what I would even go so far as to say is, people are beginning to realize the importance that storage plays, as the data custodian for the organization. Right? Certainly you have humans that are involved in setting strategies, but ultimately whatever those policies are that get applied, have to be applied to a device that must act as a responsible custodian for the data it holds. >> So what's your role at IBM and the infrastructure team? Storage is one only one of the areas. >> ()Right. >> You're here at VMware Explore. What's going on here with IBM? Take us through what you're doing there at IBM, and then here at VMware. What's the conversations? >> Sure thing. I have the distinct pleasure to run both product marketing and strategy for our storage line. That's my primary focus, but I also have responsibility for the mainframe software, so the Z System line, as well as our Power server line, and our technical support organization, or at least the services side of our technical support organization. >> And one of the things that's going on here, lot of noise going on- >> Is that a bird flying around? >> Yeah >> We got fire trucks. What's changed? 'Cause right now with VMware, you're seeing what they're doing. They got the Platform, Under the Hood, Developer focus. It's still an OPS game. What's the relationship with VMware? What are you guys talking about here? What are some of the conversations you're having here in San Francisco? >> Right. Well, IBM has been a partner with VMware for at least the last 20 years. And VMware does, I think, a really good job about trying to create a working space for everyone to be an equal partner with them. It can be challenging too, if you want to sort of throw out your unique value to a customer. So one of the things that we've really been working on is, how do we partner much stronger? When we look at the customers that we support today, what they're looking for isn't just a solid product. They're looking for a solid ecosystem partnership. So we really lean in on that 20 years of partnership experience that we have with IBM. So one of the things that we announced was actually being one of the first VMware partners to bring both a technical innovation delivery mechanism, as well as technical services, alongside VMware technologies. I would say that was one of the first things that we really leaned in on, as we looked out at what customers are expecting from us. >> So I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the industry. I've been following IBM since the early 1980s. It's trained in the mainframe market, and so we've seen, a lot of things you see come back to the mainframe, but we won't go there. But prior to Arvind coming on, it seemed like, okay, storage, infrastructure, yeah it's good business, and we'll let it throw off some margin. That's fine. But it's all about services and software. Okay, great. With Arvind, and obviously Red Hat, the whole focus shift to hybrid. We were talking, I think yesterday, about okay, where did we first hear hybrid? Obviously we heard that a lot from VMware. I heard it actually first, early on anyway, from IBM, talking hybrid. Some of the storage guys at the time. Okay, so now all of a sudden there's the realization that to make hybrid work, you need software and hardware working together. >> () Right. So it's now a much more fundamental part of the conversation. So when you look out, Scott, at the trends you're seeing in the market, when you talk to customers, what are you seeing and how is that informing your strategy, and how are you bringing together all the pieces? >> That's a really awesome question because it always depends on who, within the organization, you're speaking to. When you're inside the data center, when you're talking to the architects and the administrators, they understand the value in the necessity for a hybrid-cloud architecture. Something that's consistent. On The Edge, On-Prem, in the cloud. Something that allows them to expand the level of control that they have, without having to specialize on equipment and having to redo things as you move from one medium to the next. As you go upstack in that conversation, what I find really interesting is how leaders are beginning to realize that private cloud or on-prem, multi cloud, super cloud, whatever you call it, whatever's in the middle, those are just deployment mechanisms. What they're coming to understand is it's the applications and the data that's hybrid. And so what they're looking for IBM to deliver, and something that we've really invested in on the infrastructure side is, how do we create bidirectional application mobility? Making it easy for organizations, whether they're using containers, virtual machines, just bare metal, how do they move that data back and forth as they need to, and not just back and forth from on-prem to the cloud, but effectively, how do they go from cloud to cloud? >> Yeah. One of the things I noticed is your pin, says I love AI, with the I next to IBM and get all these (indistinct) in there. AI, remember the quote from IBM is, "You can't have AI without IA." Information architect. >> () Right. >> () Rob Thomas. >> Rob Thomas (indistinct) the sound bites. But that brings up the point about machine learning and some of these things that are coming down the like, how is your area devolving the smarts and the brains around leveraging the AI in the systems itself? We're hearing more and more softwares being coded into the hardware. You see Silicon advances. All this is kind of, not changing it, but bringing back the urgency of, hardware matters. >> That's right. >> () At the same time, it's still software too. >> That's right. So let's connect a couple of dots here. We talked a little bit about the importance of cyber resiliency, and let's talk about a little bit on how we use AI in that matter. So, if you look at the direct flash modules that are in the market today, or the SSDs that are in the market today, just standard-capacity drives. If you look at the flash core modules that IBM produces, we actually treat that as a computational storage offering, where you store the data, but it's got intelligence built into the processor, to offload some of the responsibilities of the controller head. The ability to do compression, single (indistinct), deduplication, you name it. But what if you can apply AI at the controller level, so that signals that are being derived by the flash core module itself, that look anomalous, can be handed up to an intelligence to say, "Hey, I'm all of a sudden getting encrypted rights from a host that I've never gotten encrypted rights for. Maybe this could be a problem." And then imagine if you connect that inferencing engine to the rest of the IBM portfolio, "Hey, Qradar. Hey IBM Guardian. What's going on on the network? Can we see some correlation here?" So what you're going to see IBM infrastructure continue to do is invest heavily into entropy and the ability to measure IO characteristics with respect to anomalous behavior and be able to report against that. And the trick here, because the array technically doesn't know if it's under attack or if the host just decided to turn on encryption, the trick here is using the IBM product relationships, and ecosystem relationships, to do correlation of data to determine what's actually happening, to reduce your false positives. >> And have that pattern of data too. It's all access to data too. Big time. >> That's right. >> And that innovation comes out of IBM R&D? Does it come out of the product group? Is it IBM research that then trickles its way in? Is it the storage innovation? Where's that come from? Where's that bubble up? That partnership? >> Well, I got to tell you, it doesn't take very long in this industry before your counterpart, your competitor, has a similar feature. Right? So we're always looking for, what's the next leg? What's the next advancement that we can make? We knew going into this process, that we had plenty of computational power that was untapped on the FPGA, the processor running on the flash core module. Right? So we thought, okay, well, what should we do next? And we thought, "Hey, why not just set this thing up to start watching IO patterns, do calculations, do trending, and report that back?" And what's great about what you brought up too, John, is that it doesn't stay on the box. We push that upstack through the AIOPS architecture. So if you're using Turbonomic, and you want to look applications stack down, to know if you've got threat potential, or your attack surface is open, you can make some changes there. If you want to look at it across your infrastructure landscape with a storage insight, you could do that. But our goal here is to begin to make the machine smarter and aware of impacts on the data, not just on the data they hold onto, but usage, to move it into the appropriate tier, different write activities or read activities or delete activities that could indicate malicious efforts that are underway, and then begin to start making more autonomous, how about managed autonomous responses? I don't want to turn this into a, oh, it's smart, just turn it on and walk away and it's good. I don't know that we'll ever get there just yet, but the important thing here is, what we're looking at is, how do we continually safeguard and protect that data? And how do we drive features in the box that remove more and more of the day to day responsibility from the administrative staff, who are technically hired really, to service and solve for bigger problems in the enterprise, not to be a specialist and have to manage one box at a time. >> Dave mentioned Arvind coming on, the new CEO of IBM, and the Red Hat acquisition and that change, I'd like to get your personal perspective, or industry perspective, so take your IBM-hat off for a second and put the Scott-experience-in-the-industry hat on, the transformation at the customer level right now is more robust, to use that word. I don't want to say chaotic, but it is chaotic. They say chaos in the cloud here at VM, a big part of their messaging, but it's changing the business model, how things are consumed. You're seeing new business models emerge. So IBM has this lot of storage old systems, you're transforming, the company's transforming. Customers are also transforming, so that's going to change how people market products. >> () Right. >> For example, we know that developers and DevOps love self-service. Why? Because they don't want to install it. Let me go faster. And they want to get rid of it, doesn't work. Storage is infrastructure and still software, so how do you see, in your mind's eye, with all your experience, the vision of how to market products that are super important, that are infrastructure products, that have to be put into play, for really new architectures that are going to transform businesses? It's not as easy as saying, "Oh, we're going to go to market and sell something." The old way. >> () Right. >> This shifting happening is, I don't think there's an answer yet, but I want to get your perspective on that. Customers want to hear the storage message, but it might not be speeds and fees. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's solutions. Maybe it's security. There's multiple touch points now, that you're dealing with at IBM for the customer, without becoming just a storage thing or just- >> () Right. >> ... or just hardware. I mean, hardware does matter, but what's- >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, and I think what complicates that too is, if you look at the buying centers around a purchase decision, that's expanded as well, and so as you engage with a customer, you have to be sensitive to the message that you're telling, so that it touches the needs or the desires of the people that are all sitting around the table. Generally what we like to do when we step in and we engage, isn't so much to talk about the product. At some point, maybe later in the engagements, the importance of speeds, feeds, interconnectivity, et cetera, those do come up. Those are a part of the final decision, but early on it's really about outcomes. What outcomes are you delivering? This idea of being able to deliver, if you use the term zero trust or cyber-resilient storage capability as a part of a broader security architecture that you're putting into place, to help that organization, that certainly comes up. We also hear conversations with customers about, or requests from customers about, how do the parts of IBM themselves work together? Right? And I think a lot of that, again, continues to speak to what kind of outcome are you going to give to me? Here's a challenge that I have. How are you helping me overcome it? And that's a combination of IBM hardware, software, and the services side, where we really have an opportunity to stand out. But the thing that I would tell you, that's probably most important is, the engagement that we have up and down the stack in the market perspective, always starts with, what's the outcome that you're going to deliver for me? And then that drags with it the story that would be specific to the gear. >> Okay, so let's say I'm a customer, and I'm buying it to zero trust architecture, but it's going to be somewhat of a long term plan, but I have a tactical need. I'm really nervous about Ransomware, and I don't feel as though I'm prepared, and I want an outcome that protects me. What are you seeing? Are you seeing any patterns? I know it's going to vary, but are you seeing any patterns, in terms of best practice to protect me? >> Man, the first thing that we wanted to do at IBM is divorce ourselves from the company as we thought through this. And what I mean by that is, we wanted to do what's right, on day zero, for the customer. So we set back using the experience that we've been able to amass, going through various recovery operations, and helping customers get through a Ransomware attack. And we realized, "Hey. What we should offer is a free cyber resilience assessment." So we like to, from the storage side, we'd like to look at what we offer to the customer as following the NIST framework. And most vendors will really lean in hard on the response and the recovery side of that, as you should. But that means that there's four other steps that need to be addressed, and that free cyber-resilience assessment, it's a consultative engagement that we offer. What we're really looking at doing is helping you assess how vulnerable you are, how big is that attack surface? And coming out of that, we're going to give you a Vendor Agnostic Report that says here's your situation, here's your grade or your level of risk and vulnerability, and then here's a prioritized roadmap of where we would recommend that you go off and start solving to close up whatever the gaps or the risks are. Now you could say, "Hey, thanks, IBM. I appreciate that. I'm good with my storage vendor today. I'm going to go off and use it." Now, we may not get some kind of commission check. We may not sell the box. But what I do know is that you're going to walk away knowing the risks that you're in, and we're going to give you the recommendations to get started on closing those up. And that helps me sleep at night. >> That's a nice freebie. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it really is, 'cause you guys got deep expertise in that area. So take advantage of that. >> Scott, great to have you on. Thanks for spending time out of your busy day. Final question, put a plug in for your group. What are you communicating to customers? Share with the audience here. You're here at VMware Explorer, the new rebranded- >> () Right? >> ... multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, steady state. There are three levels of transformation, virtualization, hybrid cloud, DevOps, now- >> Right? >> ... multi-cloud, so they're in chapter three of their journey- >> That's right. >> Really innovative company, like IBM, so put the plugin. What's going on in your world? Take a minute to explain what you want. >> Right on. So here we are at VMware Explorer, really excited to be here. We're showcasing two aspects of the IBM portfolio, all of the releases and announcements that we're making around the IBM cloud. In fact, you should come check out the product demonstration for the IBM Cloud Satellite. And I don't think they've coined it this, but I like to call it the VMware edition, because it has all of the VMware services and tools built into it, to make it easier to move your workloads around. We certainly have the infrastructure side on the storage, talking about how we can help organizations, not only accelerate their deployments in, let's say Tanzu or Containers, but even how we help them transform the application stack that's running on top of their virtualized environment in the most consistent and secure way possible. >> Multiple years of relationships with VMware. IBM, VMware together. Congratulations. >> () That's right. >> () Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, thanks (indistinct). Thank you very much. >> A lot more live coverage here at Moscone west. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. Two more days of wall-to-wall coverage continuing here. Stay tuned. