(gentle music) >> Now welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. I'm John Walls, and once again, we're glad to have you here for AWS re:Invent 22. Our coverage continues here on Thursday, day three, of what has been a jam-packed week of tech and AWS, of course, has been the great host for this. It's now a pleasure to welcome in Anurag Gupta, who is the founder and CEO of Shoreline, joining us here as part of the AWS Global Showcase Startup Program, and Anurag, good to see you, sir. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much. >> Tell us about Shoreline, about what you're up to. >> So we're a DevOps company. We're really focused on repairing issues. If you think about it, there are a ton DevOps companies and we all went to the cloud in order to gain faster innovation and by and large check. Then all of the things involved in getting things into production, artifact generation, testing, configuration management, deployment, also by and large, automated. Now pity the poor SRE who's getting the deluge of stuff on them, every week, every two days, sometimes multiple times a day, and it's complicated, right? Kubernetes, VMs, lots of services, multiple clouds, sometimes, and you know, they need to know a little bit about everything. And you know what, there are a ton of companies that actually help you with what we call Day-2 Ops. It's just that most of them help you with observability, telling you what's gone wrong, or incident management, routing something to someone. But you know, back when I was at AWS, I never got really that excited about one more dashboard to look at or one more like better ticket routing. What used to really excite me was having some issue extinguished forever. And if you think about it, like the first five minutes of an incident are detecting and routing. The next hour, two hours, is some human being going in and fixing it, so that feels like the big opportunity to reduce, so hopefully we can talk a little bit about different ways that one can do that. >> What about Day-2 Ops? Just tell me about how you define that. >> So I basically define it as once the software goes into a production, just making sure things stay up and are healthy and you're resilient and you don't get errors and all of those sorts of things because everything breaks sooner or later, you know, to a greater or lesser degree. >> Especially that SRE you're talking about, right? >> Yeah. >> So let's go back to that scenario. Yeah, you pity the poor soul because they do have to be a little expert in everything. >> Exactly. >> And that's really challenging and we all know that, that's really hard. So how do you go about trying to lighten that burden, then? >> So when you look at the numbers, about somewhere between 40% to even 95% of the alarms that fire, the alerts that fire, are false positives and that's crazy. Why is someone waking up just to deal with? >> It's a lot of wasted time, isn't it? >> A lot of wasted time. And you know, you're also training someone into what I call ClickOps, just to go in and click the button and resolve it and you don't actually know if it was the false positive or it's the rare real positive, and so that's a challenge, right? And so the first thing to do is to figure out where the false positives are. Like, let's say Datadog tells you that CPU is high and alarms. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's hard for them to tell, right? But you have to then introspect it into something precise like, oh, CPU is high, but response times are standard and the request rate is high. Okay, that's a good thing. I'm going to ignore this. Or CPU is high, but it kind of resolves itself, so I'm going to not wake anybody up. Or CPU is high and oh, it's the darn JVM starting to garbage collect again, so let me go and take a heap dump and give that to my dev team and then bounce the JVM and you know, without waking anybody up, or CPU is high, I have no idea what's going on. Now it's time to wake somebody up. You know, what you want to use humans for is the ability to think about novel stuff, not to do repetitive stuff, so that's the first step. The second step is, about 40% of what remains is repetitive and straightforward. So like a disk is full, I'd better clean up the garbage on the disk or maybe grow the disk. People shouldn't wake up to deal to grow a disk. And so for that, what you want to do is just have those sorts of things get automated away. One of the nice things about Shoreline is, is that we take the experience in what we build for one company, and if they're willing, provide it to everybody else. Our belief is, a central tenant is, if someone somewhere fixes something, everyone everywhere should gain the benefit because we all sit on the same three clouds, we all sit on the same set of database infrastructure, et cetera. We should all get the same benefits. Why do we have to scar our own backs rather than benefiting from somebody else's scar tissue, so that's the second thing. The third thing is, okay, let's say it's not straightforward, not something I've seen before, then in that case, what often happens is on average like eight people get involved. You know, it initially goes to L1 support or L1 ops and, but they don't necessarily know because, as you say, the environment's complex. And so, you know, they go into Slack and they say, "At here, can somebody help me with this?" And those things take a much longer time, so wouldn't it be better that if your best SRE is able to say, "Hey, check these 20 things and then run these actions." We could convert that into like a Jupyter Notebook where you could say the incident got fired I pre-populated all the diagnostics, and then I tell people very precisely, "If you see this, run this, et cetera." Like a wiki, but actually something you could run right in this product. And then, you know, last piece of the puzzle, the smaller piece, is sometimes new things happen and when something new happens, what you want is sort of the central tech of Shoreline, which is parallel distributed, real-time debugging. And so the ability to do, you know, execute a command across your fleet rather than individual boxes so that you can say something like, "I'm hearing that my credit card app is slow. For everything tagged as being part of my credit card app, please run for everything that's running over 90% CPU, please run a top command." And so, you know, then you can run in the same time on one host as you can on 30,000 and that helps a lot. So that's the core of what we do. People use us for all sorts of things, also preventative maintenance, you know, just the proactive regular things. You know, like your car, you do an oil change, well, you know, you need to rotate your certs, certificates. You need to make sure that, you know, there isn't drift in your configurations, there isn't drift in your software. There's also security elements to it, right? You want to make sure that you aren't getting weird inbound/outbound traffic across to ports you don't expect to be open. You don't want to have these processes running, you know, maybe something's bad. And so that's all the kind of weird anomaly detection that's easy to do if you run things in a distributed parallel way across everything. That's super hard to do if you have to go and Whac-A-Mole across one box after the next. >> Well, which leads to a question just in terms of setting priorities then, which is what you're talking about helping companies establish priorities, this hierarchy of level one warning, level two, level three, level four. Sounds like that should be a basic, right? But you're saying that's not, that's not really happening in the enterprise. >> Well, you know, I would say that if you hadn't automated deployments, you should do that first. If you haven't automated your testing pipeline, shame on you, you should do that like a year ago. But now it's time to help people in production because you've done that other work and people are suffering. You know, the crazy thing about the cloud is, is that companies spend about three times more on the human beings to operate their cloud infrastructure as on the cloud infrastructure itself. I've yet to hear anybody say that their cloud bill is too low, you know, so, you know, there's a clearer savings also available. And you know, back when I was at AWS, obviously I had to keep the lights on too, but you know, I had to do that, but it's kind of a tax on my engineers and I'd really spend, prefer to spend the head count on innovation, on doing things that delight my customers. You never delight your customers by keeping the lights on, you just avoid irritating them by turning 'em off, right? >> So why are companies so fixed in on spending so much time on manually repairing things and not looking for these kinds of little, much more elegant solution and cost-efficient, time-saving, so on so forth. >> Yeah, I think there just hasn't been very much in this space as yet because it's a hard, hard problem to solve. You know, automation's a little bit scary and that's the reality of it and the way you make it less scary is by proving it out, by doing the simple things first, like reducing the alert fatigue, you know, that's easy. You know, providing notebooks to people so that they can click things and do things in a straightforward way. That's pretty easy. The full automation, that's kind of the North Star, that's what we aspire to do. But you know, people get there over time and one of our customers had 700 instances of this particular incident solved for them last week. You imagine how many human beings would've been doing it otherwise, you know? >> Right. >> That's just one thing, you know? >> How many did it take the build a pyramid? How many decades did that take, right? You had an announcement this week. I don't think we've talked about that. >> No, yeah, so we just announced Incident Insights, which is a free product that lets people plug into initially PagerDuty and pretty soon the Opsgenie ServiceNow, et cetera. And what you can do is, is you give us an API key read-only and we will suck your PagerDuty data out. We apply some lightweight ML unsupervised learning, and in a couple of minutes, we categorize all of your incidents so that you can understand which are the ones that happen most often and are getting resolved really quickly. That's ClickOps, right? Those alarms shouldn't fire. Which are the ones that involve a lot of people? Those are good candidates to build a notebook. Which are the ones that happen again and again and again? Those are good candidates for automation. And so, I think one of the challenges people have is, is that they don't actually know what their teams are doing and so this is intended to provide them that visibility. One of our very first customers was doing the beta test for us on it. He used to tell us he had about 100 tickets, incidents a week. You know, he brought this tool in and he had 2,100 last week and was all, you know, like these false alarms, so while he's giving us- >> That was eye opening for him to see that, sure. >> And why he's, you know, looking at it, you know, he's just like filing Jiras to say, "Oh, change this threshold, cancel this alarm forever." You know, all of that kind of stuff. Before you get to do the fancy work, you got to clean your room before you get to do anything else, right? >> Right, right, dinner before dessert, basically. >> There you go. >> Hey, thanks for the insights on this and again the name of the new product, by the way, is... >> Incident Insights. >> Incident Insights. >> Totally free. >> Free. >> Yeah, it takes a couple of minutes to set up. Go to the website, Shoreline.io/insight and you can be up and running in a couple of minutes. >> Outstanding, again, the company is Shoreline. This is Anurag Gupta, and thank you for being with us. We appreciate it. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Glad to have to here on theCUBE. Back with more from AWA re:Invent 22. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. (gentle music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next '21. I'm joined today by Sachin Gupta, General Manager and Vice President of Open Infrastructure at Google Cloud. Sachin, welcome to theCube. >> Thanks Dave, it's great to be here. >> So, you and I both know that the definition of what constitutes Cloud has been hotly contested by some over the last 20 years. But I think you and I both know that in some quarters there really has never been a debate. NIST, for example, the standard body that calls out what constitutes Cloud, has always considered Cloud an operational model, a set of capabilities, and it has never considered Cloud specifically tied to a location. With that in mind, how about if you share with us what was announced at Cloud Next '21 around Google Distributed Cloud? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. The power of Cloud in terms of automation, simplicity, observability, is undeniable, but our mission at Google Cloud is to ensure that we're meeting customers where they are, in their digital transformation journey. And so in talking to customers, we found that there are some reasons that could prevent them to move certain workloads to Cloud. And that could be because there's a low latency requirement. There is high amounts of data processing that needs to happen on-prem. So taking data from on-prem, moving into the Cloud to get it processed and all the way back may not be very efficient. There could be security, privacy, data residency, compliance requirements that they're dealing with. And then some industries, for some customers, there's some very strict data sovereignty requirements that don't allow them to move things into the public Cloud. And so when we talked to customers, we realized that we needed to extend the Cloud, and therefore we introduced Google Distributor Cloud at Next 2021. And what Google Distributed Cloud provides is all of that power of Cloud anywhere the customers need it. And this could be at a Google network edge, it could be at an operator or communication server provider edge as well. It could be at the customer edge, so right on-premise at their site, it could be in their data centers. And so a lot of flexibility in how you deploy three fully managed hardware and software solutions delivered through Google. >> Yeah it's interesting because often statistics are cited that somewhere near 75% of of what we do in IT, is still "on-premises." The reality is, however, that what's happening in those physical locations on the edge is looking a lot more Cloudy, isn't it. (laughs) >> Yes, and the customers are looking for that computational power, storage, automation, simplicity, in all of these locations. >> So what does this look like from an infrastructure stack perspective? Is there some secret sauce that you're layering into this that we should know about? >> Yeah, so let me just talk about it a little bit more. So we start off with third party hardware. So we're sourcing from Dell, HPE, Cisco, Nvidia, NetApp, bringing it together. We're using Anthos, you are hopefully familiar with Anthos, which is our hybrid multi-cloud software layer. And then on top of that, we use open source technologies. For example, built on Kubernetes. We offer a containerized environment, a VM environment, that enables both Google first-party services, as well as third-party services that customers may choose to deploy, on top of this infrastructure. And so the management of the entire infrastructure, top to bottom, is delivered to Google directly, and therefore customers can focus on applications, they can focus on business initiatives, and not worry about the infrastructure complexity. They can just leave that to us. >> So you mentioned both Kubernetes, thinking of containerization as Cloud native, you also said VMs. So this spans the divide between containerized microservices-based applications and say VM-ware style of virtual machines or other VMs? >> Yes, look, the majority of customers are looking to modernize and move to a containerized environment with Kubernetes, but there are some workloads that they may have that still require a VM-like environment, and having the simplicity and the efficiency of operating VMs like containers on top of Google Distributed Cloud, built on Anthos, is extremely powerful for them. And so it goes back to our mission. We're going to meet customers where they are, and if they need VM support as well, we're providing it. >> So let's talk about initial implementations of this. What kind of scale are you anticipating that customers will deploy? >> The scale is going to vary based on use case. So it could be a very small, let's think about it as a single server type of scale, all the way to many, many dozens of racks that could be going in to support Google Distributed Cloud. And so, for example, from a communication service provider point of view, looking to modernize their 5G network, in the core it could be many, many racks with Google Distributed Cloud the edge product. And for their RAM solutions, it could be a much smaller form factor, as an example. And so depending on use case, you're going to find all kinds of different form factors. And I didn't mention this before, but we also, in addition to scale, we offer two operational modes. One is the edge product. So Google Distributed Cloud edge that is connected to the Cloud. And so it gets operational updates, et cetera, directly through the Cloud. And the second one is something we call the hosted mode, and in hosted mode, it's completely air-gapped. So this infrastructure, what is modernized and provides rich 1PN third party services, does not connect to the Cloud at all. And therefore, the organizations that have the strictest data latency sovereignty requirements, can benefit from a completely air-gapped solution as well. >> So I'm curious, let's say you started with an air-gapped model. Often our capabilities in Cloud exceed our customer's comfort level for a period of time. Can that air-gapped, initial implementation be connected to the Cloud in the future? >> The air-gap implementation, typically customers, the same customer, may have multiple deployments, where one will require the air-gap solution, and another could be the hosted solution, and the other could be the edge product, which is connected. And in both cases, the underlying stack is consistent. So, while I don't hear customers saying, "I want to start from air-gap and move," we are providing Google Distributed Cloud as one portfolio to customers so that we can address these different use cases. In the air-gap solution, the software updates obviously still come from Google, and customers need to move that across the air gap check signatures, check for vulnerability, load it in the system, and the system will then automatically update itself. And so the software we still provide, but in that case, there's additional checks that that customer will typically go through before enabling that software onto their system. >> Yeah, so you mentioned at the outset, some of the drivers, latency security, et cetera, but can you restate that? I'd like to hear what the thinking behind this was at Google when customers were presenting you with a variety of problems they needed solutions for. I think it bears recapping that. >> Right, so let me give you a few examples here. So one is, when you think about 5G, when you think about what 4G did for the industry in terms of enabling the gig economy, with 5G we can really enable richer experiences. And this could be highly immersive experiences, it could be augmented reality, it could be all kinds of technologies that require lower latency. And for this, you need to build out the 5G infrastructure on top of a modernized solution like Google Distributed Cloud. Let me just get into a few use cases though, to just bring some color here. For example, for a retailer, instead of worrying about IP and infrastructure in the store, the people in the store can focus on their customers, and they can implement solutions using Google Distributed Cloud for things like inventory management, asset protection, et cetera, in the store. Inside a manufacturing facility, once again, you can reduce incidents, you can reduce injuries, you can look at your robotic solutions that require low latency feedback, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of emerging applications through ISVs, that a rich, on-prem or anywhere you want it in the edge infrastructure, can enable a new suite of possibilities that weren't possible before. In some cases, customers say, "You know what, I want 5G. But I actually you want a private 5G deployment." And that becomes possible with the Google Distributed Cloud as well. >> So we talked a little bit about scale. What's the smallest increment that someone could deploy? You just gave an example of retail. Some retail outfits are small stores, without any IT staff at all. There's the concept of a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which is something we love to come up with in our business terminology that makes no sense, single node cluster. The point is, these increments, especially in the containerized world, are getting smaller. What's the smallest increment that you can deliver, you're planning to deliver? >> I'll answer this two ways. First of all, we are planning to deliver a smallest increment, think of it as one server. We are planning to deliver that as well, all the way up to many, many racks. But in addition, there's something unique that I wanted to call out. Let's say you're in the medium or larger deployment in the racks, and you want to scale up, compute, and store it separately. That's something we enable as well, because we will work with customers in terms of what they need for their application, and then scale that hardware up and down based on their need. And so there's a lot of flexibility in that, but we will enable scale all the way down to a single server unit as well. >> So what is the feedback been from the partners that will be providing the hardware infrastructure, folks like Dell. What has their reaction been? >> I think that they're obviously very eager to work with us. We're happy to partner with them in order to provide customers flexibility, any kind of scale in any kind of location, different kind of hardware equipment that they need. But in addition to those partners on the hardware side, there are customers and partners as well who are enabling rich experiences and solutions for that retailer, for that manufacturer, for example. And so working with AT&T, we announced partnership on 5G and edge to enable experiences, especially in the areas of retail and manufacturing, like I talked about earlier, but then in Europe, we're partnering with OVHcloud, for example, in order to enable very strict data sovereignty requirements that are happening in that country. And so where there's many communication service providers, there's many partners trying to solve for different use cases for their end customers. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's pretend for a minute that you're getting Yelp reviews of this infrastructure that you're responsible for moving forward. What would a delighted customer's comments look like? >> I think a delighted customer's comments will be probably in two or three areas, all right? So first up will be, it's all about the applications and the end user experience that this can enable. And so the power of Google AI ML technology, third-party software as well, that can run consistently single operational model, build once, deploy anywhere, is extremely powerful. So I would say, the power of the applications and the simplicity that it enables is number one. I think number two is the scale of operations experience that Google has. They don't need to worry about, "do I have 5 sites or 500 sites or 5,000 sites?" It doesn't matter. The fleet operations, the scaled operations capability, the global network capability that Google has, all that experience in site reliability engineering, we can now bring to all of these vast amounts of edge locations, so they don't need to worry about scale at all. And then finally, they can be sort of rest assured that this is built on Anthos, it's built on Kubernetes, there's a lot of open source components here, they have flexibility, they have choice, they can run our one-piece services, they can run third-party services on this, and so we're going to preserve the flexibility in choice. I think these are the things that would likely get highlighted. >> So Sachin, you talk to customers around the world. Where do you see the mix between net-neu stuff going into infrastructure like this, versus modernized and migrated workloads into the solution? What does that mix look like? And I know it's a bit of speculation, but what are your thoughts? >> I think, Dave, that's a great question, I think it's a difficult one to answer because we find that those conversations happen together with the same customers. At least that's what I find. And so they are looking to modernize, create a much richer environment for their developers, so that they can innovate much more quickly, react to business needs much more quickly, to cater to their own end customers in a much better way, get business insights from the data that they have. They're looking to do all of this, but at the same time, they have, perhaps, legacy infrastructure or applications that they just can't easily migrate off of, that may still be in a VM environment, more traditional type of storage environment, and they need to be able to address both worlds. And so, yes, there are some who are so-called "born in the Cloud," everything is Cloud native, but the vast majority of customers that I talked to, are absolutely looking to modernize, like you don't find a customer that says, "Just help me lift and shift, I'm not looking to modernize." I don't quite see that. They are looking to modernize but they want to make sure that we have the options that they need to support different kinds of environment that they have today. >> And you mentioned insights. We should explore that a little further. Can you give us an example of artificial intelligence, machine learning being used now at the edge, where you're putting more compute power at the edge? Can you give us an idea of the kinds of things that that enables specifically? >> Yes, so when you think about video processing, for example, if I have a lot of video feeds and I'm looking based on that, I want to apply artificial intelligence, I'm trying to detect object inventory movement, people movement, et cetera. Again, adhering to all the privacy and local regulations. When I have that much data streaming in, if I have to take that out of my edge all the way across the WHEN network, into the Cloud for processing, and bring it all the way back and then make a decision, I'm just moving a lot of data up and down into the Cloud. And in this case, what you're able to do is say, no, you don't actually need to move it into the public Cloud. You can keep that data locally. You can have a Google Distributed Cloud edge instance there, you're going to run your AI application right there, achieve the insights and take an action very, very quickly. And so it saves you, from a latency point of view, significantly, and it saves you from a data transmission up and down into the Cloud significantly, which you sometimes, you know, you're not supposed to send that data up, that there's data residency requirements, and sometimes the cost of just moving it, it doesn't make sense. >> So do you have any final thoughts? What else should we know about this? Anything that we didn't touch on? >> I think we've touched on a lot of great things. I think I'm just going to reiterate, you started with a "what is the definition of Cloud itself" and our mission once again, is to really understand what customers are trying to do and meet them where they are. And we're finding that they're looking for Cloud solutions in a public region. We've announced a lot more regions. We continue to grow our footprint globally, but in addition, they want to be able to get that power of Google Cloud infrastructure and all the benefits that it provides in many different edge locations all the way on onto their premises. And I think one of the things we perhaps spent less time on is, we're also very unique that in our strategy, we're bringing in underlying third-party hardware, but it's a fully managed solution that can operate in that connected edge mode, as well as a disconnected hosted mode, which just enables pretty much all the use cases we've heard about from customers. So one portfolio that can address any kind of need that they have. >> Fantastic. Well, I said at the outset Sachin, before we got started, you and I could talk for hours on this subject. Sadly, we don't have hours. I'd like to thank you for joining us in theCube. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for this Cube conversation, covering the events at Google Cloud NEXT 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining. (upbeat music)