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hello everyone this is dave vellante with the cube and welcome to this conversation with me is anil singal who is the ceo of netscout anil it's a pleasure to speak with you today thanks so much for coming on the program thank you so i want to talk a little bit about uh netscout we're kind of at the cube we're sort of enamored by founder-led companies i mean you started net scout right around the same time that i entered the tech business and you remember back then it was an industry dominated by ibm monolithic systems were then with a norm in the form of mainframes you had mini computers pcs and things like pc local area networks they were in their infancy in fact most of the pcs as you remember they didn't have hard disks in them so i want to start with what was it that you saw 35 years ago to let you let that led you to start net scout and at the time did you even imagine that you'd be creating a company with a billion dollars worth of revenue and a much larger market cap well certainly i'd not imagine where we'll be right now and uh we didn't need we didn't know that this will be the outcome where i mean we just happened to be at the right place at the right time but we did have a vision some of you had the feeling we are enamored by networking and we thought that network will be the business in fact our business card in 91 said network is the business and so somehow we got that right and and we said these things will be connected and overall we found then that with the ip convergence first in the enterprise in 90s and then internet and then carriers moving from analog to digital we call talk about digital transformation in last few years but this has been going on for the last 30 years and as we add what we were doing become relevant to more and more people over time for example right now even power companies use our product okay and we have iot devices coming in so so basically what we do is we we said we're going to provide visibility through looking at the traffic through the lens and the vantage point of the network a lot of people think we're just doing network monitoring or have been doing that but actually we use the network as the vantage point which is other people are not doing most of the people have accidental data from devices at the basis of visibility and that turned out to be a very successful and but at some point different points in our life we became responsible for the market not just for netscope and that changed the shape of the company and what we did and how we drove the innovation yeah now i want to get into some of that but i i i'm still really enamored of and and fascinated by by the beginnings i worked for a founder led a chairman a guy named pat mcgovern who built the media empire he had these 10 sort of core principles we he used to test us on him we'd carry him around a little little note card things that today still serve us you know stay close to the customer uh you know keep the corporate staff lean promote from within respect for individuals the things that are drilled into your head i wonder you know what are the principles that you know sometimes they come become dogma but they're good dogma i don't mean that as a pejorative what are the things that that you built your business on the principles that you're sort of most proud of well i think there is so there are five in fact we call um uh some of the standards so five tenants we have we call we call this high ambition leadership which is more than just about making money and as just like the us is the leader of the free world we have a responsibility beyond u.s same way netscout has a responsibility beyond our own company and and revenue and our stakeholders so with that in mind we have these five things which i think i wouldn't have been able to articulate that 20 years ago like this and but they were always there so first is this guardians of the connected world which you see it on our website guardians care about their asset it's not just about money we are going to solve problems in the connected world which nobody else is able to solve or have the passion or have the resources and willpower to do it so that's that's the overall theme of the company guardians of the connected world connected world is changing broad new problems are coming our goal is there are pros and cons of every new thing our goal is to remove all the cons so you can enjoy the pros so that's guardian of the connected world then our mission is accelerate digital transformation meaning remove the road blocks people are looking at enablers but there are barriers also how do you remove the barriers for our customers so they can improve the fruits of digital transformation for example going to the cloud allows you to outsource some of the stuff especially in this time of agility and and dependency you can cut your cost but that comes with the price that you lose control so our product big bring the control back so now you can enjoy the pros and the cons and i call it sometime how do you change the wheels of your car while driving well if you change the four wheels then carve is going to fall down but how do you put one wheel in the cloud well that's what the our vision is visibility without water we'll give you the same information which is the third part so we have this uh tagline and for the company and then we have the mission accelerating digital transformation our vision is visibility without border when you run your application no matter where you run we'll give you the same piece of information that allows the people to make this transparent transparent migra that's migration transparent from a monitoring and visibility point of view then the fourth area is about a technology we call it smart data technology the whole world is talking about artificial intelligence machine learning but who are you going to learn for is your ai really authentic or is it truly artificial and that comes from smart data data is the oil of the new industry that's the oil and and people are not focusing on that they're saying i have lots of data but you don't have the data which we have in the past we said we are not going to share the data with third parties so in recently we have changed that you say yeah we'll there is the price for that we'll do that so we are branding ourselves as a smart data company where the whole industry is talking about smart analytics and i said we make smart people smarter and lastly uh the the value system of netscout is called lean but not mean okay and uh anybody can get lean if you get fat you can get your operation but how do you do lean decision making so you never have to be in me like net score never had delay in the last 35 years we have ups and down our stock has gone to three dollars and has gone to forty dollars but company continued to invest and uh and that's why we have this reputation we have with this tom here or steve here the tenure at netscout is 10 15 years minimum even in sales and people don't realize the power of that because some of our customers tell us hey your sales people are around longer than our employees and that how it builds a franchise of loyalty in the customer base we underestimate that this continuity part so there are many aspects of not what is the definition of not being mean the lean and mean is is sort of people are very proud of that and i think you can be lean without being mean and how do you become lean is don't hire when in good times unless you need them the reason people are able to do it is because they think i can fire any time so let's build up the fact so there are a lot of decision making we do around this and that's what i talk about in the book it's not about technology and this is i would say it's just one of the five diamonds but it's probably one of the most important ones and is one of the biggest differentiator of netscope well it's obviously served you well i mean no layoffs in 35 years the the retention metric is is very impressive i mean again i go back to my experience i was at idg for 15 years my passion was always to start my own company but i didn't want to leave because it was such a great culture and it seems like you've created something similar you know i talk to cios and ctos a lot too about about you know it's always people process technology and of course we want to talk about tech because we love talking about tech but they always tell me look tech comes and goes it's the processes that you put in place the culture that you have in place we could deal with the tech and it and it sounds like you've created a similar dynamic and i think back again when you started there were proprietary networks it was ibm sna dec network every mini computer had its own network then you know tcpip came in the whole world it changed and exploded but yet you said guardians of the connected world and that's kind of been your your focus from really day one you know i i loved what you said about the business the the network is the business remember the network is the computer that scott mcneely popularized so really kind of a similar dynamic there so it seems anneal that that framework that you just laid out those core principles have actually allowed you to ebb to flow to deal with stock prices and still retain people for very long periods of time maybe one more thing to add there is that on the lean but not when you talk about generalities we don't look any different like everyone cares about happy customers they care about happy employees and they care about happy stakeholders shareholders everyone including us but what's the order what's uh what's where do you start so we start with employees we say if they're happy employees they create success happy customers and then because of that they drive they buy more stuff and we create happy shareholders whereas if you start with happy shareholders you may not get happy employees and so and so all i'm saying is that everyone probably believes in what what we are saying or what i'm saying but how they implement it and then like really walking the talk is the most important part well i think you're right i mean i think you know the financials is a byproduct of happy employees which drive happy customers if you take care of employees and customers then good good things will happen uh if you start with trying to micromanage the finances of course we all attempted to to do that um i i wonder if we could talk a little bit about so just to bring it forward a little bit we're talking about how netscout has essentially from a cultural standpoint been able to withstand the ups the downs i mean you've seen since since you know over 35 years a lot of the the the downturns and the the tech softness the tech bubbles the great you know recession obviously now we're in the middle of the pandemic um i and i wonder if you could talk to that specifically so the data that we have from our survey partner etr enterprise technology research shows that before the pandemic around 16 of employees worked from home we're talking about truly remote workers not you know a couple days a week and when we talked to cios today they tell us it's you know well over 70 percent now but they fully expect that when you know the world comes back to the new abnormal i call it that it's it's that number is going to that 16 is going to double to more than double the 34 so it's it puts stress on on the the network it changes the the direction of the traffic it changes the security uh emphasis maybe you could talk a little bit about that just in terms of how you you are helping your customers respond specifically so i always talk about like is this a new problem or is the bad problem getting worse and so i put it in that bad problem getting worse so if you make the bad to zero then you can't multiply it so i think it's highlighting some of the problems which are already there are being highlighted by a lot of people are telling are you seeing more attacks no we are becoming more conscious of the attacks we always had we have more time by the way hackers have more time too because they are also sitting at home doing things so what i'm saying what i feel is that two parts one is that i think people should not in the when the new normal comes or new abnormal then i think people should not make people work from her for the wrong reason certain people are saying oh i can save money that's the wrong reason but if it's efficient we should do this so we are doing some interesting things for home users to feel how they can feel that they're really working from the office and so yeah there are some new challenges on how we monitor because when a user complains now about a performance to it because they can't get their work they don't know whether it's our network or is the isp or is their wi-fi network so we try to provide the root cause analysis as quickly as possible which we call mean time to know and one of the things i didn't mention earlier about the what is the uniqueness of our technology when we use the network vantage point to drive visibility it's almost like the blood test when you have a problem if you tell the doctor i said hey what is my problem and they start looking at all kinds of things it's going to take forever but if i take the blood test i'll be able to do the i will know what the next thing to do so in a way we are doing the blood test of the user experience security problems and when we do that we can come up with some very unique things so in the we think that we'll be moving on into other areas so the visibility is the means to an end the end could be performance management could be visibility troubleshooting uh and could be security forensics like blood tests can be used for dna evidence also and so we have all the technology so we are moving on as we move to the home user we are applying that our techniques not just for service assurance or end user experience monitoring but also for security financing and one example i give you the i always talk about and you'll see that in my book being different before being be better first be different get the earplugs out of the audience before you tell the story and you don't do that even though we are very big we are very small compared to a lot of companies in the industry compared to big players like cisco ibm and all those so the new thing which we are looking at in security is the security industry is catching the act we are going to catch the actor if i can get into the what they were doing before the act before they did the ransomware what were they doing well that required continuous monitoring of the traffic and that's what we do so when we do catch the actor catching the thief not what they're stealing then you're preventing tomorrow's attack and that's basically the innovation part of netscout which we have been pushing for but we somehow decided not to apply that to security because we had enough problems to be sold as guardians of the connected world from a monitoring point of view and so those are those are some of the things we'll be applying as as we move forward and i feel that those are equally applicable before the pandemic and after the pandemic and it's just polarized more because more people are working from home it's interesting what you're saying about the blood test uh that's a great analogy because it kind of eliminates the guesswork uh and and removes the opaqueness uh goes right to sort of the hard heart of the matter you call it mean time to know um and and it's interesting too to look at productivity i i mentioned some of the survey work when we talked to organizations they say to us that actually productivity has gone up since the the pandemic and my response to that is yeah no kidding because people are working 15-hour days you can't keep that up and and the silent killer of productivity is is the the not has having an elongated mean time to know um and having to to guess and so my premise is that this productivity gain if in fact it exists is not sustainable because we're doing it on the backs of our employees and it's going to it's going to burn them out i'm not sure whether it's real also see there are both sides it's not possible practical as you are saying because for example you're a sales person and you're working six seven hours and you're traveling six hours you can't be on the phone for 12 hours with the customer right now right how can they be productive is there both sides going some people are overworked and so definition of productivity itself is in question and how do you measure that and so that's what we'll have to look i think basically what i'm saying is we should do it whatever we do after the pandemic is over about how many people work from home should be based on your business model your expectation not just based on cost and a lot of people are looking at once again oh this is another cost saving exercise and that should not be the reason that's the wrong reason because then they're measuring the productivity in terms of reduced cost not everything else plus at least in net stock is a company which i mean every meeting i go to i use chalkboard and it's very very hard as a for our company like somebody like ibm where most of the people were there 50 offices they were remote is the easy transition it's not easy for netscout and so right now we focus on safety but we need to come up with a good hybrid model later on and different people will set up differently but what we do will be relevant in all cases yeah but i think you're making a good point that it's not some kind of mandate to drive your costs down or we saw last decade there were a couple of prominent companies that were mandating actually working in the office eliminating work from home so obviously the wrong side of history you know who they didn't know a pandemic was coming but so so how how will you make that decision uh will you is it really a discussion case by case with the employees or how what's the framework for you guys to decide that well i think so right now our focus is on safety so it's completely optional in fact we don't even allow more than 20 percent and that's only in the headquarters other places we have less than five percent people coming right and only essential workers manufacturing and all those so right now is completely optional but my personal preference when there is no risk these people should come to work like they were coming before we like to make it as close as possible to the old normal but that's not going to be the case for other companies because they're bigger in size they have other things at play but certainly we are not going to do it or because it's cheaper for net scores because we when people work from home and so we will see how it goes i think it will be a transition but i can see we going back to new normal in a year from now if the things start winding down in six months within a year or so we should be getting back to uh some normalcy and but that doesn't mean it's going to be true for our customers so from a product point of view we are doing several things so we can help the customer through this transition and by the way one other thing i wanted to mention earlier when we talk about the blood test how does it relate to guardians of the connective connected world if you believe in that what did the industry do they made sure needles were not painful that blood test was reliable you could there is no hygiene issues or no issues like that the cost has come down as a guardian of the connected world because we do that that's what we have been doing we are removing the banners to a great idea but lot of other companies gave up and then they have different strategy and some are successful some are not so as a guardian of the connected wall our goal is to continue to make this practical use imagine if blood test industry has not done that where we'll be right now and that's what what i meant by guardian of the connected world this is not easy to do and sustain that in for a period of 20 30 years but we have been able to do that and we get a lot of challenges from naysayers or this will not work at high speed when i started mad scout it was 10 megabit ethernet now we have 100 gigs 100 gig ethernet and we are still able to handle it and nobody thought in those days that you can even get 200 likes people were questioning us but what happens is other things keep working in the market intel is making improvements a lot of people are doing work to solve the problem and we leverage that and and that's how we are able to uh sort of sustain this guardian of the connected world team yeah you know the other key aspect of the guardian of the connected world again not to overdo the blood test analogy but the time to results is very important if you if you have an issue and you have to wait wait weeks for the results and your doctor you can't get a hold of her and so you're you're successfully dealing with that in real time or near real time and that that to me is is critical a very important point thanks for reminding me because i forgot today that's one of the things i say all the time hey this one of the big things we have done if blood test industry has done it how long take to get results nowadays you can get results done in in like two hours and doctors can get a report in couple of hours that's what we have done that's like mean time to know which we talked about with our technology i think we're basically the all the issues that you can't even breathe without doing something on the network so if you're listening to the traffic or hearing that uh what the conversation you can form an independent view of what is happening and that could be the that's the smart data which then becomes the basis of analytics whether analytics in the security space or not and so that's uh and that one thing we have not changed this technique now the outcomes are different what are we doing with the visibility is different is keep changing the number of customers and the type of customers are different but ultimately that part has interestingly has not changed i wonder if i could ask you i'd like to ask ceos especially those that are technologists and business leaders you know their thoughts on on the cloud i mean our data shows that the public cloud is growing in the 30 plus range annually the big three cloud public cloud players now account this year probably for close to 75 billion dollars in revenue maybe even a little bit more you know what what do you see driving this growth what does it mean for your customers well i think so forth we have a big announcement coming out called smart cloud monitoring to address this but what's the meaning of that i think what our customers are looking for is that it's it's not all or nothing it's not that everything is in the cloud or everything is in the program it could be private cloud public cloud colos the way vpns are laid out so they want to make sure that they can use our technology to do this react and analytics regardless of what decision they make and even five years from now there'll be enough non-cloud stuff okay so that's what we are trying to do we want to that's what is visibility without water and when they do that they say that helps them decide what's the best mode of operation for them for what application moving blindly to the cloud is a problem not going into that area is is also a problem but i think this the two new things have happened recently i would say one is sort of because of this crisis people don't want to own uh like hospitality industry okay this would i mean they're obviously having a big big issues with them but if they want a lot of the infrastructure they could have turned off some of that and so that's driving more movement to the cloud but i think there is a lot of choices available about a year or two ago i think affordable pricing model multiple choices not just aws and technology maturing where you can you can really implement and have a good experience i think those have become big enablers and so i think now it is possible to get to massive movement to the cloud but then they want to make sure that i'm now i'm outsourcing my problems but i'm not also outsourcing my vision to the cloud vendors because previously the way in the iit industry a lot of problems were solved is it was called the war rule let's get everyone who reports to me and everyone who reported to you but now that everyone doesn't report to you so how do you maintain the control when i complain to my ci hey my webex is slow or office three seriously and how does it resolve that problem because they cannot tell me oh we outsource them so i can't tell you that well we should not have outsourced them to the cloud so how do you drive this collaboration between the providers and the consumers is going to be key to accelerating this transformation because otherwise the cost of capex cost of reduction of moving to the cloud will be offseted by the increase in operax and customer satisfaction for the customer and so if we can help deal with one of the parts industry is already doing the other big part of making cloud work i think then we'll have the best chance of success yeah and of course the security has implications on the security model you were talking earlier about that as an opportunity people sometimes think oh yeah i put put my data in the cloud i'm good on security but there's there's a shared responsibility uh again we talked about different traffic patterns uh you've got work from home going on uh so and it's interesting when you juxtapose a sort of industry narrative on security which is it's it gets harder and harder and harder and you hear some of the cloud players say hey the state of security is really good uh but when you talk to csos you know they'll talk about the lack of talent uh the challenges they have the tools tools creep the fact that they spend more but the adversaries just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger it's a really serious problem i mean maybe we close there i mean kind of how do you see it from your your vantage point let's look at the blood test so i look at if you don't the technique which we are talking about at least in the dimension of security monitoring then you are going to a lot of little things because you are doing little things you are going to be do a tool creep and because of that you have a like a talent issue and i think if you can make the right stuff work then you will not have this this talent issue and i feel that we are always looking solving yesterday's problem okay because we are not watching what led to the attack we are just dealing with the attack as an incident a security issue so i think continuous monitoring of deviation traffic allows you look at the deviation of the north so signature based security is a big portion but how do you know the signature of tomorrow and well you know that because you know the normal but only way you know normal is if you have been monitoring what was going on not for a specific event but deviation from normal that's what our approach is going to be anomalous behavior detection through our smart data and then you apply machine learning and ai algorithms to that i think that could be nirvana and but we don't have all the smart people for analytics but we can feed our data to those smart people and that's something we are going to bring up and the reason i feel it will be successful because this idea has been widely successful for netscout in the non-security space yeah i think you're bringing up another point that i've talked about a lot which is we've the industry has gone from sort of an industry of products to platforms and now ecosystems is really driving a lot of the innovation it's exactly what you're talking about feeding data to other partners data partners and now you start thinking about iot and the edge and machines talking to machines i mean i put you know video cameras up in my house to to make my environment more secure but of course i'm scared to death that those things can get hacked um it's a very complicated situation and the the power of many is going to trump the the the resources of one and so i'm glad you you brought that out um maybe give us your final thoughts anil it really has been a pleasure talking to you well i think the vr one of the things people have asked me is uh is why did you start another company especially in silicon valley i said with this spot many companies but they all happened to be called netstar netscout 1.0 2.0 3.0 actually we we are into the 4.0 i sometimes say you know george foreman's four sons they're all called george foreman so it's like one and so every time we do something different and now we are in the process of launching netscore 5.0 it was partly because maybe accelerated because of what's what's going on with the pandemic because there are some new challenges which we then here for and we are entering the security space so i'm very excited about repeating what we did in the traditional monitoring space service assurance space both for enterprise and carriers to the security space and people will question us how come it took so long while we were solving other problems which were more interesting than this for netscout and now we're going to bring that technology and all the tenants guardian of the connected world smart data to the security space and also i mean people are around for a long time we are also building the next generation of leaders at netstar and and so we have our hands full over the next two three years in uh building the next generation of net scout solving some of the problems which industry is facing without abandoning our tenants and the culture and if we can do that i think uh there'll be uh we'll be going to uh to the next level in terms of netscore branding and leadership well given given the guiding principles that you shared with us earlier the the the fundamental technology that you have around visibility uh i think that's served you very well and i think there's no shortage of of opportunity uh for netscout so neil thanks so much for sharing your story and coming on thecube good thank you all right and thank you for watching everybody this is dave vellante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm in our Boston area studio and one of the things we always love to do is talk to startups and really find out they're usually on the leading edge of helping customers, new technologies, conquering challenges. And to that point, we have the co-founder and CEO of env0, that is, Ohad Maislish and we brought along with him he's got two of his investors, one of his advisors. So sitting next to Maish, we have Ed Sim, who's the founder and managing partner of Boldstart Ventures and sitting next to him is Guy Podjarny, who is the founder of Snyk. So now, you know is the acronym for Snyk and if you didn't know that, I know I'd heard about the company a couple years before that and my understanding is, Guy your the ones that connected Ohad with Ed who was the first investor. So Guy let's talk to Ohad in a second, but how the conversation started? And what what piqued your interest about what is now env0? >> Yeah, I think it started with people. I mean, I think fundamentally when you think about technology and think about startups, it needs to be an interesting market, it needs to be a good idea, but it really, first and foremost is about the people. So I've I've known Ohad from actually some work that he's done at Snyk earlier on, and was really impressed with his sharpness, his technical chops, and a lot of times the bias for feedback. And then when he presented the idea to me around kind of making Infrastructure as Code easy, and I don't want to sort of steal his thunder, talking about it and about kind of engaging with developers for it, a thought that literally resonated with me, I think, we'll probably dig into it some more. But in we live in a world in which more and more activities, more and more decisions, and really more effort is rolled on to developers. So, there's a constant need for great solutions that make on one hand make it easy for developers to embrace these solutions, on the other hand, still kind of allow the right kind of governance and controls. And I felt like Infrastructure as Code was like a great space for that, where we asked developers to do more, there's a ton of value in developers doing more around controlling these Infrastructure decisions, but it's just too hard today. So, anyways, I kind of liked the skills, I liked the idea. And I pulled in Ed, who I felt was kind of natural to kind of help introduce these experiences with other startups that share a similar philosophy to kind of help make this happen. >> Awesome, thank you Guys. So Ohad, let's let's throw it to you. Give us a little bit about your background, your team, Infrastructure as Code is not a new term. So I guess would love you to kind of weave into it. You know why now? Is it becoming more real in why your solution is positioned to help the enterprise? >> Awesome, first of all, thank you for having me. It's really exciting and again thank you for the opportunity. Regarding your question, so my background is technical. I was maybe still am a geek started University at a young age at the age of 14 in Palo Alto High School. And started my career in non technical roles very early. I have now like 21 years of experience, this is my second startup and third company, as I mentioned, my previous company is services company, provided services for Snyk and we became friends and later on partners, investors, and so on. And, we we've seen huge shift, we call the Infrastructure as Code the third data center revolution. We look at the first one being virtualization about 20 years ago led by VMware and then ZenSourcer. The second obviously, is the public cloud when companies started clicking buttons in order to get those compute resources but now nobody is clicking those buttons anymore. And instead writing, maintaining and executing that code, that Infrastructure as Code and as the Guy mentioned, it made it much more relevant for developers to influence the Infrastructure decisions and not just the app decisions. With that many challenges and opportunities around Infrastructure as Code management and automation, and that's where we focus. >> All right, so Ed I'm sure like me, you've seen a number of companies, try to climb this mountain and fall down and crash so I feel like five years ago, I would talk to a company and they say, oh, we're going to help, really help the enterprise enable developers for networking for storage, for security or anything like that. And it was like, oh, okay, good luck with that. And they just kind of crashed and burned or got acquired or did something like that. So, I feel like from our viewpoint we've seen for a long time that growth of developers and how important that is, but that gap between the enterprise and the