>>mhm Yes. Welcome back to the Qantas industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm john furrier host of the cube. The changing landscape of advertising is here and Chip Gupta, founder of you of digital is joining us Chip, thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate, I know you're busy, you've got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry. You got some kids to take care of and train them to. So welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >>Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. >>So the house of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big 34 tech players dominate the marketplace. So clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before Web mobile revolution, which was basically a reply platform NG of capabilities. But now we're in an error of re factoring the industry, not re platt forming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet global internet evolved. What are your, what's your take on this, this industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean? And what proposals are out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, I I really view the identity proposals and kind of to to kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by google. Right, so google um you know, introduce something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies uh as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say they're all bird themed for some reason, I don't know why. Um but the one the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for Federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is google is moving forward with cohort level Learning and understanding of users in the future after 3rd party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation, it's what google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox. Now On the other side is, you know, things like unified, I need to point or the work that 85 is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space, that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, unified I. d 2.0 comes to mind because it's the one that's probably got the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it and unified, I need to point out again is user level. So it's it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites you know that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams right, you've got the walled gardens and or you know, google with flock on one side and then you've got unified I. D. Two point oh and other I. D. Frameworks for the open internet on the other side, you've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again on the google side it's cohort level, it's gonna be built into chrome. Um The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today, but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy whereas on the other side of the open internet you're still getting down to the user level. Um And that's pretty powerful. But the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under five of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you if you simplify things, you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >>I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies, and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think, you know, the consensus is at least from my reporting in my view, is that the world agrees, Let's make it open, Which one is going to be better. >>Yeah, that's a great question, john So as I mentioned, right, we have we have to kind of work streams here, we've got the walled garden work work stream being led by google and their work around flock, and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say unified I. D to kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an endgame here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly, I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks, neither of them are perfect, they're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution. Right? So they're saying, hey, we use, you know, an open I. D. Framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data and that's important. But we don't have all the scale. So now we go to google and we go to flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data, we have some of our own partnerships, we're gonna bring that in and layer it on top. Right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both. With a little extra something on top. I think that's, that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space and I think that's frankly where we're headed. >>What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this, has these programmatic, you mentioned also the data is there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this, with this conundrum? >>So, so I think john where we're headed? Um, you know, I think we're right now we're having this existential existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry, because our world is being turned upside down, all the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told that we're gonna have new mechanisms, right? So cookies are going away device IEDs are going away and now we got to come up with new things and so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Like everyone's always talking about identity right now, where do I think this is going if I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today, Right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today, Identity for marketers in my opinion, has been a little bit of a checkbox activity. Right? It's been, hey, um, okay, uh, you know, ad tech company or media company, do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay. Sounds good. That sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know, Yes, you have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing. Right. And so that, that's, that's kind of where we've been now, all of a sudden the cookies are going away, the device IDs are going away. And so the world is turning upside down. We're in this crisis of how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future. So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re engineer right? The mechanisms now if I was to look into the crystal ball right two or three years from now where I think we're headed is not much is going to change. And what I mean by that john is um I think that marketers will still go to companies and say do you have an ID solution? Okay tell me more about it. Okay uh let me understand a little bit better. Okay you do it this way. Sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different right now. It's flock and unified I. D. And this and that right. The ways the mechanisms will be a little bit different but the end state right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape, in my opinion will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a tell me you have an ID solution, Make me feel good about it. Help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're gonna do in the future. My just my viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >>And I'll say the user base is the audience. Their their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and Ai are going to create those and we have the data. You have the sharing it or using it as we're finding shit. Gupta great insight dropping some nice gems here, Founder of You of Digital and also the Adjunct professor of Programmatic advertising at Levi School of Business and santa Clara University Professor. Thank you for coming, dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot for having me john really appreciate it. >>Thanks for watching the cooking 100 is the cube host Jon ferrier. Me. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Yeah.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to the Quantcast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies. The Cookie Conundrum, A Recipe for Success. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. The changing landscape of advertising is here, and Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital is joining us. Shiv, thanks for coming on this segment. I really appreciate it. I know you're busy. You've got two young kids, as well as providing education to the digital industry. You got some kids to take care of and train them too. So, welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. >> So, the house of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big three, four tech players dominate the marketplace. So, clearly in a major inflection point. And you know, we've seen this movie before. Web, now mobile revolution. Which was basically a re-platforming of capabilities, but now we're in an era of refactoring the industry, not replatforming. A complete changing over of the value proposition. So, a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet-- global internet, evolves. What are your, what's your take on this? There's industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean and what proposals are out there? >> Yeah, so, you know, I really view the identity proposals in kind of two kinds of groups. Two separate groups. So, on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing. And really that's being led by Google, right? So, Google introduced something called the Privacy Sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third-party cookies. And as part of the Privacy Sandbox, they've had a number of proposals. Unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say, they're all bird-themed, for some reason I don't know why. But the one, the bird-themed proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called FLOC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. And, essentially what it all boils down to is Google is moving forward with cohort level learning and understanding of users in the future after third-party cookies. Unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting and tracking purposes. And so, that's on one side of the equation. It's what Google is doing with FLOC and Privacy Sandbox. Now, on the other side is, you know, things like unified ID 2.0 or the work that ID5 is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, Unified ID 2.0 comes to mind because it's the one that's probably gotten the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it. And Unified ID 2.0 again is user level. So, it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so, if you think about those two work streams, right? You've got the walled gardens and or, you know, Google with FLOC on one side. And then you've got Unified ID 2.0 and other ID frameworks for the open internet on the other side. You've got these two very different type of approaches to identity in the future. Again, on the Google side it's cohort level, it's going to be built into Chrome. The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today but now you're just doing them at a group level so that you're protecting privacy. Whereas, on the other side with the open internet you're still getting down to the user level and that's pretty powerful but the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw was under 5% of all website traffic is authenticated. So, really if you simplify things and you boil it all down you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >> So we have a publishing business. We'd love to have people authenticate and get that closed loop journalism thing going on. But, if businesses wannna get this level too, they can have concerns. So, I guess my question is, what's the trade-off? Because you have power in Google and the huge data set that they command. They command a lot of leverage with that. And again, centralized. And you've got open. But it seems to me that the world is moving more towards decentralization, not centralization. Do you agree with that? And does that have any impact to this? Because, you want to harness the data, so it rewards people with the most data. In this case, the powerful. But the world's going decentralized, where there needs to be a new way for data to be accessed and leveraged by anyone. >> Yeah. John, it's a great point. And I think we're at kind of a crossroads, right? To answer that question. You know, I think what we're hearing a lot right now in the space from publishers, like yourself, is that there's an interesting opportunity right now for them, right? To actually have some more control and say about the future of their own business. If you think about the last, let's say 10, 15, 20 years in advertising in digital, right? Programmatic has really become kind of the primary mechanism for revenue for a lot of these publishers. Right? And so programmatic is a super important part of their business. But, with everything that's happening here with identity now, a lot of these publishers are kind of taking a look in the mirror and thinking about, "Okay, we have an interesting opportunity here to make a decision." And, the decision, the trade off to your question is, Do we continue? Right? Do we put up the login wall? The registration wall, right? Collect that data. And then what do we do with that data? Right? So it's kind of a two-fold process here. Two-step process that they have to make a decision on. First of all, do we hamper the user experience by putting up a registration wall? Will we lose consumers if we do that? Do we create some friction in the process that's not necessary. And if we do, right? We're taking a hit already potentially, to what end? Right? And, I think that's the really interesting question, is to what end? But, what we're starting to see is publishers are saying you know what? Programmatic revenue is super important to us. And so, you know, path one might be: Hey, let's give them this data. Right? Let's give them the authenticated information, the data that we collect. Because if we do, we can continue on with the path that our business has been on. Right? Which is generating this awesome kind of programmatic revenue. Now, alternatively we're starting to see some publishers say hold up. If we say no, if we say: "Hey, we're going to authenticate but we're not going to share the data." Right? Some of the publishers actually view programmatic as almost like the programmatic industrial complex, right? That's almost taken a piece of their business in the last 10, 15, 20 years. Whereas, back in the day, they were selling directly and making all the revenue for themselves, right? And so, some of these publishers are starting to say: You know what? We're not going to play nice with FLOC and Unified ID. And we're going to kind of take some of this back. And what that means in the short term for them, is maybe sacrificing programmatic revenue. But their bet is long-term, maybe some of that money will come back to them direct. Now, that'll probably only be the premium pubs, right? The ones that really feel like they have that leverage and that runway to do something like that. And even so, you know, I'm of the opinion that if certain publishers kind of peel away and do that, that's probably not great for the bigger picture. Even though it might be good for their business. But, you know, let's see what happens. To each business their own >> Yeah. I think the trade-off of monetization and user experience has always been there. Now, more than ever, people want truth. They want trust. And I think the trust factor is huge. And if you're a publisher, you wannna have your audience be instrumental. And I think the big players have sucked out of the audience from the publishers for years. And that's well-documented. People talk about