developers feels like we're getting there. So, it gets similar what I asked Ohad why now, why this group, why the investment from you? >> Yeah, so I'll echo Guy's comment about the people. So, first and foremost, I was fortunate enough to invest in Guy back in his prior company before he started Snyk and then invested in Snyk. And there are lots of elements of env0 that remind me of Snyk the idea, for example, that developers are doing more, and that security is no longer a separate piece of developing, it's now embedded kind of in what developers and teams are doing. And I felt like the opportunity was still there for Infrastructure as Code. How do you make developers more productive, but provide that control plan or governance that's centralized so that environments can easily be reproduced. And the thing that got me so excited, was the idea that Ohad was going to tie kind of cloud costs from a proactive basis versus a reactive basis. Meaning that once we know that your environments are up and running, you could actually automatically tag it and tie the environment to the actual application. And to me, tying the business piece to the development piece was a huge, huge opportunity that hasn't been tapped yet. And so there are lots of elements of both Snyk and env0 and we're super excited to be invested in both. >> Alright, so Ohad maybe just step back for a second, give us some of the speeds and feeds we read your blog post 3.3 million dollars of the early investment, how many people you have, what is the stage of the product customer acquisition and the like? >> Sure, so we just launched our public beta and announced the funding couple of months ago led by Boldstart and another VC in Israel named Grove, and then angel investors Guy is the greatest investor among those and so we have some others as well. And now we have like 10 employees nine in Israel, one in New York City, I'm relocating after this all pandemic thing will get better. I'm moving to the Bay Area as soon as possible. That's more or less the status. And as I've mentioned, we just launched our public beta. So we have our first few design partners and early like private beta customers now starting to grow more. >> Yeah, and how would you characterize, what is the relationship between what you're doing in the public clouds. We understand, in the early days, it was like, Oh, well, cloud is going to be easy, it's going to just be enable it, it has been a wonderful tool set for developers. But simple is definitely not, I think anyone would describe the current state of environments. So, help it help us give it a little bit of what you're seeing there. And how you deal with like some very large players in ecosystem. >> Our customers are the same as the cloud vendors customers. The cloud vendors provide great value with the technical aspect with Infrastructure. But once you want to manage your organization, you want to empower your developers, you want to shift left some decisions, APM, did shift left for a performance, Snyk is doing great shift left for security. I believe that we are doing similar things to the cost. And you in the cloud vendors are in charge of you being able to do some technical orchestration. But when do you need to tear down those resources? When do you understand that there is a problematic resource or environment and what exactly made it? What is the association, how you can prevent from (mumbles) deployments from even happening at first. So all of those management information and insight ties back to your business logic and processes that's where we fit. >> I think there's actually a lot of analogy if I can chime in, on maybe an ownership aspect that happens in cloud. So we talk about the cloud and oftentimes cloud is interpreted as the technical aspect of it. So the fact that it allows you to do a bunch of things in the clouds and sort of renting someone else's hardware, and then automating a lot of it. But what cloud also does and that definitely represents what we're doing security and I think applies here, is that it moves a lot of things that used to be IT responsibility being a part of the application. So a lot of decisions, including ones really security, and including ones related cost around anywhere from provisioning of servers to, network access, to when you burst out, and to the balancing of business value to the cost involved or the risk involved. Those are no longer done by a central IT organizations, but rather, they're being done by developers day in and day out. And so I think that's really where the analogy really works with cloud is, it's not so much, like clearly there's an aspect of that that is the the technical piece of tracking how much does it cost in the on demand surrounding of cloud, but there's a lot of the ownership change, or the fact that the decisions that impact that are done by developers, and they're not yet well equipped to have the insights, to have the tools, to make the right decisions with a press of button. >> Thank you Guy and absolutely, 'cause cloud is just one of the platforms you're living on, you know well from Snyk that integration between what's happening in the platform, where open source fits into it, the various parts of the organization that are there. So, you've got some good background, I'm sure, helps you're an advisor to Ohad there to helps pull through a little bit of some of those challenges. Yeah, I mean, Ed I'd love to hear just in general your viewpoint on how startups are doing at monetizing things in the era of... You've got the massive players like Amazon and Microsoft out there. >> Look, the enterprise pain is higher than ever right now, every fortune 500 is a tech company right now and they need engineers, and they're hiring engineers. In fact, many of the largest fortune 500 have more engineers than some of the tech companies. And developer productivity is number one, front and center. And if you talk to CIOs, we just hosted a panel with the CIO of Guardian Life and the CTO of Priceline. They're all looking at how do I kind of automate my tool chain? How do I get things done faster? How do I do things more scalable? And then how do I coordinate processes amongst teams. As Guy hit upon and Ohad as well, not just security, there's product design being embedded with developers as product management being embedded with developers. There's finance now, FinOps. If you're going to spend more and more in the cloud, how do you actually control that proactively before things happen versus after or months after that happens? So I think this is going to be a huge, huge opportunity on the FinOps side. And, the final thing I would say is that winning the hearts and minds of developers to win the enterprise is a tried and trued model, and I think it's going to be even more important as we move forward in the next few years, to be honest with you. >> All right, so Ohad you know I think Ed talked about those hearts and minds of developers absolutely critical. When you look at the tooling landscape out there, the challenge of course, is there's so many tools out there, that there's platform battles, there's developers that find certain things that they love, and then there's, oh, wait, can I have a general purpose solution that can help. You talk about this being the third wave, how does this kind of tie into or potentially replace some of the last generation of automation tools. How do you see yourself getting into the accounts and growing your developer base? >> I think, I have a very simple answer, because, now enterprises have two options. Either they go with productivity self-service, or they go with governance, but they cannot have both. So if it's the smaller or they have less risks, so they go with the productivity and they take those risks, take the extra costs, take that potential damage that can happen. But more we see the case of I cannot allow myself this mess, so I have to block this velocity. I have to block those developers, they cannot just orchestrate cloud resources as they wish they have to open tickets, they have to go through some manual process of approval or we see more and more developers that understand there is a challenge they built in-house env0 of self-service combined with governance solution, and they always struggle doing it well, because it's not their core business. So once you see the opportunity of a more and more customers doing a lot of investment in in-house solution that do the same thing, probably a good idea to do it, as a separate product. And also the fact that we have the visibility of different customers, we can be very early but for later on adds pattern recognition, and notice what makes sense, what is problematic and give those insights and more business logic back to the customers which is impossible for them to do if they're only isolated on their cases. So as providing the same great solution to different companies, allowing them self-service combined with governance, and then additionally, add those and Smart Insights later on. >> Yeah, I think what I love about what he said is that I don't think he even sort of said finance or cost at any time of those. So really, like you said, governance and I think you can swap governance or you can swap the kind of the entity that's doing the governance for security for all of those. And that sounds awfully familiar for Snyk, which really kind of begs the answer to be the same, it's the reason that env0 approach is promising and that it would win against competition is that it tends to be that the competition or the people that are around are focused on the governance piece, they're they're focused on just sort of the entity that is the controlling entity. I like to say that it's actually not about shift left, it's about if you want to choose a direction, it's going to be the sort of the top to bottom. So it's more about, like this governance entities, whether security or finance, they need to shift from a controlling mindset that is top down that is like this dictatorship of sort of telling you what you should and shouldn't do to more of a bottom up element and allowing the teams the people in the trenches people actually make decisions to make correct decisions, and in this case, correct decisions from a financial perspective. And then alongside that, the governing entity, they need to switch to being a supportive entity an enabling entity and I think that transition will happen across many aspects of sort of software development and definitely anything that requires that type of governance from from outside of the development process today that is to change. >> Yeah, to chime in and add to Guys point, development is so important, it touches every aspect of an organization. So I always think about it as almost a collaborative workflow layer versus being reliant on kind of one control entity. Great developers always want to move fast. But, how do you kind of build that collaborative workflow and I think that Ohad in env0 is providing that for the environment and finance. Guys doing it for security. And there's lots of other opportunities out there, like privacy as well. And I wouldn't be surprised if finance folks start getting embedded with development at some point just like security is, or design is, product management is as well, because that is probably one of the highest costs around right now for many companies, and they're all trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding much earlier. >> Yeah, it's been lots of discussion, of course, we kind of go beyond DevOps, I think FinOps is in there. Ohad you have a favorite term that you've had from your advisors yet, how you categorize what you're doing. Any final words on kind of that organizational dynamic which we know so often it's the technology can be the easy part, it's getting everybody in the org, pulling in the same direction. >> Yeah, I think I'm looking at maybe a physical metaphor, or just an example, if you just enter a developer's room, you might see a screen TV there with some APM Datadog, New Relic Metrics, developers care about performance. They know very early if they did something wrong. And now they see more and more in those dashboards, in the developers rooms, things like Snyk to make sure you're not putting any bad open source package, which has security or ability. What we believe is that now they don't have the right tools, the right product that they can be part of the responsibility, of course, and that's like somebody else's problem. In other rooms, you have those TVs, those screens that show what is the cost, and maybe only later on in the waterfall kind of way you try to isolate and root cause analysis on what went wrong, but there is no good reason why those graphs of the past should be in the same rooms next to the APM and the Snyks and to prevent those as early as possible, maybe to change the discussion and build more trust between the developers that now seem not to care about the cost because they used not to care like 10 years ago when we used to have is called Apex-Cloud. The VMware or even EC2 Instances with the predicted pricing, that's all school. Now you have auto scaling Kubernetes, you have Lambda those kind of things you pay per usage. So the possibility for engineers to know how much their code is about to cost to the organization is very challenging now. If we tie from the developer up to, the financial operations, we will provide better service, and just better business value for our customer. >> Awesome, so final question I have for you, and Ohad I'm going to have you go last on this one is you kind of painted the picture of where things are going to go. So give us what success look like, Ed, start with you, give us out 12 to 24 months as to env0 in this wave as what should we be looking for? >> Success to me would be that every large enterprise has this on their budget line item as a must have. And the market is still early and evolving right now, but I have no doubt in my mind, it's going to happen. And as you hear about many large enterprises saying that we were in the second inning of cloud migration now we're in the fourth. That is what success will be and I know it's going to happen faster than we all thought. >> I'll take the developer angle to it, I think success is really when developers are delighted, or sort of they feel they're building better software by using env0 and by factoring this aspect of quality into their daily activities. And I think a lot of that comes down to ease of use. Like, I kind of encourage folks to sort of try out the env0 and see the cost calculation, it's all about making it easy. So what excites me is really around that type of success where it's so easy that it's embedded into their sort of daily activities, and that they're happy it's not a forced thing. It's something they've accepted and like having as part of their software development process. >> I fully agree with both Ed in Guy, but I want to add on on a personal note, that one of the reasons we started env0 is because we saw developers quitting jobs at some places. And the reason for that was that they didn't give them self-service, they didn't empower those developers, they were blocked by DevOps, they needed to open tickets, to do trivial things. And this frustration is just a bigger motivation for us to solve. So we want to reduce this frustration. We want developers to be happy and productive, and do what they need to do, and not getting blocked by others. So that's, I think, another way to look at it, to make sure that those developers are really making good use out of their time and going back home at the end of the day, and feeling that they did what they were paid for, not for waiting for others to locate some cloud resources for them. >> All right, well, Ohad want to wish you the best, absolutely. Some of the early things that we've seen sometimes they're the tools that help, we've been talking gosh I remember 15, 20 years about breaking down the silos between various parts of the organization, some of the tools give you different viewpoints into what you're doing, help have some of the connection and hopefully some empathy as to what the various pieces are there. You really highlighted there's nothing worse than I'm not being appreciated for the work I'm doing, or they don't understand the challenges that I'm going through. So, congratulations on env0. We look forward to following going forward and definitely hope being part your customers in the future. Thanks so much. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> All right, and Guy really appreciate your perspectives on this thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having them. >> All right, be sure to check out theCUBE.net where you can find all of the events we're doing online these days, of course, where there's a huge back catalog of what we have in the thousands of interviews that we've done. I'm Stuart Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from New York, it's theCube! Covering AWS Global Summit 2019, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, we're here at the Javits Center in New York City for AWS Summit, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost is Corey Quinn and happy to welcome to the program Scott Mullins, who's the head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development with Amazon Web Services based here in The Big Apple, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Stu, thanks for having me, Corey. >> All right so we had obviously financial services big location here in New York City. We just had FINRA on our program, had a great conversation about how they're using AWS for their environments, but give us a thumbnail if you will about your business, your customers and what you're seeing there. >> Sure, we're working with financial institutions all the way from the newest FinTech startups, all the way to organizations like FINRA, the largest exchanges and brokers dealers like Nasdaq, as well as insurers and the largest banks. And I've been here for five years and in that time period I actually went from being a customer speaking at the AWS Summit here in the Javits Center on stage like Steve Randich was today to watching more and more financial institutions coming forward, talking about their use in the cloud. >> Yeah before we get into technology, one of the biggest trends of moving to cloud is I'm moving from CapEx more to OpEx and oh my gosh there's uncertainty because I'm not locking in some massive contract that I'm paying up front or depreciating over five years but I've got flexibility and things are going to change. I'm curious what you're seeing as the financial pieces of how people both acquire and keep on the books what they're doing. >> Yeah it can be a little bit different, right, then what most people are used to. They're used to kind of that muscle memory and that rhythm of how you procured technology in the past and there can be a stage of adjustment, but cost isn't really the thing that people I think look to the most when it comes to cloud today, it's all about agility and FINRA is a great example. Steve has talked about over and over again over the last several years how they were able to gain such business agility and actually to do more, the fact that they're now processing 155 billion market events every night and able to run all their surveillance routines. That's really indicative of the value that people are looking for. Being able to actually get products to market faster and reducing development cycles from 18 months to three months, like Allianz, one of our customers over in Europe has been able to do. Being able to go faster I think actually trumps cost from the standpoint of what that biggest value driver that we're seeing our customers going after in financial services. >> We're starting to see such a tremendous difference as far as the people speaking at these keynotes. Once upon a time you had Netflix and folks like that on stage telling a story about how they're using cloud to achieve all these amazing things, but when you take a step back and start blinking a little bit, they fundamentally stream movies and yes, produce some awesome original content. With banks and other financial institutions if the ATM starts spitting out the wrong number, that's a different point on the spectrum of are people going to riot in the street. I'm not saying it's further along, people really like their content but it's still a different use case with a different risk profile. Getting serious companies that have world shaking impact to trust public cloud took time and we're seeing it with places like FINRA, Capital One has been very active as far as evangelizing their use of cloud. It's just been transformative. What does that look like, from being a part of that? >> Well you know it's interesting, so you know you just said it, financial services is the business of risk management. And so to get more and when you see more and more of these financial institutions coming forward and talking about their use of cloud, what that really equates to is comfort, they've got that muscle memory now, they've probably been working with us in some way, shape or form for some great period of time and so if you look at last year, you had Dean Del Vecchio from Guardian Life Insurance come out on stage at Reinvent and say to the crowd "Hey we're a 158 year old insurance company but we've now closed our data center and we're fully on AWS and we've completed the transformation of our organization". The year before you saw Goldman Sachs walk out and say "Yeah we've been working with AWS for about four years now and we're actually using them for some very interesting use cases within Goldman Sachs". And so typically what you've seen is that over the course of about a two year to sometimes a four year time period, you've got institutions that are working deeply with us, but they're not talking about it. They're gaining that muscle memory, they're putting those first use cases to begin to scale that work up and then when they're ready man, they're ready to talk about it and they're excited to talk about it. What's interesting though is today we're having this same summit that we're having here in Cape Town in Africa and we had a customer, Old Mutual, who's one of the biggest insurers there, they just started working with us in earnest back in May and they were on stage today, so you're seeing that actually beginning to happen a lot quicker, where people are building that muscle memory faster and they're much more eager to talk about it. You're going to see that trend I think continue in financial services over the next few years so I'm very excited for future summits as well as Reinvent because the stories that we're going to see are going to come faster. You're going to see more use cases that go a lot deeper in the industry and you're going to see it covering a lot more of the industry. >> It's very much not, IT is no longer what people think of in terms of Tech companies in San Francisco building products. It's banks, it's health care and these companies are transitioning to become technology companies but when your entire, as you mentioned, the entire industry becomes about risk management, it's challenging sometimes to articulate things when you're not both on the same page. I was working with a financial partner years ago at a company I worked for and okay they're a financial institution, they're ready to sign off on this but before that they'd like to tour US East one first and validate that things are as we say they are. The answer is yeah me too, sadly, you folks have never bothered to invite me to tour an active AZ, maybe next year. It's challenging to I guess meet people where they are and speak the right language, the right peace for a long time. >> And that's why you see us have a financial services team in the first place, right? Because your financial services or health care or any of the other industries, they're very unique and they have a very specific language and so we've been very focused on making sure that we speak that language that we have an understanding of what that industry entails and what's important to that industry because as you know Amazon's a very customer obsessed organization and we want to work backwards from our customers and so it's been very important for us to actually speak that language and be able to translate that to our service teams to say hey this is important to financial services and this is why, here's the context for that. I think as we've continued to see more and more financial institutions take on that technology company mindset, I'm a technology company that happens to run a bank or happens to run an exchange company or happens to run an insurance business, it's actually been easier to talk to them about the services that we offer because now they have that mindset, they're moving more towards DevOps and moving more towards agile. And so it's been really easy to actually communicate hey, here are the appropriate changes you have to make, here's how you evolve governance, here's how you address security and compliance and the different levels of resiliency that actually improve from the standpoint of using these services. >> All right so Scott, back before I did this, I worked for some large technology suppliers and there were some groups on Wall Street that have huge IT budgets and IT staffs and actually were very cutting edge in what they were building, in what they were doing and very proud of their IT knowledge, and they were like, they have some of the smartest people in the industry and they spend a ton of money because they need an edge. Talking about transactions on stock markets, if I can translate milliseconds into millions of dollars if I can act faster. So you know, those companies, how are they moving along to do the I need to build it myself and differentiate myself because of my IT versus hey I can now have access to all the services out there because you're offering them with new ones every day, but geez how do I differentiate myself if everybody can use some of these same tools. >> So that's my background as well and so you go back that and milliseconds matter, milliseconds are money, right? When it comes to trading and actually building really bespoke applications on bespoke infrastructure. So I think what we're seeing from a transitional perspective is that you still have that mindset where hey we're really good at technology, we're really good at building applications. But now it's a new toolkit, you have access to a completely new toolkit. It's almost like The Matrix, you know that scene where Neo steps into that white room and hey says "I need this" and then the shelves just show up, that's kind how it is in the cloud, you actually have the ability to leverage the latest and greatest technologies at your fingertips when you want to build and I think that's something that's been a really compelling thing for financial institutions where you don't have to wait to get infrastructure provisioned for you. Before I worked for AWS, I worked for large financial institutions as well and when we had major projects that we had to do that sometimes had a regulatory implication, we were told by our infrastructure team hey that's going to be six months before we can actually get your dev environment built so you can actually begin to develop what you need. And actually we had to respond within about thirty days and so you had a mismatch there. With the cloud you can provision infrastructure easily and you have an access to an array of services that you can use to build immediately. And that means value, that means time to market, that means time to answering questions from customers, that means really a much faster time to answering questions from regulatory agencies and so we're seeing the adoption and the embrace of those services be very large and very significant. >> It's important to make sure that the guardrails are set appropriately, especially for a risk managed firm but once you get that in place correctly, it's an incredible boost of productivity and capability, as opposed to the old crappy way of doing governance of oh it used to take six weeks to get a server in so we're going to open a ticket now whenever you want to provision an instance and it only takes four, yay we're moving faster. It feels like there's very much a right way and a wrong way to start embracing cloud technology. >> Yeah and you know human nature is to take the run book you have today and try to apply it to tomorrow and that doesn't always work because you can use that run book and you'll get down to line four and suddenly line four doesn't exist anymore because of what's happened from a technological change perspective. Yeah I think that's why things like AWS control tower and security hub, which are those guardrails, those services that we announced recently that have gone GA. We announced them a couple of weeks ago at Reinforce in Boston. Those are really interesting to financial services customers because it really begins to help automate a lot of those compliance controls and provisioning those through control tower and then monitoring those through security hub and so you've seen us focus on how do we actually make that easier for customers to do. We know that risk management, we know that governance and controls is very important in financial services. We actually offer our customers a way to look from a country specific angle, add the different countries and the rule sets and the requirements that exist in those countries and how you map those to our controls and how you map those into your own controls and all the considerations that you have, we've got them on our public website. If you went to atlas.aws right now, that's our compliance center, you could actually pick the countries you're interested in and we'll have that mapping for you. So you'll see us continue to invest in things like that to make that much easier for customers to actually deploy quickly and to evolve those governance frameworks. >> And things like with Artifact, where it's just grab whatever compliance report you need, submit it and it's done without having to go through a laborious process. It's click button, receive compliance in some cases. >> If you're not familiar with it you can go into the AWS console and you've got Artifact right there and if you need a SOC report or you need some other type of artifact, you can just download it right there through the console, yeah it's very convenient. >> Yeah so Scott you know we talked about some of the GRC pieces in place, what are you seeing trends out there kind of globally, you know GDRP was something that was on everybody's mind over the last year or so. California has new regulations that are coming in place, so anything specific in your world or just the trends that you're seeing that might impact our environments-- >> I think that the biggest trends I would point to are data analytics, data analytics, data analytics, data analytics. And on top of that obviously machine learning. You know, data is the lifeblood of financial services, it's what makes everything go. And you can look at what's happening in this space where you've got companies like Bloomberg and Refinitiv who are making their data products available on AWS so you can get B-Pipe on AWS today, you can also get the elektron platform from Refintiv and then what people are trying to do in relation to hey I want to organize my data, I want to make it much easier to actually find value in data, both either from the standpoint of regulatory reporting, as you heard Steve talk about on stage today. FINRA is building a very large data repository that they have to from the standpoint of a regulatory perspective with CAT. Broker dealers have to actually feed the CAT and so they are also worried about here in the US, how do I actually organize my data, get all the elements I have to report to CAT together and actually do that in a very efficient way. So that's a big data analytic project. Things that are helping to make that much easier are leg formations, so we came up with leg formation last year and so you've got many financial institutions that are looking at how do you make building a data leg that much easier and then how do you layer analytics on top of that, whether it's using Amazon elastic map reduce or EMR to actually run regulatory reporting jobs or how do I begin to leverage machine learning to actually make my data analytics from a standpoint of trade surveillance or fraud detection that much more enriched and actually looking for those anomalies rather than just looking for a whole bunch of false positives. So data analytics I think is what I would point to as the biggest trend and how to actually make data more useful and how to get to data insights faster. >> On the one end it seems like there's absolutely a lot of potential in this, on the other it feels in many cases with large scale data analytics, it's we have all these tools for machine learning and the rest that we can wind up passing out to you but you need to figure out what to do with them, how to make it work and it's unclear outside of a few specific use cases and I think you've alluded to a couple of those how to take in a typical business that maybe doesn't have an enormous pile of data and start applying machine learning to it in a way that makes intelligent sense. That feels right now like a storytelling failure to some extent industry wide. We're starting to see some stories emerge but it still feels a little "Gold Rush"-y to some extent. >> Yeah I would say, and my advice would be don't try to boil the ocean or don't try to boil the data leg, meaning you want to do machine learning, you've got a great amount of earnestness about that but picture use case, really hone in on what you're trying to accomplish and work backwards from that. And we offer tooling that can be really helpful in that, you know with stage maker you can train your models and you can actually make data science available to a much broader array of people than just your data scientists. And so where we see people focusing first, is where it matters to their business. So if you've got a regulatory obligation to do surveillance or fraud detection, those are great use cases to start with. How do I enhance my existing surveillance or fraud detection, so that I'm not just wading again through a sea of false positives. How do I actually reduce that workload for a human analyst using machine learning. That's a one step up and then you can go from there, you can actually continue to work deeper into the use cases and say okay how do I treat those parameters, how do I actually look for different things that I'm used to with the rules based systems. You can also look at offering more value to customers so with next best offer with Amazon Personalize, we now have encapsulated the service that we use on the amazon.com retail site as a service that we offer to customers so you don't have to build all that tooling yourself, you can actually just consume Personalize as a service to help with those personalized recommendations for customers. >> Scott, really appreciate all the updates on your customers in the financial services industry, thanks so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here guys, thanks for having me. >> All right for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more here at AWS Summit in New York City 2019, thanks as always for watching theCube.

(light electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> We are back in Las Vegas here at AWS re:Invent alone with Rebecca Knight and I'm John Walls and I know what you're thinking. Email, oh my god, email. The avalanche, the problems that are causes here folks in IT. Well, I tell you what, Chris McFadden is here to solve your problems. (mumbles) engineering at SparkPost. Chris good to see you this afternoon, thanks for joining us. Good to see you, I'm happy to be on The Cube. >> Yeah, great. >> It's my third time at re:Invent, but first time on The Cube so happy to be here. >> Welcome. >> So a Cube rookie. >> (laughs) >> We ever find, to leave you with it on the way out, remind me to get it for you. Alright, so tell us about SparkPost first off, about, we talk about email, what your primary focus is and just the challenges that you are trying to solve to your clients. >> Sure, SparkPost is the leading email delivery provider. So our customers send over five trillion emails a year. That's over 37% of the world's commercial email. That's obviously a lot of email. So we're focused on B2C email and what that means is that any app who has the need to send email, we help with getting that email on time into the inbox. That really helps product managers and product teams with ensuring that they can get the right performance, the analytics and also the human services to make sure that they can get customers to adopt their service, grow engagement and ultimately revenues. >> I understand you have a new product, SparkPost Signals, tell our viewers a little bit more. >> Yeah, so I'm very excited to talk about SparkPost Signal. So as everybody knows, your email is super important to people, and with email being such a high ROI for most companies, when you have a different email performance that could really impact a company's revenue as well. So I'm excited to talk about SparkPost Signals because what that could really help with is being able to provide some dashboards and tools so that you can have more data driven predictive, actionable insight so that ordinary customers can have that kind of email expertise at their fingertips really to be able to then boost their performance. So I can certainly talk about some of the particular challenges that this would solve for people. So in particular, we have a health score and also a spam chart reporting. So for example, what could happen is, if you or maybe somebody in the organization that you don't even know about, they could go out and acquire an email list. More email addresses, the better. >> Sure. >> The next thing you know, you end up landing on spam traps, you're getting blocked, you're email's not going out. So it's better off to get early notice about whether there's some sort of problem so then you can actually react and correct the problem before it starts impacting your business. >> So is it a delivery problem or challenge or is it a firewall challenge or problem. Kind of, how do you balance that out because you, it seems like it's a little bit of both actually or it could be a little bit of both. >> So email is a very much an open network. There's no one particular tech company really owns it so anybody can send any email. That's why most email that's sent is actually spam. So on the ISP side, these are the internet service providers who are Gmail or Hotmail that are actually receiving the email, they are very protective of their users. So what that means is that if you buy email addresses or you're sending too much to people and they say, I don't want this email, then the ISPs can actually say, you know, you're doing this too much, you're being abusive and we're actually going to start blocking you so none of your email is actually then going to get delivered. So none of your password resets, none of your auto-confirmations, none of your marketing email. So you have to be very, you have to have very good email sending practices otherwise you run into trouble. So for most customers from most companies we work with, they're expertise is elsewhere, you know. They're in social media, they're in banking, >> Marketing >> whatever it is. They don't necessarily know all the best ways to be able to manage their email streams. >> And yet email is mission critical to their businesses. >> Exactly >> This product launches in January but you've already been testing the waters a bit with some of your customers. What are you hearing, what are they saying? >> So we've heard a lot of very good things. The usual response from customers is when can we get it, you know. So we're frantically working to roll this out. But we've actually, when we were doing the demos with customers, we were actually showing them real data so this wasn't hypothetical. We were actually showing them real data with their own health scores, with their spam trap reports. Also showing, which is really interesting, their engagement cohorts. So what that means is that if customers, or companies that work us are not sending to their most engaged users but are also sending to users that don't actually engage much at all, then that can actually hurt their overall deliverability and engagement so when we show them these cohort reports, showing them that if you actually are sending more to your more engaged users, ultimately your engagement and revenue's going to go up. So we've actually worked, even before Signal is a product, we've worked with customers to do this. We have some very high-profile customers who've actually reduces the volume of email they've sent through is but their actual engagement has gone through the roof as well as their revenue. We've also worked with customers and that's more on the engagement cohort reporting. On the other side, when it comes to span trap reporting, we've had customers who've actually run into problems where they inadvertently started emailing to addresses that are on spam traps. Spam traps if you don't know are essentially bogus email addresses that are out there, like honeypots and if you email them, then it tells the spam trap owner that you obviously didn't get a real person to subscribe to this or to opt in so you're obviously following bad practices and I'll report you to maybe a blacklist which will then prevent all of your email being delivered. So we were able to work with that customer to really identify the rate of spam trap hits that they have and they were able to clean up their own practices based on that and then get back in business and actually have better engagement for what they're doing. >> So you're here at AWS, so there's a public cloud play here somewhere. Is this about a customer migration, are you educating people and bringing them along as well for the public cloud experience. I mean, what are you doing here. >> Right, so we have our cloud services and that's built on AWS. We've been in AWS for over four years now and we love coming here and learning about a lot of the new technology. We also have a booth here, we're providing our own services. What we also have is that ewe had an on-premise product, Momentum and PowerMTA and both of those products are heavily used throughout the industry for sending email. So we have a number of customers who are coming to us and saying, we're looking to move to the cloud. So we can either help them move their mail streams to SparkPost which can be very convenient or if they want to continue to run their own MTAs and some of their own infrastructure, possibly maybe they're a bank or maybe it's just not the right time for them then we're able to look at other options. Potentially things like hybrid analytics and that's a way for them to be able to get the addition analytics and things like SparkPost Signals but without actually moving everything. But I'm definitely very encouraged. Yesterday's keynote had Guardian and that's quite an ambitious project to be able to move to the cloud so I'm very excited. We're also, SparkPost is one of their SAS providers that they chose to use in part of their migration. So rather than continue to try to run their own infrastructure, they said, here's an API, I trust SparkPost, they've got the right security, support services to be able to get the job done. >> I'm curious about the future and sort of, will email always be an integral part of doing business for companies and how SparkPost is thinking about its future business model. >> Right, so email's been dead about 20 years. >> Supposedly, that's what they keep saying. (laughs) >> However, every year, email volumes keep growing. Everybody has an email address, really it's the preferred method of communication even among millennials nowadays. Emails also again, it's an open platform so it's not controlled by the big tech companies so it's very ubiquitous. It's also a good system of record and also there's certain things that don't really make sense to send over push or SMS. So email continues to be a (mumbles) for companies both in triggered email as well as marketing email. So we have a number of customers who are in these next generation martech vendors who are providing even more services. They use us as the back end for doing that delivery but they're seeing even more demand for again, on the marketing side and again, there's more and more apps being built. There's more and more opportunities there. They all need to send email and we see certainly with SparkPost Signals and otherwise, that with the smart use of data, there really becomes an even better opportunity to grow those relationships with your customers. So rather than just being a transaction, that's an opportunity for a relationship building interaction. >> A value add. >> Right. >> Well, five trillion emails, I think half of them, I think I've sent in half of those these days so maybe you and I aught to talk 'cause (mumbles) Thanks for the time. Thanks for coming here on The Cube and again, leave you with a parting gift, please, >> Thank you, I appreciate it >> by all means. Chris McFadden joined us here and we'll be back with more from AWS re:invent, we are live on The Cube from Las Vegas. (light electronic music)

(futuristic electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas with AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent 2018's CUBE coverage. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage here on the ground floor. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years we've been coming to re:Invent. Every year except for the first year. What a progression. We got great news. Always raising the bar, as they say at Amazon. This year, big announcements. One of them is blockchain. Really kind of laying out early formation of how they're going to roll out, thinking about blockchain. We're here to talk about here, with Rahul Pathak, who's the GM of analytics, and data lakes, and blockchain. Managing that. And Shawn Bice who's the vice president of non-relational databases. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> I wish my voice was a little bit stronger. I love this segment. You know, we've been doing blockchain. We've been following one of the big events in the industry. If you separate out the whole token ICO scam situation, token economics is actually a great business model opportunity. Blockchain is an infrastructure, a decentralized infrastructure, that's great. But it's early. Day one really for you guys in a literal sense. How are you guys doing blockchain? Take a minute to explain the announcement because there are use cases, low-hanging use cases, that look a lot like IoT and supply chain that people are interested in. So take a minute to explain the announcements and what it means. >> Absolutely, so when we began looking at blockchain and blockchain use cases, we really realized there are two things that customers are trying to do. One case is really keep an immutable record of transactions and in a scenario where centralized trust is okay. And for that we have Amazon QLDB, which is an immutable cryptographically verifiable ledger. And then in scenarios where customers really wanted the decentralized trust and the smart contracts, that's where blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum play a role. But they're just super complicated to use and that's why we built Managed Blockchain, to make it easy to stand up, scale, and monitor these networks, so customers can focus on building applications. And in terms of use cases on the decentralized side, it's really quite diverse. I mean, we've got a customer, Guardian Life Insurance, so they're looking at Managed Blockchain 'cause they have this distributed network of partners, providers, patients, and customers, and they want to provide decentralized verifiable records of what's taking place. And it's just a broad set of use cases. >> And then we saw in the video this morning, I think it was Indonesian farmers, right? Wasn't that before the keynote? Did you see that? It was good. >> I missed that one. >> Yeah, so they don't have bank accounts. >> Oh, got it. >> And they got a reward system, so they're using the blockchain to reward farmers to participate. >> So a lot of people ask the question is, why do I need blockchain? Why don't you just put in database? So there are unique, which is true by the way, 'cause latency's an issue. (chuckles) Certainly, you might want to avoid blockchain in the short term, until that gets fixed. Assume that every one will get fixed over time, but what are some of the use cases where blockchain actually is relevant? Can you be specific because that's really people starting to make their selection criteria on. Look, I still use a database. I'm going to have all kinds of token and models around, but in a database. Where is the blockchain specifically resonating right now? >> I'll take a shot at this or we can do it together, but when you think of QLDB, it's not that customers are asking us for a ledger database. What they were really saying is, hey, we'd like to have this complete immutable, cryptographically verifiable trail of data. And it wasn't necessarily a blockchain conversation, wasn't necessarily a database conversation, it was like, I really would like to have this complete cyrptographic verifiable trail of data. And it turns out, as you sort of look at the use cases, in particular, the centralized trust scenario, QLDB does exactly that. It's not about decentralized trust. It's really about simply being able to have a database that when you write to that database, you write a transaction to the database, you can't change it. You know, a typical database people are like, well, hey, wait a second, what does immutable really mean? And once you get people to understand that once that transaction is written to a journal, it cannot be changed at all and attached, then all of a sudden there's that breakthrough moment of it being immutable and having that cryptographic trail. >> And the advantage relative to a distributive blockchain is performance, scale, and all the challenges that people always say. >> Yeah, exactly. Like with QLDB, you can find it's going to be two to three times faster cause you're not doing that distributing consensus. >> How about data lakes? Let's talk about data lakes. What problem were you guys trying to solve with the data lakes? There's a lot of them, but. (chuckles) >> That's a great question. So, essentially it's been hard for customers to set up data lakes 'cause you have to figure out where to get data from, you have to land it in S3, you've got to secure it, you've then got to secure every analytic service that you've got, you might have to clean your data. So with lake formation, what we're trying to do is make it super easy to set up data lakes. So we have blueprints for common databases and data sources. We bring that data into an S3 data lake and we've created a central catalog for that data where customers can define granular access policies with the table, and the column, and the row level. We've also got ML-based data cleansing and data deduplication. And so now customers can just use lake formation, set up data lakes, curate their data, protect it in a single place, and have those policies that enforce across all of the analytic services that they might use. >> So does it help solve the data swamp problem, get more value out of the data lake? And if so, how? >> Absolutely, so the way it does that is by automatically cataloging all datas that comes in. So we can recognize what the data is and then we allow customers to add business metadata to that so they can tag this as customer data, or PII data, or this is my table of sales history. And that then becomes searchable. So we automatically generate a