that all the time. I guess the question, it really comes down to is, what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because, I think the consensus is, at least from my reporting and my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open. Which one's going to be better? >> Yeah. That's a great question, John. So as I mentioned, right? We have two kinds of work streams here. We've got the walled garden work stream being led by Google and their work around FLOC. And then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say Unified ID 2.0 kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an end game here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly. I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks. Neither of them are perfect. They're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now, is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution, right? So they're saying, hey we use, you know, an open ID framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data. And that's important, but we don't have all the scale. So now we go to a Google and we go to FLOC to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce. Right? We have some of our own data. We have some of our own partnerships. We're going to bring that in and layer it on top, right? And so, really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both with a little extra, you know, something on top. I think that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly, where we're headed. >> What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because, I think this is going to be- You can't ignore the big guys on this Obviously the programmatic you mentioned, also the data's there. But, what do you think the market will evolve to with this conundrum? >> So, I think John, where we're headed, you know, I think right now we're having this existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry. Because our world is being turned upside down. All the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told, "Hey, we're going to have new mechanisms." Right? So cookies are going away. Device IDs are going away. And now we've got to come up with new things. And so, the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Everyone's always talking about identity, right? Now, where do I think this is going? If I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today, right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today. Identity, for marketers, in my opinion, has been a little bit of a checkbox activity, right? It's been, Hey, Okay. You know, ad tech company or media company. Do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay. Sounds good. That sounds good. Now, can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business. And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know? Yes, you have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing, right? And so, that's kind of where we've been. Now, all of a sudden, the cookies are going away. The device IDs are going away. And so the world is turning upside down. We're in this crisis of: how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future? So, everyone's talking about it and we're tryna re-engineer the mechanisms. Now, if I was to look into the crystal ball, right? Two, three years from now, where I think we're headed is, not much is going to change. And what I mean by that, John is, I think that marketers will still go to companies and say, "Do you have an ID solution? Okay, tell me more about it. Okay. Let me understand a little bit better. Okay. You do it this way. Sounds good." Now, the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different. Right now it's FLOC and Unified ID and this and that, right? The ways, the mechanisms will be a little bit different. But, the end state. Right? The actual way in which we operate as an industry and the view of the landscape in my opinion, will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a, tell me you have an ID solution, make me feel good about it, help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So, I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment, where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're going to do in the future. My viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >> And then I'll say the user base is the audience, their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and AI are going to create those. And if you have the data, you're either sharing it or using it. That's what we're finding. Shiv Gupta, great insights. Dropping some nice gems here. Founder of U of Digital and also the adjunct professor of programmatic advertising at Leavey School of business in Santa Clara University. Professor, thank you for coming and dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >> Thanks a lot for having me, John. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks for watching The Cookie Conundrum This is theCUBE host, John Furrier, me. Thanks for watching. (uplifting electronic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We're going to be digging in. This award is for the most customer obsessed migration and happy to welcome to the program two first time guests coming to us from India. First of all, from the partner with Tech Mahindra, we have Gautam Chatterjee. He is the vice president with Tech Mahindra, who's the winner of the award, and they've brought along their customer for this, that is Satyendra Gupta, who is the director of the CPWD, which is the Central Public Works Department, part of the government of India. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, if we could, let's start with just a quick summary of what your organizations do. Gautam, we'll start with you. Tech Mahindra, I think most of our audience, you know, should be aware, you know, large, very well known organization. Congratulations to you and the team on the win. Tell us what your part of Tech Mahindra does. >> Okay. So, Tech Mahindra is a five billion dollar organization, and it's a part of Mahindra and Mahindra. Which is approximately at $22 billion evaluation worldwide. So, Tech Mahindra is primarily into IT services and consulting services for the information technology and information technology related works across the globe. We have got multiple offices, almost around 90 locations across the country, and we have gotten to operations worldwide in different verticals and different geographies. So, as a part of Tech Mahindra, I manage the central government that is the public sector business for Tech Mahindra, based out of New Delhi, in India. And we handle the complete large public sector organizations and different ministries which are coming into the government of India. >> Wonderful! Satyendra, obviously public works, relatively self explanatory, but, tell us a little bit about your organization, your roll, and, if you could, introduce the project that your group worked with Tech Mahindra on. >> Okay, so, Central Public Works Department is a 165 year old organization that was aided by large technology. In 1854 was when this organization started working. The primary responsibility of this organization is to build the consistent works of the government of India. Primarily in the buildings sector. We see predominantly, Tech Mahindra will see predominantly you aiding the department, is that technical add-on to the government of India regarding these concepts and matters. Right, so, this department is spread across the country, from north, and in the south, Kerala. And from Gujarat in the west to another place in the east. This department has departments across the country. We had to use, with all tech with all the top companies we had thought (indistinct) is that only the building but we created and perfected from the government of India, like, the stadiums. That is not so many, wanted something that would have been very useful regarding the tsunami. Tsunami came so the government, the projects we picked up would be constantly small houses that we'd have to give it to. And CPWD, using the info technology since long, but we have it all along (indistinct) in value. Now, last year, it had been decided that we would implement the IT system in the CPWD very hard softwares and will be implementing a single use form, and everything will be connected to each other, too. So, this is what the internet for part of the implementation is. As far as myself is concerned, I am in charge of the implementation of this year for the system in the department. From it's inception to the end, and detailing the whole of the process until all the onboarding of the Tech Mahindra, and the implementation of. And then, from there after waiting a minute to, in the department to make it adaptable, we tell everybody. These are the roles that I have. >> All right, Gautam, if you could, migration's obviously a big part of what I expect Tech Mahindra is helping customers with. Help frame up, you know, the services that you're doing, talk a little bit, if you could, the underlying AWS component of it, and, you know, specifically, give us a little bit about Tech Mahindra's role in the public works project that we were just talking about. >> Okay. So, coming to the relationship and the journey which you have started for the CPWD project, it's around a year, year and a half work when you have started interacting with CPWD. By understanding their business challenges and the business department, which is primarily automating the whole processes. And there are multiple applications, multiple processes which they wanted to automate. Now, definitely once their automation comes into the picture, you have to take place the complete automation of the applications, the complete automations of the infrastructure, and the complete automations of the UI part of it. That is the user perceptions, user interface, right? So, all three has been covered by this company to automation process. As a part of the system integrations business, our main objective is to plan and bring the respective OEMs, who are the best of the great, our technology providers, to bring them to utilize those platforms, and to utilize those course applications, so that, by utilizing those technologies and applications, we can automate the complete process and provide the complete drill down management view to CPWD for their inter-operations and application. In the process of doing that, what we have done, we have brought in SAP as an ace for HANA implementation, which is the primary business applications which will be implemented in CPWD. The inter-user log-in and user interface will be done through a portal, and that portal will be utilizing the Liferay user portal, which will be the front end user interface. There will be an eTendering application, which will be also through one of my large general partners, who will be working together for us for the eTendering applications, which is also a part of ours, and 40 of the whole automation process. And inter-application, eTendering, the portal, and all the applications, as a matter of fact, will be hosted to the cloud on AWS platform. Now, once you're talking about the AWS platform, that means it will implement the complete infrastructure of the service, and the complete platform as a service. So, all the computed storage, everything will be deploying from the AWS cloud, and necessarily all the platform in terms of your database applications, all third-party tools to do the performance testing, management, monitoring. Everything will be provided as a platform of the service by AWS. So, we, engaged AWS from the beginning itself, the AWS team, and SMP team, both major OEMs worked with us very hand and gloves from day one. And we had multiple interactions with the customer. We understood the challenges. We understood the number of users, number of iterations, number of redundancy, number of high, I mean, the kind of high availability they will require in times of the business difficulty of the applications, and based on which, together, along with AWS, Tech Mahindra, and SAP, all three of us together, and I have the complete solutions, architecture, and the optimizations of the whole solutions, so that overall impact comes to CPWD as the customer, the ultimate results, and the business output they deserve. You know? So, that is where we actually interacted. We have got the interactions with AWS solutions team, AWS architect team, along with our interface architect and the solutions team, who worked very closely along with the customers, them desizing so that it exactly matches the requirement not only for today, down the line for the next four years, because the complete implementation cycle is 18 months, and after that, Tech Mahindra is a prime service provider. We'll provide the four years after implementation support to CPWD, because we all understand that any government department, they need government understanding. These kind of business applications implementation is a transformation. Now, this transformation definitely cannot happen overnight. It has to happen through a process, through a cycle, and through a phase, because there will be the users who will be the proactive users who will start using the inter-applications from the beginning, and, gradually, the more and more success, the more and more user friendliness will come into the whole picture. Then, participation for multiple users, multiple stakeholders will come on board. The moment that comes in, the users load, the user's participation and user's load, both into the platforms, both into the infrastructure will keep on changing, keep on increasing, and that is why our role will be how to manage the complete infrastructure, how to manage the complete platform throughout the journey of this transformation of five and a half years. And that is what the exact role as a prime and large MSP Tech Mahindra will perform for the next five and a half years along with AWS, along with CPWD, and along with SAP. (coughs) >> All right, well, Satyendra, Gautam just laid out, I think, a lot of the reasons why they won the customer obsessed award from AWS on this. You know, I think back to earlier in my career and you talk about NSAP rollout, and it's not only the length of time that it takes for the rollout, and the finance involved, but what Gautam was talking about is the organizational impact and adoptions. So, I would love to hear from your side. You know, what were the goals that you had coming into this? It sounds like getting greater adoption inside the organization for using these services. Give us your insight as to, you know, how that roll-out has been going, the goals you had, how you're meeting them, any success metrics that you use internally to talk about how the project has gone so far. >> We implement the Atlas System in the CPWD, the activities going on since a long time. It was more than one and a half years had been