catalog as data comes in and that addresses the, what do I have in my data lake problem. >> Okay, so-- >> Go ahead. >> So, Rahul, you're the general manager. Shawn, what's your job, what do you do? >> So our team builds all the non-relational databases at Amazon. So DynamoDB, Neptune, ElastiCache, Timestream, which you'll hear about today, QLDB, et cetera. So all those things-- >> Beanstalk too, Elastic Beanstalk? >> No we do not build Beanstalk. >> Okay, we're a customer of DynamoDB, by the way. >> Great! >> We're happy customers. >> That's great! >> And we use ElastiCache, right? >> Yup, the elastic >> There you go! >> surge still has it. >> So-- >> Haven't used Neptune yet. >> What's the biggest problem stigmas that you guys are trying to raise the bar on? What's the key focus as you get this new worlds and use cases coming together? These are new use cases. How are you guys evaluating it? How are you guys raising the bar? >> You know, that's a really good question you ask. What I've found in my experience is developers that have been building apps for a long time, most people are familiar with relational databases. For years we've been building apps in that context, but when you kind of look at how people are building apps today, it's very different than how they did in the past. Today developer do what they do best. They take an application, a big application, break it down into smaller parts, and they pick the right tool for the right job. >> I think the game developer mark is going to be a canary in the coal mine for developers, and it's a good spot for data formation in these kind of unstructured, non-relational scenarios. Okay, now all this engagement data, could be first person shooter, whatever it is, just throw it, I need to throw it somewhere, and I'll get to it and let it be ready to be worked on by analytics. >> Well, yeah, if you think about that gamer scenario, think about if you and I are building a game, who knows if there's going to be one user, ten players, or 10 million, or 100 million. And if we had 100 million, it's all about the performance being steady. At 100 million or ten. >> You need a fleet of servers. (John laughing) >> And a fleet of servers! >> Have you guys played Fortnite? Or do you have kids that play? >> I look over my kid's shoulder. I might play it. >> I've played, but-- >> They run all their analytics on us. They've got about 14 petabytes in S3 using S3 as their data lake, with EMR and Athena for analytics. >> We got a season-- >> I mean, think about that F1 example on keynotes today. Great example of insights. We apply that kind of concept to Fortnite, by the way, Fortnite has theCUBE in there. It's always a popular term. We noticed that, the hastag, #wherestheCUBEtoday. (Rahul chuckling) I couldn't resist. But the analytics you could get out of all that data, every interaction, all that gesture data. I mean, what are some of the things they're doing? Can you share how they're using the new tech to scale up and get these insights? >> Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing a bunch of things. I mean, one is just the health of the systems when you've got hundreds of millions of players. You need to know if you're up and it's working. The second is around engagement. What games, what collection of people work well together. And then it's what incentives they create in the game, what power ups people buy that lead to continued engagement, 'cause that defines success over the long term. What gets people coming back? And then they have an offline analytics process where they're looking at reporting, and history, and telemetry, so it's very comprehensive. So you're exactly right about gaming and analytics being a huge consumer of databases. >> Now, Shawn, didn't you guys have hard news today on DynamoDB, or? >> Yeah today we announce DynamoDB On-Demand, so customers that basically have workloads that could spike up and then all of a sudden drop off, a lot of these customers basically don't even want to think about capacity planning. They don't want to guess. They just want to basically pay only for what they're using. So we announced DynamoDB On-Demand. The developer experience is simple. You create a table and you putyour read/write capacity in the on-demand mode, and you literally only pay for the request that your workload puts through system. >> It's a great service actually. Again, making life easier for customers. Lower the bill, manage capacity, make things go better, faster, enables value. >> It's all about improving the customer experience. >> Alright, guys, I really appreciate you coming in. I'm really interested in following what you guys do in the future. I'm sure a lot of people watching will be as well, as analytics and AI become a real part of, as you guys move the stack and create that API model for, what you did for infrastructure, for apps. A total game changer, we believe. We're interested in following you guys, I'm sure others are. Where are you going to be this year? What's your focus? Where can people find out more besides going to Amazon site? Is there certain events you're going to be at? How do people get more information and what's the plans? >> There's actually some sessions on lake formation, blockchain that we're doing here. We'll have a continuous stream of summits, so as the AWS Summit calendar for 2019 gets published that's a great place to go for more information. And then just engage with us either on social media or through the web and we'll be happy to follow up. >> Alright, well, we'll do a good job on amplifying. A lot of people are interested, certainly blockchain, super hot. But people want better, stronger, more stable, but they want the decentralized immutable database model. >> Cryptographically verifiable! >> And see as everyone knows. >> Scalable! >> Anyone who wants to keep those, they talk about CUBE coins but I haven't said CUBE coin once on this episode. Wait for those tokens to be released soon. More coverage after this short break, stay with us. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. 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>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. (echoing percussive music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests this segment, we have Brian Bohan, the AABG global business lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, welcome back to theCUBE, managing director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah. >> So I want to start with you, Chris. It's been three years since Accenture and AWS announced this relationship, bring us up to speed on what's happened in those three years. >> Yeah, it's been a fast-paced three years. We've seen AWS continue to mature the platform, grow their number of services, we've seen our customers go from looking at just lift and shifting workloads at AWS, to now doing full cloud native services, machine learning, containerization, all the really cool stuff they can do on the platform. So for the business group, we've gone through that journey and that maturity as well. We started very focused on things like lift and shift migrations, and cloud management, and investing in assets and capabilities, now to really focus on innovation, and helping our customers drive the innovation on top of that platform. >> I want to get into that, but you've also recently said you're going to continue to expand this partnership, Brian-- >> Mhmm. >> And so what does this mean? >> Yeah, I mean just kind of keying off some of the things Chris talked about, right, is that, and I think we've talked about innovation specifically, really where we're going to focus, and we're also going to talk about vertical and industry solutions, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later. But, even if we looked at where we've had a lot of success in the mass migrations, moving enterprise applications like SAP to AWS, what we're seeing now, customers are in their maturity curve, where they're there in the cloud, and now they're asking what can I do? Right, so I have SAP, I have my core systems in the cloud, and so we're investing heavily, as Chris mentioned, in some of the modern technologies, so application modernization, cloud native development. Andy in his keynote today talked a lot about database freedom, so now that you're in the cloud, how can we start looking at your database portfolios, start using some RDS or Aurora, some other native AWS services. So, these are way that we can innovate with our customers that you maybe typically don't think about, but are critically important, and I would say on the other side, and what Chris mentioned as well, is the investments we're making in machine learning, and in AI, and in analytics, and edge computing. And then really at the core of that is data, right. And what we find, with these kinds of projects, is you need to move very, very quickly, and you also need to prove out the concepts. So these are two important things, and so what we're doing is a big investment in the partnership, is investing something we call Launchpad. So this a mechanism in Amazon parlance, we can think about it as two pizza teams, so several nodes of two pizza teams around the world, and these folks are 100% focused on driving innovation, and driving POCs, and pilots, and prototyping, and asset development, in the innovation areas around AWS machine learning, analytics, connect, so new modern customers care capabilities. So that's really important, and then, kind of related to that, very closely, is our innovation studios. So these team will be located across the world, some of them in or around liquid studios that Accenture has. So the innovation studio is a place where we can bring clients to get together, and we can execute on working backward, and ideation, and design thinking sections, so we can take it from an idea to actually a concrete, implementable set of requirements, and then use that Launchpad team to execute very quickly. So this is something we're really excited about. >> So interested, you bring clients into the studio. Now, why is that so important, to get everyone in the room together? >> Now I think what we've seen is it gets them out of their day-to-day environment, right? And in an innovative environment, where they can go through that innovation process, come up with those ideas, and then very quickly see them in reality, versus sitting and writing a bunch of requirements down and things like that. So the whole design thinking process and going through that, we find works very well, in a very innovative studio type format. >> So how does it work, I mean a client comes-- >> Yep. >> You're together, Accenture, AWS, together, with the clients-- >> Yep. >> saying what are your problems, and so how do you help them learn to think expansively about what their biggest challenges are? >> So we start with some design thinking workshops. So thinking about what they're trying to achieve, not the technology, right, we get the technology, but what they're trying to do, how they want to think about the problem differently, and we do the working backwards. So, idea is, where do you want to end up, either press release, or something like that, that documents where they want to be. Then we work backwards, at leverage the design thinking, and then going to the idea-zation phase, look at what will work, what might not work, and then how technology, we can use the AWS technology. So the technologists are there, they say, "Oh if we can go use these three services "off the platform, we can actually deliver this," and take advantage of this data that you may not have had before to help to answer that problem. >> And the technologists are also saying, "If we can leverage these three existing technologies, "we can also build some more stuff." >> Yeah, and I think Andy was again hitting home, the right tool for the right job, and as Chris mentioned, we don't start with the technology, we really start with the problem. And what's really cool about this is that Accenture's gotten very mature and developed and deep capabilities through their digital practice, around design thinking, working backward. And when folks come visit Amazon, one of our most popular EBC or executive briefing sessions, is around Amazon culture, and how does Amazon innovate. So we programatize that, as well, into our working backward methodology, that we work with clients, and what we've done is we've married these two things together. So, we're able now to bring the best of both worlds, and help our customers through that journey, getting from idea to actual realization. And then, as you saw, we now have I don't know how many services, 130 plus services, there's plenty of things in the bag that our technologists can then start working together with the clients to solve those problems. So it's really exciting. >> How do we innovate, that's sort of the question of the hour, the question of the era. At a company like Amazon that is now so big, but still is famous for it's start up mentality, and it's ability to innovate and deliver products that customers don't know they need, until they until they (Rebecca laughs) have them in their little hands, how do you do it? I mean, what is the secret sauce? >> So, I mean, there's a few things, and I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I think culture, we've talked about it a little bit, is hugely important, and you just can't graft on or import culture. You saw Guardian's CIO talk today how important it was. They didn't start with technology to cloud, they started with actually redesigning their work spaces and how their teams work together, that's super important. So at Amazon, we work in what we call two pizza teams. So every team is fairly autonomic, fairly small. They interact with other teams, but they can make decisions autonomously, and move fast. And then the other thing that we reward moving fast, is if you're going to move fast, you're also going to make some mistakes, you're going to take risks, you're going to experiment, and you're going to fail. So Jeff Bezos always likes to say, if you're not failing, then you're really not innovating. Right, so we want to controlled failures, and we want to make sure that when we are failing, it's what we call a two-way door, meaning that if we fail, we can come back through the door, and do it again. We haven't committed ourselves down a path that we can't retreat. So, you know, again, small teams, our culture, a culture that also rewards risk-taking, controlled risk-taking and failure, and that's also I think why getting us in the cloud is so important because now we have a platform where you can spin up nodes to run your analytics and your machine learning. If it's wrong, it doesn't work, you just tear it down, and that's it, you start over. So, it's a great platform for that as well. >> Chris, what have been some of the most exciting new business ideas, models, approaches, that you've come up with; we're having a number of really fascinating guests theCUBE, what personally excites you most? >> Yeah, I think one of the things is the research life science cloud and then some of the work we've done with AWS and marketed around that. To bring the research all together to make the researchers jobs much easier, bring all that data together and get the value out of the data. I was amazed when I first got involved in that and didn't realize how much time was spent just duplicating data across different systems during the research process, and I thought that's a lot of waste of time by very, very smart people, just coding data, and by us being able to do that, it just opens up the possibilities of what research can do. And it's all about saying how can we help lives to be better, and that's something that's really doing it. Other thing is just, customer interaction. So, one of the things I've talked about and have been very excited over the last couple of years, was you know Amazon Connect, future next generation call center capabilities, again, like Brian said, as a service, you can step up it up very quickly. You don't have to go and buy PBXs and install them and go through that whole, and the the 360 relationship that you can build with those services, that customers are demanding and asking for, right? You can go into organizations that have not been known for great customer care, and now within a few days, and do 360 type customer and omni-channel, and pass off chats, and stuff like that. You know, all the things that Amazon themselves, as dot com business, are famous for, right? And they can, they can get there. So you know, those things just excite me, and I see the clients get really excited when we go and sit down and talk about that stuff. >> And how are they measuring the ROI because I mean, as you said, at a company like Merck that is doing life-saving medicine every day, it's kind of obvious, but at a company that maybe is not good with customers, and then to suddenly have this more customer-centric call center, it really can change things. So how are they measuring what they're getting out of this? >> So they're measuring the sentiment of the customers, right, which Amazon can help you do too, right? You know, so really understanding how satisfied the customers are, they can tell by the way they're talking to the reps, and listening to the recordings, and stuff like that. And see how angry they