passed, we have angers, one of them concerning our ideas and the way we transform our business processes. They have some certain ideas and that the app implementation is the last one. Most of them have been implemented and we have started, started to get ideas to implement some, but we had bad interactions with all the leading IT service providers in the country, along with all the leading cloud service providers in the country, and this, of course, all the leading EIP services, OEMs, EIP, OEMs, so and so. But, it's a long journey, we have a trial approximately half of the deadline from there. To inform returning process, Tech Mahindra has been appointed as the system integrator and they have come with all the sorts of the services that they are offering, for example, they plan to use SAP, and EIP will be in there, as well. This "one life" system for the portal, eTendering, is a primary credit, has been done. And overall everything has been hosted on the AWS cloud platform. So, it's just that, when could we have. And, everybody knows that Amazon is the leading cloud service provider with the largest of the facilities available with us, so, during this journey, we have got lots of support from the AWS via lots of the credit regarding us to get it set up with the AWS team, and continuously boosted our office and explained each of our queries on this, and now, from the march onwards, Tech Mahindra has started the implementation process we are in. More than four months have been passed since then. And we have covered a lot. The whole objective of this implementation is all our activities will be done on this EIP system, only that if somebody is working in the CPWD, you will activate that. Work in the CPWD on the EIP, or you will not be able to work at all. This is a light goal and whole system. But, all of our system is going to be automatic. Earlier, we were having a different idea because when we were working in the silos, everything we wanted to be integrated with each other, and the time that will be invested to make the entry of the different activity at a different time and with the applications, applicants are not talking to each other, they are working in the silos, but that will go away. So, what we are expecting everything will be on the EIP system, as well, and we are expecting the efficiency of the CPWD unit is going to be increased tremendously. Apart from this, they will handle a more number of the works compared to what they were handling and the time in it since. And everything will revolved around the click of the buttons and we need not to go and ask from anybody to give the reports, et cetera. So, problem management must peak, too. By the click of the button, we will also be able to get all the inputs, all the reports with what is going on across the country. And that idea. So, it is going to be really a transformation to the working of the department, and, in whole, the entire public work center of this country is going to be benefited out of this. This has been like a lighthouse today. This EIP implemented in the CPWD is the lighthouse up ahead, so there are more than 30 public work departments, said public work departments are working, so this is going to create and open a window for everybody there. Once it is a success of this implementation, we'll have it far reaching implication on the implementation of that EIP system or a similar idea for implications in the public works or in the whole country. So, so, there's lots of these stakes our there. To any and, hopefully, with the help of Tech Mahindra, with the help of SAP, AWS, and Amazon, one day they will be able to implement successfully and we will, we are going to get the benefit out of. Everybody is going benefit, not only the Central Public Works Department, but all of our stakeholders. All the stakeholders in terms of businesses, in terms of their reach to the Public Works, and there is a new door to open because the IT had not been leveraged the way in the Public Works Department in the central department or the state government. The other IT system hadn't used EIP. It is going, it's a lighthouse headed to success. We'll have a far reaching implication for everybody. >> Well, I tell you, Satyendra, that's been the promise of cloud, that we should be able to do something, and the scalability and repeatability is something that we should be able to go. Gautam, I want to give you the final word on this. You know, speak to how does cloud, how do we enable this to be able to scale throughout many groups within the organization without having to be, you know, as much work, you know. I think about traditional IT, it's, well, okay, I spend a project, I spend so much time on it, and then every time I need to repeat it, I kind of, you know, have that same amount of work. The, you know, labor should go down as we scale out in a cloud environment. Is that, what you feel, the case? You know, help us understand how this lighthouse account will expand. >> Okay. So, any cloud, you know, have initiative nowadays into any organization. It depends. It primarily benefits in both the ways. Number one, the organization doesn't require to invest up front on the capital expenditure part of it. That's very important. Number two, the organization has got the flexibility to scale up and scale down based on the customer requirements. Within a click of the mouse. It doesn't take any time. Because the inter-positioning of the infrastructure is available with the cloud infrastructure service provider. And, similarly, the scaling of the platforms, that's also available with the cloud infrastructure provider. So, once you do the complete mapping requirement and the sizing for the entire tenure of the project, then the provisioning and deprovisioning is not a matter of time, it can happen with a click of mouse. That's number one. Number two, it's become a challenging activity for any government organization to have their own IT set-up. To manage such a huge, mammoth task of the entire infrastructure, applications, services, troubleshooting, 24 by 7, everything. So, that's not expected from the large government organizations, as such, because that's not their business. Their business is to run the country, their business to run the organization, their business to grow the country's different ideas. And, the IT services organizations, like Tech Mahindra, is there to support those kind of automation processes. And, the platforms which are available on the cloud nowadays, that's the ease of inter-applications, inter-management, monitoring, availability of the entire infrastructure, that makes use of the whole, complete system. So, it all works together. It's not a thing that the system integration organizations already will do the all new reform. It has to happen in synergies. So, application has to work together, infrastructure has to be available together, the management, monitoring has to happen, scaling up, scaling down has to happen, all kinds of updates, upgrades, and badges down the line for the company, continuing of the whole contract has to happen so that the system, once up and running and benefited, it's performing at least for a period of the next five years, as the tenure of the contract, in multiple department happens. Now, what Mr. Gupta was saying, it's very very true that CPWD is the kind of motherly organizations for all public works departments in the country. And, all the public works departments in the country are eagerly looking at this project. Now, it is very important for all of us, not only for Tech Mahindra, Tech Mahindra, SAP, Liferay, and AWS, together, to work and make this project as a success, because it is not a reason that, as a simple customer, this project has to be successful. It's a flexible project for the government of India, and it's been monitored by Didac Lee, the government of India officials, and top ranking bodies on a day in and day out basis, number one. Number two, if we become successful together in this project, there will be an avenue for what Satyendra Gupta has said. That all state PWDs will be open to everybody. They will try and adopt, and they will try and implement a similar kind of system to all the respective states in the country. So it's a huge opportunity in terms of technology enhancement, automations, infrastructure, applications, and moreover, as a service provider, to provide the services to all these bodies, together, which, I feel, it's a huge huge opportunity for all of us together, and we are confident that we will work together, hand in gloves, the way we have done from the day one of this initiative, and we'll take it forward. >> All right, well Satyendra, thank you so much for sharing the details of your project, wish you the best of luck with that going forward. And, Gautam, congratulations again to Tech Mahindra for winning the most customer obsessed migration solution. Thank you both for joining. >> Both: Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you for joining. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Thanks for watching. >> Gautam: Thank you very much. (bright upbeat music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering AWS executive. Something >>brought to you by Accenture. >>Welcome back, everyone. We are kicking off day two of the cubes. Live coverage of the ex center Executive Summit here at AWS. Reinvent, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this panel. We have some bad meta. He is the chief information officer at Putnam based in Boston. Where? Boston People together. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Nitin Gupta. He's the partner and solutions lead. Financial service is at AWS Welcomed and Shale Jane back again for more. Who leads the data business group in North America. Thanks >>so much the last time. >>Yes. We can't get enough of each other. So thank you so much for coming on the show. We're talking about the data data journey and financial service is so I'm gonna start with you, Sam. It tell us. Tell our viewers a little bit about Putnam. That your assets under management. Your employees? >>Sure. So you know, problem is a global firm. We are a leader in mutual funds in the mutual fund business. We're in 84 year old organization. We based in Boston on, and we are known for innovation. We've done a lot of firsts in our industry on our focus has always bean looking after the needs of our shareholders. So even as we launch digital transformation, we launch it with the lens off, making sure we're covering the needs of our shareholders. >>So what was the impetus? What was the driving force to it? To embark on this cloud journey? >>Sure, So you look recovered. The financial markets recover industries. We look at our own industry as well. Things are changing rather rapidly, right, if I may just turn it around a little bit. Last year's letter from our CEO Bob Reynolds, said That problem now has Maur increasingly Maur four and five star funds, according to Morningstar, then we've had it as a percent of total funds ever. Before we had inflows, when the rest of the industry were having outflows, we built a digital platform and we said digital technology at problem is how we gonna view the internal technology department who will help enable our company to go and provide the investment insights directly to our advisors and to our shareholders so that they can benefit from the performance that we're we're delivering, right? We can only do that through a change. What's really going on in our industry is that there's more choice that's now available to shareholders than ever before. So while we talk about where there's outflows in in in our world, there's actually a lot of flow happening, right, So So it's for us to figure out how. How are the tastes changing right? What are people buying would do advisors need? When do they need them and can reposition ourselves to service them at scale, and so that those are the things that are driving our business? For us to continue to serve the shareholders needs. We really need to be in tune with where the market is. So we're helping do that at Putnam through technology, >>so shale in it. And I mean, what he's just described is thin. This enormously changing landscape and financial service is disrupted by a lot of new entrance. A lot of financial text in tak, a lot of different kinds of technologies. A lot of industries are experiencing this rapid pace of change. How do u ex ensure in AWS work with Putnam amidst this tremendous change, and how do you sit down with the client and sort of work out? Where do we go from here? >>So you know, I want to touch upon a couple of things that made you said And Rebecca You said, So no one is the cloud of their journey. It's It's not a destination that you're trying to get to, And then the other thing that you talked about, it's change. So we had in the cycle right now. But there's a lot of change happening at an industry we had in the cycle Where you nothing, that $38 trillion or something, which is a generator, you know, they're just getting transferred from one generation to the other. I'm not getting any off it. Unfortunately, you know >>all of >>this change that is happening in the industry. What is really required is you need something up in terms of technology, a platform that allows you to move quickly on adapt really quickly to this change. And I think that's where cloud comes in when we talk about all the new generation technologies like data machine learning, artificial intelligence, how >>do you >>leverage all of those. How do you fail quickly? How do you test experiment? Run thousands of not millions of experiments and see what will work in what will not work and do that in a very cost effective way and cloud of a very easy. It's an effective way to do it. And the weight of Louis is helping our customers. Obviously. You know, we we announced a bunch of service is yes, today way have the widest and the deepest tack that is dead in the industry today. You know the strength of our partners. Accenture. So you know, Accenture has Bean one of our longest standing partners altar and financial firm on, you know, working with them, working with our partners to enable our customers. But then we're also investing very heavily in building our industry capabilities. Are accounting solution architects? Professional service is security professionals helping our customers answer all the questions that they would need to answer as they go in this journey with us. So it's, you know, we are in this with them for for the long haul on dhe, you know, super excited about parking trip. >>So from our perspective, I think where we view the world as at a point where we're post digital, where digital was to put a front end that made your engagement with the customers much better. But now we're talking about intelligent enterprise, which is to really digitize the company from the inside out. So not only you need cloud for agility and all the other benefits that cloud offers, but you also need to look at data is the vehicle that would actually not only transform the culture of the company but also be able to integrate with your partners. For example, Cement talked about, you know, getting mind share from the advisers. But if you can exchange data, integrate data much better, faster with them and serve data to them in shapes and speeds that they need, they'll be more amenable to put you on their roster as well. So I think we're seeing a change that's mostly driven by the fintech industry disruption. That's that's happening as well. And it is no better time than now with the cloud and data to really help transform companies like >>the's tons of innovation, right, it's We heard Andy Jassy talk about the Let's roll Sweet the Sweets that are available to us. Our job is to learn what they are and how does it apply to our business because at the end of the game you said it's about our shareholders. It's about the value that we can bring. But we want to harness the power off all of the innovation, and we can't even though we've Bean an innovator, we're not going to innovate alone, all right, so it's really helpful to have to surround yourself with partners who have done this before, to be learning from others and bringing in the right tools at the right time, so so we can turn things around quickly, right? This is way are obviously very conservative and risk averse when it comes to managing other people's money. So we have to be very, very careful. Having said that, you know, we want to learn about all the guardrails we can put in place so we can go faster. >>I want to actually do something about what Shayla brought up, and that is the cultural change within the organization, because change is hard and so many people are resistant, particularly when things are going relatively well and they say Why mess that up with the new technology? So how is hard? Maybe >>is the understatement of the week very hard, and as you guys know, you know where it's not. It's not hard because people don't just want changes. They are experts in things that they've been doing for the last 15 years. 20 years. They've bean at our firm for a really long time. They really know how everything works from front to back. What happens, though? Now, when we get a changing need from the market and people want to buy things differently and we want to sell different products and maybe wanna introduce new products to the market, we can create bottlenecks that slow things down if we're not careful. So this is where we want to learn about the two pizza teams and how you can do things faster. How can we apply that to our world? Which means business partners working with technology, co located in small teams, being completely empowered to deliver solutions, right, working with our risk and compliance people, making sure that everyone's doing things that there were supposed to be doing right? How do we put that to work in the financial service is industry. So where we're learning as we go, we're learning to break down the sidles in the organization, and it's hot all the way around because we're experts in our areas. We know what we've done really well. But fortunately we have a leader in our CEO who's basically said that Let's transform problem so that we become leaders in the digital era for financial service is so with his support waken. Get the executive team align, and as the executive team aligns, then you find that people in the organization they want to work in this model, right but way don't know yet what we don't know, right? It's so we know how to do things from yesterday. Now we're learning and working together. So you guys have come in and this is where we've said, Bring in the people who have done this before and let's hold a session with 40 50 people that Putnam and let's just learn about what that transformation looked like at other places, so we don't make the same mistakes. >>Well, that's what Andy Jassy said in his fireside chat this morning. He was talking about how he had surgery recently in the question you need to ask your surgeon is how many times have you done this surgery? Because that is the critical thing. And so having a trusted partner is so important. So how how does it work that we're working together, collaborating on this relationship? How are you ensuring that Putnam doesn't make mistakes and does do the right tool for the right job shell? >>So, um, earlier this year, we actually launched an offering. A devious lighthouse with eight of us and what it is is a is a collection off. All of our assets are thought, leadership and architectures that we have garnered over the years, having worked with plants like Putnam and have them through the journey. So we put them all together and we bring Bring that Fourth Putnam is one of the first clients actually take advantage of it Abuse Data Lighthouse and, for example, we have a methodology that is specially customized for doing data on on eight of us. So things like that is what we bring to the table to help eliminate the risk that they may encounter. >>And data is critical to us, right? It's we manage a set of data assets, and that's the engine off the organization. So when we look at cloud migration way, look at what's our data strategy? How are rebuilding the so called you guys introduce the terminology for confirmed data sets? And then can we gallon eyes the rest of the organization around it, from investment professionals to operational professionals who used that data every day. Manager governent Make sure that it is what it's supposed to be. And to do that in a cloud environment where their user experience becomes a lot simpler, a lot easier almost takes I t a little away from the day to day. We don't have to be in the report writing business because we can make them more self service right that will create efficiencies in our organization. Our clients are asking us to do things at a lower cost than ever before and introduce more products and more tools and more service is right, so >>I would just tie with Samantha, just said with your question about culture. So if you can make it easy for people, for example, making things self service and data that's discovered through a catalog, so you have a place where you can go and find all the data sets it available. What is the quality? What is the veracity of data and then be able to take a piece of that and try some experiments with it? I think that would enable the cultural change much faster >>because they are able to basically do their jobs better. >>Yes, yes, >>it is. A is a more productive implement. Will highly >>engaged employees, right? We don't want to be in a situation where we find a lot of those disengagement moving employees and the mission for company. We want high engagement. We own people committed to what they're doing. We want to remove hurdles, and technology is they can produce great efficiencies, but it's not done right. It can also be a big hurdle. So we want to learn how to deliver the right tools, the right products to make it easier for way like to say, bring delightful experiences for our clients and our employees. >>Delightful. Another were another Jeff Bezos favorite word of his Obviously Putnam is, is a real innovator and really on the vanguard of this new technology. What are you seeing in the greater financial service is landscape. I mean, how how what are the what is the corporate mind set when it comes to this kind of change? >>So you know, when we look across our financial service is customer base across banking, capital markets, insurance pretty much every customer today. The question is not, you know if we should move to the cloud or when should we move to the cloud? But I think every every CEO and see io is asking the question, How do I move too loud? And what applications do I move over? How do I start on this journey of transformation? Whether it's a digital or it's reducing costs are improving my risk. Posher whatever that end goal is on dhe, you know, when we look at use cases across the industry, risk and data is with one of the easiest use cases to get started with, say, on Ben Field. They were looking at Solvent E to calculations for 25 million other policy holders, and they reduce that time from 10 days to 10 minutes. That is a, you know, really good use case off getting moving to the cloud. You know, if Indra is a great example. They're very public customer analyzing 38 building over market records in the stock market and looking in on alive in all of the data. On it up with data and risk is one of the core use cases that companies start with but then >>has to >>get more as they learn more about the cloud. As they get more get a deeper understanding, they start looking at other things, like Transforming Corp core applications. Today we have core creating applications, scored insurance application score, banking applications that are running running on the cloud. And then they start looking and innovation. You know, how do we look at artificial intelligence? How do we look at machine learning? How do we look at the new technologies to really transform our business and one of the great use case? And we thought so. You know, a lot off insurance companies Liberty Mutual using Lexx as part of their there was a conversational agent for their customers. But one of the interesting examples I have is it's ah, it's a reinsurer in Denmark, Italy insurer in Denmark, and what they're doing is they're using image recognition from from Amazon to look at on accident in the field and then analyzing that, using the using our recognition service to see what that that actual damages and what the cost is and feeding that information to the underwriter really compressing the time that it takes two from a clean filing to processing and payment to a matter of a few few few hours on getting that payment to the to the customer. So really creating a very positive customer experience. >>So it speaking of customer experiences, what have you know? You said you thought you were in service to your shareholders. What have been some of the results that you've seen? >>So you have to look across the organization, right? So our advisers served the need on the retail side, so we were like a bee to be business, right? So we have to be cognizant of what's going on in their world. They're sitting down with clients and talking through the choices, and they have certain needs what they need to fulfill their obligations. They need to explain why they're doing what they're doing. If Putnam knows where each of the advisers are at in their journey with their clients, we can be more helpful to them in explaining why our funds are behaving the way they are right, that information can be had at the right time at the right moment when they need it. Need it, And that brings advisers closer to our our teams are retail distribution teams are marketing teams are investment teams are investment professionals, are using data and analytics to get information to. We're using technology to get information to them faster, so companies are doing releases. There's a ton of information out there these days. We're using technology to dig deeper into the press releases as well as the SEC filings, looking at the footnotes, really trying to understand what they're trying to say, what they said before and what are analysts should be focused on. And we can take a 70 page document, condense it to seven pages and pinpoint what the technology tools say's are really insights. And the analysts will take the time and read the whole thing. But they'll also look at the insides and they'll add it into their process. So technology's additive to the investment process and really making a change help and then that's helping Dr performance. So at the end of the day, we're living good performance on our funds through data analytics technology, you know, give you another example. Some off the were were very strong in the in the mortgage analytics business and on the fixed income side. Our team's very well known. They've been together for many, many years now. They're starting to use data at scale, and we found that being able to go to the cloud to do these analytics right in hours instead of days has really made a material difference in the number of iterations we can run. So now the questions are, when we do risk management, can we do that a little differently and run more reiterations and get more accuracy? So we're seeing all of that benefit. That's direct user experience, that people are seeing people seeing how technology is helping them do a better job with their thesis. >>Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on. The Cube seem ed knitting and shale. A pleasure having you on. >>Thank you for being here. >>I'm Rebecca night. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of the Ex Center Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to Vegas baby. This is the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 19 this is day three. John Walls is my cohost Jay. Welcome back to Vegas baby Vegas. It's Vegas baby. And you know I'm looking out back. So this is not like a day three crowd. It's really not. Now you can kind of yell out in the hallway and your echo bounce around, but there are a lot of people still here, a lot of business still being done. There really are. There's no shortage of that. And because we're live on the queue, what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas. So we're happy to welcome a couple of new guests to the queue that are going to share all these great things about security and teach us to, to my left is Robbie's sort of Austin VP of solutions and platform marketing from forest points and from AWS. >>Roe had gooped up global segment leader insecurity. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So we can't go to any event without talking about security. It's, it's one of those topics that I think every generation understand when there are big breaches like Capitol one that happened recently or Facebook, even the older generations who are still in the workforce today, they understand it to some degree. The security is so complex. And, and Ravi, one of the things I know that's most challenging about security, especially cyber, is humans are 90 plus percent of the problem. It's human errors, right? Talk to us about Forcepoint. I love the tagline, human centric cybersecurity. How can you help us humans fix all of the errors that we're causing? Or can you, Doug, good question. It's, it's the cat and mouse game, right? Uh, so Forcepoint is a purpose belt, a user and data protection company, right? >>And we're focused on the digital identities and the behavior of their cyber behavior to be able to understand that and then protect, um, data and the users as well. So that's what we refer to as human centric cybersecurity. And how long have you guys been working on this? Oh, we've been working on this for decades. It's the problem with traditional security was all infrastructure centric, guns, guards and Gates and magic will happen. And then turns out those bad actors figure out the guns, guards and Gates and always looking to compromise users and their access. And so independent of whether the attack is external or internal, it's that compromise that that's the focus. And so when you focus on the compromise, that's where we focused on in terms of how to help companies with security. So, so what, what does that connection between behavior in between operations? >>I mean, so what are you looking for in terms of what that user's doing correctly or incorrectly? I mean, what kind of markers do you have? What kind of signs do you get? And in what corrective measures can you put into the process that automatically will correct or at least address that? Yeah, so let me take an example. Right? Um, so if I'm a developer, I'm building using Amazon's awesome services, putting a lot of content in there. I use get hub as a storage. I put a lot of information in there and I'm doing that quickly to get my project done. Right. As I do that and I launched that application, then security comes along after after fact and says, well, let's put security design a day and then how do we protect the data? That model is breaking. Why is it breaking? Because companies are saying users are no longer coming just from the enterprise. >>They're working from home, they're working from the Starbucks and they're accessing the same data and bad actors follow that too. What do they do? They follow the users and go, I can then pretend to be Ravi and get access to the data. And that's how you see a lot of the breaches. So what we're looking at is the behavior of Ravi as an employee. I engage with my mobile device, with my laptop, I get access. I work from eight to five, I'm in Austin most of the times. So the markers are user related, device related, and also context. It's like, why am I logging in from Austin? And at the same time also seeing a login from China that doesn't look right. So that's, that's an example of a behavior. So what's the red flag that goes up there? And you mentioned China, that's an extreme example, but I'm sure there are some more subtle or some not quite as obvious. >>I mean, what exactly is that, that prophylactic measure that that comes in that's automated that says, wait a minute, I don't think this is Ravi, although it's in Denver or it's on this server, whatever month. You know what I mean? Absolutely. So again, the context is built out of three things, users, devices and the environment. Right? By triangulating on those three things, you can actually capture very subtle needle in the haystack of being able to say, look, this is Robbie's behavior. So we're going to let him access get hub. We're going to let him access all the resources on Amazon, but as soon as we see deviations from that, we're going to throw a yellow flag. We're going to ask them to login with a multifactor authentication or some, some other additional form of engaging. Then if we still see more deviations, then we say the word, I'm actually blocked that and I can safely block it because I know that this is not Ravi anymore. Right. And that's how we've seen a lot of organizations use behavior at the heart of their security posture. >>So Rohit, before we went live, you, you told John and me that you've been in security for a thousand years. So one of the biggest challenges though besides people is, is being reactive. And when companies have to be reactive to security events, whether they're ostensible or, or more subtle like John talked about, that can potentially be catastrophic. Can you just talk to us a little bit about some of the historical changes say in the last few years that you've seen where companies, there's no time to go from react to be reactive. How are companies leveraging technologies like Forcepoint and AWS to go from reactive to predictive to eventually prescriptive? >>Yes, that's a good question. And firstly, it's a dozen years, not a thousand years, but, uh, it feels like that sometimes. Uh, so what we have found is that the cloud actually has helped companies become more secure because security is about visibility and control. And what the cloud does is provide better visibility than was available before because you have things like cloud trail that are showing any event that is happening in the system that you could actually use to figure out what happened before and then you can learn from that quickly and take action to fix it. So that's where the control part comes in. Over time you will get better at understanding the signals, as Robbie was saying, and you can be more predictive or you can take action much faster. And even if you don't completely solve the problem right away, you are able to react much faster. So the damages is minimal. Right? And so we've seen that change happened over the years. Companies are using automation that the cloud brings and coupled with the visibility to really gain control back. >>You know, there, there's um, I don't know if you'd call it a natural tension, but there's certainly some friction. Speed. Security, right? I want to go, go, go, go, go. I want to stop, stop, stop. So I've stopped. Right? So I mean our, our, our, our, they to take years, you know, cat and mouse are the, are they natural enemies or friction or can they be complimentary now in such a way because of what you are developing are the tools that we do have at our disposal now, can you address both? It's very, very interesting. The, when you started with an infrastructure centric security, when you put guns, guards and Gates, they were that tension, right? But when you start to change the conversation about, look, we're not about stopping progress, we want the developers to use the data, but we want them to do use it securely, right? And as you start to think about that approach, then security can actually be an enabler for digital transformation. Just as Amazon is talking today or throughout the last three days about how you've lots of services and enabling digital transformation. That's really our focus too, is how to enable that securely. How to enable users to be able to touch the data wherever it is, but secure that along the value chain >>is security. Is this question for both of you and Rohit? Let's start with you. Where is security and terms of the conversation as Andy Jassy talked about on Tuesday when he was talking about business, true business transformation gotta start at the top, you to have that senior exec level initiative sponsorship that's pushed down into the organization is security at that. I imagine it is at that senior level. Talk to us about how you've seen that evolve and how it is really a cornerstone to digital transformation. >>Yeah. I think security used to be an afterthought. The developers were not concerned about it. They don't teach security or at least they didn't teach security in college and computer science courses. It was not even that important. It's gone from that to an hour board level and perhaps even a regulatory level of discussion where it is being addressed by much higher authorities then even the board of the company. Right. So yes, it has definitely gone from a backroom operation that people didn't care about to something that is really very important and as Ravi said, you can move fast and stay secure. You almost have no choice because you have to move fast, right? Figuring out how to be secure in that environment and you don't do not want to end up in the news ultimately. And so that is why it is a conversation that is elevated. Now to the board level. >>Do you see that, speaking of ending up in the news, and there's a couple of folks whose boobs are here that have been in the news recently for significant breaches, human caused, is that when that becomes a sensational story, is that a facilitator of more conversations of customers coming? And maybe, maybe Ravi, I'll start with you. Customers coming to Forcepoint going, gosh, you know what, here's another example of a breach that affected millions and millions. We need to get our hands around this in a better way so that we can really use that data for competitive advantage to those, those news breaking stories, good for business. >>So we get invited to a lot of board level conversations. Our leaders get invited to speak to boards and the two common questions they get asked is, am I going to be the next target? Right? And then most importantly, the second one is how am I doing against my peer group? Right? And so when it comes to that conversation, as you as rotors, there's describing it, organizations are saying, look, I've gotta be able to run my business and I need to run it securely in order to do that. If I can answer those two questions, I'm not going to worry about the threats and attacks and what happened to in the news. I'm more focused on how can I get this new project deployed, security connected? How do I do this new mobile application? Get that and to protect the data, right? So that's the conversation that boards want to know. >>So they do want the reference point, for sure. Can we, you know, at least it's talk about the headlines and we all see that almost to the point that we're kind of numb to it, right? We're almost desensitized. Another hack, another breach or whatever. So we've, in a way, our mindset is, or Facebook that it happens. Can we get to the different, flip that paradigm to where we almost take for granted that it won't happen, that that are our guide. Our guards are that good. I mean, what does it take to get to that point to where we don't accept preachers and we look at them as an anomaly rather than for kind of the cost of doing business. I mean that's, that's been the central focus for us with the human centric cybersecurity. We're saying if you take, uh, any breach and their story reads, breach happened and then you get all the other what they did after effect, right? >>And then they'd tell you a story that happened that the bad actor or the compromise was happened over some period of time, whether it was months to detecting bad things. Ex-post is hard. But what we are focused on when you look at human centric security as we're saying, the time to steal data is in minutes, but the indicators that it takes to steal that data has been building up. So we're saying if we can use behavior to show that buildup, then we could block it before a breach happens. So it's kind of like a slow drip in your ceiling, right? You see it there, go and go ahead. Don't wait for the ceiling to collapse. Right? You've got a ring that's growing there, so do something about it. Exactly how to identify it. >>Last question as we look at, one of the other things that Andy showed on Tuesday is that 97% of it spend is still on prem. We know that there's a lot of hybrid cloud out there in those types of environments which are becoming more and more the norm. How do you help customers manage all of that data regardless of what's on from what's in the cloud and how things are moving in a secure way. >>And that's where for us the partnership is critical and we see the partnership with Amazon to be very strategic in the fact that Amazon's building up awesome set of foundational controls. That's great. We'll let the developers use that, right? And now as enterprises connect with their data, data is on prem and in the cloud and everywhere in between. How do you then implement security that's closest to where the data sits? So we were leverage a lot of the security controls that Amazon provides. And in addition to that, we then offer more of a unified policy control to provide that control wherever the data sits, whether it's on the end point in line or in the cloud. >>Exciting stuff. Well guys, thank you for joining John and me on the program, giving us more information on, on cybersecurity and some of the opportunities that businesses have to actually use that as an advantage. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for the time for John Walls. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Q for Vegas. Re-invent 19 thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) [Reporter] - Live from San Diego, California it's theCUBE covering Goodcloud and Cloud- Native cloud. Brought to you by Red Hat the Cloud-Native computing foundation. and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, we're here at Kubecon Cloud-Native con 2019 in San Diego, I'm Stu Miniman. We've got over 12,000 in attendance here and we have a three guest lineup of Kubecon veterans here. To my right is Loris Degioanni who's the CTO and founder of Sysdig. To his right, representing the Tiger is Amit Gupta who's vice president of business development and Product Management at Tigera, and also Knox Anderson who's Director of Product Management. We know from the Octopus, Amit, that also means that he's with Sysdig. So gentlemen, thank you all for joining. [Loris]- Octopus and Tiger >> Octopus and Tiger, bringing it all together on the tube. We have a menagerie as it were. So Loris, let's start as they said, you know all veterans, you've been here, you've almost been to every single one, something about a you know, a child being born made you miss one. [Loris] - The very first one. >> So, why don't you bring us in kind of what's so important about this ecosystem, why it's growing so fast and Sysdig's relationship with the community? >> Yeah, I mean, you can just look around, right? Kubecon is growing year after year, it's becoming bigger and bigger and this just a reflection of the community getting bigger and bigger every year, right? It's really looks like we are, you know, here with this community creating the next step, you know? For computing, for cloud computing, and really, you know, Kubernetes is becoming the operating system powering, you know, the cloud and the old CNC ecosystem around it is really becoming, essentially the ecosystem around it. And the beauty of it is it's completely open this time, right? For the first time in history. >> All right, so since you are the founder, I need to ask, give me the why? So we've been saying you know, we've been starting this program almost 10 years ago and the big challenge of our time is you know building software for distributed systems. Cloud's doing that, Edge is taking that even further. Bring us back to that moment of the birth of Sysdig and how that plays into all the open source and that growth you're talking about. >> Yeah, I mean, Sysdig was born, so first of all, a little bit of background of me. I've been working in open source and networking for my whole career. My previous company was the business behind washer, then it took on a live service, so, a huge open source community and working with enterprises all around the world, essentially to bring visibility over their neighbors. And