get, and how much that reduces over time, and really get there, right. They're looking at customer satisfaction, of course. >> Yeah. >> Right, and almost every call center finishes up with some type of survey, right? So looking to see how those surveys have improved. They look at call volumes, they look at how many they're able to answer via chatbot, or via text, and things like that, and how many of those a customer care rep can do at the same time. When you're on the phone, usually you can only talk to one person, but a customer care rep might be able to take four or five calls at the same time, via chat, and be able to help customers which reduces the time waiting on the phone, and the less time you wait on the phone, the happier the customer is. >> Brian, last word, what do you think we're going to be talking about at AWS 2019. >> So I think if you look at the trend that we're seeing, so as we move more into the innovation services, what also is true is that we're getting increasingly focused on industry problems, right, and Chris already mentioned one with life sciences and the research life science cloud because it's sort of a migration across industries, with some variances, but when you're talking about deep applied learning and analytics, it's going to be very specific. So I think what we're going to see next year, is a lot more things like the research life science cloud across industries, right, so we're diving deep in financial services and capital markets, and banking around things like money-laundering, and anti-fraud platforms, right? We're working across over into PNC, and insurance, on kind of completely new ways to have customers think about how they engage with their PNC insurance companies. So, as we dive deeper into this, and as we apply a lot of these up the stack innovation services, I think we're going to see a lot more really compelling, exciting business solutions specific to industry problems, and I'm just super excited about that. >> Great, well we're looking forward to seeing you >> Yeah, yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> here again. >> I'm sure we will. >> I'm looking forward to it. (Chris laughs) >> We'll be here. >> Chris, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage at the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (bouncy percussive music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's theCUBE covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Linux Foundation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in Santa Clara, California at the Open Networking Summit 2017. Really happy to be joined by my co-host for the next couple of days, Scott Raynovich. And we've been talking to a lot of providers and technical people, but now we want to talk to customers. We love talking to customers, and we're really excited to have Rashesh Jethi. He's the SVP, Head of R&D for the Americas for Amadeus, which is a big travel company. Welcome. >> Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you, Scott. >> So like I said, we'd love to talk to a practitioner. So you're out on the frontlines, you're seeing all this talk of software-defined and software-defined networking. From your point of view, how real is it, where are we on this journey? What do you see from your point of view? >> Super real. Have you searched for a flight lately? >> I have searched for a flight. >> Excellent. I'm proud to tell you that your flight search very likely was powered by Amadeus, and it's running on a software-defined data center completely. So this stuff is real. We are, I believe, one of the first companies who have actually taken this from what was a very strong academic kind of research project onto this start-up ecosystem, but we're actually out there deploying it, running real world business, using a very purposeful and deliberate software-defined strategy. >> And it's interesting because you said before we got on camera that you guys are actually very active participants in the open source movement and development of this stuff. You're not just kind of a participant waiting in the wings for this stuff to get developed. >> I mean absolutely, and to me, that's one of the reasons which if you're serious about open source, you have to use it. You can't just talk about it. You can't just say it looks like a nice idea. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty and do it. But the other thing also is you have to contribute back. I think that's a big tenet of the open source community. And we all and certainly the company, we grew up and we've seen tech evolve through the ages. And a big part, especially in the last 10 years or so, has been the open source movement, and it's contributing back. It's one of the reasons I'm here. It's one of the reasons the conference organizers invited me, is to actually talk about how we use open source and software-defined strategy for our technology. >> That's cool. So where do you run this software? You run it in private cloud, public cloud? Do you guys build your own data centers? How do you run it? >> Quick history lesson and our quick history-- >> Let's back up. First off, where is Amadeus today for people that aren't familiar with the company? >> We are actually a 30-year-old company. We are celebrating our 30th birthday this year. The company was started in the late '80s as a consortium between four leading European airlines, Lufthansa, Air France, Iberia, and Scandinavian. So we started off, which was very typical at that time, as a mainframe shop, and that's where a lot of our core systems were built. We're a big provider of technology in general to the travel industry even though we were founded by airlines. So to put it in perspective, we carry about 95% of the world's scheduled commercial seats, airline seats, on our platform. >> 95%. >> 95%, so we work with the world's-- >> Are available to purchase. Obviously, 95% of the purchases don't go through your system. >> Right. They are available. They are used by over 90,000 travel agents, retail travel agents, corporate travel, online travel. And we work with over, like I said, 700 airlines, work for their inventory. So chances are if you travel on an airplane, very good chances that our software was used to make the reservation. We also have airline ID systems and hotel ID systems, and we work with the airports. And this is where we do departure control, flight management, baggage reconciliation, a lot of the back end processes. And we started the company, essentially runs as we write our own software. We are offered as a service from day one, so we are one of the oldest software service providers in the industry. And obviously, when we got started to do that, you had to own your own infrastructure. So we are pretty good at it. We have very strong kind of technical chops. We have a large data center outside Munich Airport and a bunch of smaller data centers all over the world. And what we're doing now is really very deliberately making the journey towards a cloud, both our private cloud, so taking our own infrastructure, virtualizing it, and making it available as a service for our own applications, and then where it makes sense, to leverage public cloud infrastructures where they are available. >> So different apps in different clouds, is that-- >> Different apps in different clouds based on customer preferences. The core reservation booking engines, they are in our own private cloud because we do have a lot of regulatory security, privacy considerations. So that stuff, we keep kind of close where we can keep a very watchful eye on it, but there are a lot of transactions we are also talking about. The volume of searches has grown up, right? Obviously, Google has seen a lot of search volume. If you look at our business, it used to be when you wanted to book a flight, you'd go to a travel agent and be able to look at a bunch of flight options and you'd pick one. About 20 years ago, you call it the look to book ratios. You'd look at 10 to 20 options and you'd book one. You want to guess what it is today? >> The look to book ratio was 20 to one. That's got to be way higher. That's got to be 80 to one. >> It's more like 1,000 to one. >> 1,000 to one. >> 1,000 to one. It's partly people like you and I who have a spare moment and have a vacation in mind, and we are looking at options. But keep in mind, anything that you search, it has to come into our systems. We have to configure the journey. We have to price it. We have to make sure it's available before we offer it up to you, right? So it's very transaction and computing intensive even before it touches any of the back ends where we do core kind of booking and passenger processing. And so to handle that scale, those are the kind of very logical applications that make sense for the public cloud. And those are the ones that we've looked to move. Certainly, for customers, we are a global company. We have customers all over the world. Some customers want to have some of these systems closer to their geographic location. So we look at all use cases kind of. >> That's amazing to think of. These things have so changed behavior and the way that we interact. I assume that 20 to one was a function because you would sit down. Now you sit down at your desk, time to book that flight, and maybe you don't get it done that day. You come back two or three times. But as you said, now it's grabbing little bits of time throughout the day whenever we can. But do you get paid on a regular subscription, or do you get paid on the transaction? Has that just increased your overhead, whatever the ratio 20 to 1,000 is? >> Absolutely, no, our business model has been very consistent from day one. We get paid on the number of bookings we make and the number of people that board aircraft, I mean roughly speaking. There are smaller lines of businesses, but those are our two main revenue drivers. So we see a lot of transaction volume upfront, but it doesn't translate to a booking which logically, it won't. Yes, that's noise or revenue for us, but we still have to service that volume because that's eventually, the funnels just gotten wider. And so it makes sense to do that in the most cost efficient manner but without compromising quality, without compromising speed. I mean if you're like me, if you have to wait for more than two or three seconds, you're like, "Ah, I'm moving on." >> Oh, two seconds. It's milliseconds, isn't it? >> Absolutely. >> And by the way, I still don't always find the flight I want. So where are those extra flights? Can you provide those for your service? >> Jeff: That extra 5% those are under. >> That's very different. It's got nothing to do with open source and kind of what we're talking about here, but a lot of what you're doing in there from an engineering perspective is just looking at, for example, machine learning algorithms. And what you said is actually a very common complaint, is how do I find kind of the right sort of flights. And more importantly, if you have certain preferences with airports or airlines or loyalty programs or time of day, how do I provide you context-sensitive results? We are doing a lot of kind of core R&D work for that, but our customers are doing amazing work as well. KAYAK is one of our customers, very close to our offices in the Boston area, and they do pretty amazing work in terms of getting their context right and then applying machine learning technologies and artificial intelligence. It's very, very early days but very exciting, very promising. >> One of the cool features I like are these fare alerts. I don't know if you use them. It tells you, it predicts this is going to go up. You better book now, wait. Do you guys do that sort of thing too? >> Our customers do that. We have a very simple model. Our customers are travel agencies, online, American Express, Expedia, metasearches like KAYAK, Skyscanner, et cetera, the airlines themselves whose products we host in our system and we sell. So a lot of our engineering work is learning to offering kind of core innovation so that they can offer products for people like you and me, their customers, the best products out there. So we focus on enabling them. And then at an operational level, we try to do it in the most efficient manner and the most future proof that we can think of. >> What about security? I mean it sounds like a lot of sensitive data changing hands here, right, where are people going to sit on an airplane, where are they going. You must have incredible security demands on your data now. >> Yes. (Jeff and Scott laugh) I mean you understand, obviously, it's paramount to us. And the good news is, look, we've been in this business for 30 years. We have really deep domain expertise in that. And also, you'll understand why I wouldn't want to talk too much about what we do and how we do it, but absolutely, that's one of the-- >> Scott: You just lock it down. >> Prime drivers of everything we think all the way from application design to things like the infrastructure planning and design to the physical level. I mean everything you can think of and probably a couple of things you may not think of. >> Hopefully a few things we didn't think of. So where do you go next? It sounds like you're enabling a lot of the innovation on your partner's side. You just mentioned KAYAK and people writing some of the machine learning and AI algorithms to help the end traveler find what they're looking for. Where are you guys concentrating? You said you've been at it for 30 years. What are some of the next big hurdles that you're looking to take down? >> It's wonderful, I think, being close to our customers. And one of the reasons I'm in Boston, we are a European company. We are actually headquartered in Madrid. Our core engineering team, our central engineering team is in France. The reason I'm in Boston and my team is in Boston is we've started doing a lot of business here in North America, and we try to stay very close to our customers. And when you listen carefully, and that's why we have two ears and one mouth is to hopefully try to listen a lot, you do see their pain points, you do see where they are going with kind of their business. And it gives us a chance to have a front row seat in designing new products that they can use. So to me, it's kind of two pronged. One is we want to offer the best technology we can to our customers at the best price point we can. And obviously, by now, you've figured out it's mission critical stuff has to always be on. Keeping those kind of boundary conditions in mind, you want to be the best technology provider, and then we want to innovate. So one of the things I'm seeing at this conference, there's a lot of friends from the service providers who are talking about 5G technology. And so with connected cars, with virtual reality, I mean these are all trends that are going to impact us as travelers in a positive way. And so we have a dedicated innovation team across all our business lines. We do a lot of work with academic institutions, with ETH in Zurich, with MIT here, close to my office in Boston. And there's just a chockfull of possibilities in terms of what can be done. >> All right, I'll give you the last word, impressions on the show. What do you get out of a show like this? Why is it important for you to come? >> It's amazing. I mean this morning, Martin Casado was there. He's called kind of the grand daddy of software-defined networking (mumbles). >> He's not that old yet, but he's going to like seeing that clip. (laughs) >> It's true. I read that at The Guardian. It was on one of the newspapers. But the fact is we used NSX for virtualization in our entire data center, and we have close to 20,000 infrastructure devices. All our computers are virtualized, 100% of it, and it's all using NSX from VMware, right? Now this was a sort of brilliant idea by an extremely intelligent and persuasive graduate student at Stanford 15 years ago that is, as he announced this morning, is a billion-dollar business today, right? And we are actually using the technology, and it's very real, to process all of this. So it's great to be able to see what people like him, I mean from Google, he's a great partner of ours. We use Kubernetes for kind of the container deployment strategy for our cloud network. We hear him speak about what they're thinking about in terms of investments and how the network is going to essentially drive the movement of data analytics. It's just phenomenal to get the top leadership. I'm obviously very honored and privileged to be presenting to this audience and to share our thoughts and what we're doing and just to see a lot of the buzz around here and what wonderful ideas are happening in the Valley. There's so much action, as always, going on. >> Great, great, great summary. Well, glad you could take a few minutes to stop by theCUBE. >> Completely my pleasure. Thank you very much. Great meeting you, and have a great rest of the show. >> All right. He's Rashesh, he's Scott, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Open Networking Summit 2017 in Santa Clara. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec. >> People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but The Herjavec Group has been really laser focused on cybersecurity. >> I actually helped to bring upon Checkpoint to (mumbles) firewalls, URL filtering, that kind of stuff. >> But you're also...