then I started realizing the stack was changing radically, right? With the event of cloud computing. With the event of containers and Docker. With the event of Kubernetes. It, legacy ways of approaching the problem were just not working. Were not working the technical level because, you need to create something completely new for the new stack but they were also not working at the approach level. Every thing was proprietary. Every thing was in silos, right? So the approach now is much more, like inclusive and community first, and that's why I decided to start Sysdig. >> All right. so Amit, we know things are changing all the time. One thing that does not ever change is security is paramount. I really say, I go back 10 or 15 years you know, they've got a lot of lip service around security. Today, it's a board level discussion. Money, development, especially here in the Cloud-Native space it's really important so, talk about Tigera relationship with Sysdig and very much focused on the Kubernetes ecosystems. >> Absolutely. So I couldn't agree with you more, Stu. I mean, security is super critical and more so now as folks are deploying more and more mission critical applications on the Kubernetes based platform. So, Sysdig is a great partner for us. Tigera provides networking and network security aspects of that Kubernetes deployment. And if you think about it how modern applications are built today, you've taken a big large model and decomposed into hundreds of micro services so there's procedural cause that were happening inside the code and now API calls on the network so you've got a much bigger network with that service a highly distributed environment. So the traditional architectures where you manage the security typically with the firewall or a gateway, it's not sufficient. It's important, it's needed and that's really where, as people design their architecture, they have to think about how do you design security across that entire infrastructure in a distributed fashion or done in the early stages of your projects. >> Knox, help us understand the relationship here, how it fits into Sysdig's product with Tigera. >> Yeah, so we're great partners with Tigera. Tigera lives at the network security level. Sysdig's secure in that the product we built extends the instrumentation that Loris started off with our open source tool, to provide security across the entire container lifecycle. So at build time, making sure your images are properly configured, free of vulnerabilities at run time, looking at all the activity that's happening and then the big challenge in the Kubernetes space is around incident response and audit. So if something happens in that pod, Kubernetes is going to kill it before anyone can investigate and Sysdig helps you with those work flows. >> Maybe it would help, we all throw around those terms, Cloud-Native a lot and it's a term I've heard for a number of years. But the definition like cloud itself is one that you know matures over time and when we get there so, maybe if we focus in a little bit on Cloud-Native security. You know, what is it we're hearing from customers, what does it mean to really build Cloud-Native Security. What makes that different from the security we've been building in our data centers, in clouds for years? >> Well I thought Cloud-Native was just a buzzword. Does it actually mean something? (laughs) >> Well hopefully it's more than just a buzzword and that's what I'm hoping you could explain. >> Yeah, so again, the way I see it is the real change that you are witnessing is how software is being written. And we're touching a little bit on it at this point. Software intended to be architected as big monoliths now is being splayed into smaller components. And this is just a reflection of software development teams in a general way being much more efficient when you can essentially, break the problem into sub-problems and break the responsibilities into sub-responsibilities. This is perhaps something that is extremely beneficial especially in terms of productivity. But also, sort of revolutionizes the way you write software, you run software, you maintain software, CICD, you know continues development, continues integration, pipelines, the reliance on GIT and suppository to store everything. And this also means that, securing, monitoring, troubleshooting infrastructures becomes much different. And one of things we are seeing is legacy two's don't work anymore and the new approaches like Calico Networking or like Falco and runtime security or like Sysdig secure, for the lifecycle and security of containers are something bubbling up as alternatives to the old way of doing things. >> I would add to that I agree with you. I would add that if you're defining a Cloud-Native security the Cloud-Native means it's a distributed architecture. So your security architecture has got to be distributed as well, absolutely got a plan for that. And then to your point, you have to automate the security as part of the various aspects of your lifecycle. Security can not be an afterthought you have to design for that right from the beginning and then one last thing I would add is just like your applications are being deployed in an automated fashion your security has to be done in that fashion so, policy is good, infrastructure is good and the security is just baked in as part of that process. It's critical you design that way to get the best outcomes. >> Yeah, and I'd say the asset landscape has completely changed. Before you needed to surface finding against a host or an IP. Now you need to surface vulnerabilities and findings against clusters, name spaces, deployments, pods, services and that huge explosion of assets is making it much harder for teams to triage events, vulnerabilities and it's really changing the process in how the sock works. >> And I think that the landscape of the essence is changing also is reflected on the fact that the persona landscape is changing. So, the separation between attempts and operation people is becoming thinner and thinner and more and more security becomes a responsibility of the operation team, which is the team in charge of essentially owning the infrastructure and taking care of it, not only for the operational point of view but also from the security. >> Yeah, I think I've heard the point that you've made a many times. Security can't be a bolt on or an afterthought. It's really something fundamental, we talk about DevOps is, it needs to be just baked into the process, >> Yeah. >> It's, as I've heard chanted at some conferences, you know, security is everyone's responsibility, >> Correct. >> make sure you step up. We're talking a lot about open source here. There's a couple of projects you mentioned, Falco and Calico, you're partners with Red hat. I remember going to the Red Hat show years ago and they'd run these studies and be like, people are worried that open source and security couldn't go side by side, but no, no you could actually, you know open source is secure but taking the next step and talking about building security products with open source give us, where that stands today and how customers are you know embracing that? And how can it actually keep up with the ever expanding threat surfaces and attacks that are coming out? >> Yeah. First of all as we know open source is actually more secure and we're getting proof of that you know, pretty much on a daily basis including you know, the fact that tools like Kubernetes are regularly scrutinized by the security ecosystem and the vulnerabilities are found early on and disclosed. In particular, Sysdig is the original creator of Falco which is an open source, CNCF phased anomaly detection system that is based on collecting high granular data from a running Kubernetes environment. For example, through the capture of the system calls and understanding the activity of the containers and being able to alert about the anomalous behavior. For example, somebody being able to break into your container, extricating data or modifying binaries, or you know perpetrating an attack or stuff like that. We decided to go with an approach that is open source first because, first of all, of course, we believe into participating with the community and giving something as an inclusive player to the community. But also we believe that you really achieve better security by being integrated in the stack, right? It's very hard , for example, to have, I don't know, security in AWS that is deeply integrated with the cloud stack upon us, alright? Because this it's propietary. Why would Kubernetes solutions like Falco or even like Calico, we can really work with the rest of the community to have them really tightly coupled and so much more effective than we could do in the past. >> You know, I mean I would make one additional point to your question. It's not only that users are adopting open source security. It's actually very critical that security solutions are available as an open source, because, I mean, look around us here this is a community of open source people, they're building and distributing infrastructure platform from that is all open source so we're doing this service if we don't offer a good set of security tools to them, not an open source. So that's really our fundamental model that's why Calico provides two key problems networking and network security for our users, you deploy your clusters, your infrastructures, and you have all the bells and whistles you need to be able to run a highly secure, highly performing cluster in your environment and I believe that's very critical for this community. >> Yeah, and I'd say that and now with open source, prevention has moved into the platform. So, with network policy and things like Calico or in our 3.0 launch we incorporated the ability to automate tests and apply pod security policies. And those types of prevention mechanisms weren't available on your platforms before. >> Okay, I often find if you've got any customer examples, talk about, you know, how they're running this production kind of the key, when they use your solutions you know, the benefits that they're having? >> Yeah, I'll take a few examples. I mean, today it is probably fair to say Calico from the partial phone home data we get a 100,000 plus customers across the globe, some of the, I can't take the actual names of the customers but, so the largest banks are using Calico for their enterprise networking scenarios and essentially, the policies, the segmentation inside the clusters should be able to manage the security for those workloads inside their environments. So that's how I would say. >> Yeah, and Sysdig, we, have an open core base with Falco, and then we offer a commercial product called Sysdig secure, in particular, last week we release version 3.0 of our commercial product which is another interesting dynamic because if we can offer the open core essentially to the community but then offer additional features with our commercial product. And Falco is installed in many, many thousands extension of platforms. and Sysdig secure you know secures, and offers visibility to the biggest enterprises in the world. We have deployments that are at a huge scale with the biggest banks, insurance companies, media companies, and we tend to fall to cover the full life cycle of applications because as the application and as the software moves in the CICD pipeline so security needs to essentially accompany the application through the different stages. >> All right, well thank you all three of you for providing the update. Really appreciate you joining us in the program and have a great rest of the week >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with more coverage here from Kubecon, Cloud-Nativecon. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, California. It's theCUBE, covering the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at Fisherman's Wharf at the IBM CDO conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante, Joe Selle is here. He's the Global Advanced Analytics and Cognitive Lead at IBM, Boston base. Joe, good to see you again. >> You to Dave. >> And Jerry Gupta, the Senior Vice President and Digital Catalyst at Swiss Re Institute at Swiss Re, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me Dave. >> You're very welcome. So Jerry, you've been at this event now a couple of years, we've been here I think the last four or five years and in the early, now this goes back 10 years this event, now 10 years ago, it was kind of before the whole big data meme took off. It was a lot of focus I'm sure on data quality and data compliance and all of a sudden data became the new source of value. And then we rolled into digital transformation. But how from your perspective, how have things changed? Maybe the themes over the last couple of years, how have they changed? >> I think, from a theme perspective, I would frame the question a little bit differently, right? For me, this conference is a must have on my calendar, because it's very relevant. The topics are very current. So two years ago, when I first attended this conference, it was about cyber and when we went out in the market, they were not too many companies talking about cyber. And so you come to a place like this and you're not and you're sort of blown away by the depth of knowledge that IBM has, the statistics that you guys did a great job presenting. And that really helped us inform ourselves about the cyber risk that we're going on in cyber and so evolve a little bit the consistent theme is it's relevant, it's topical. The other thing that's very consistent is that you always learn something new. The struggle with large conferences like this is sometimes it becomes a lot of me too environment. But in conference that IBM organizes the CDO, in particular, I always learn something new because the practitioners, they do a really good job curating the practitioners. >> And Joe, this has always been an intimate event. You do 'em in San Francisco and Boston, it's, a couple hundred people, kind of belly to belly interactions. So that's kind of nice. But how do you scale this globally? >> Well, I would say that is the key question 'cause I think the AI algorithms and the machine learning has been proven to work. And we've infiltrated that into all of the business processes at IBM, and in many of our client companies. But we've been doing proof of concepts and small applications, and maybe there's a dozen or 50 people using it. But the the themes now are around scale AI at scale. How do you do that? Like we have a remit at IBM to get 100,000 IBMers that's the real number. On our Cognitive Enterprise Data Platform by the end of this calendar year, and we're making great progress there. But that's the key question, how do you do that? and it involves cultural issues of teams and business process owners being willing to share the data, which is really key. And it also involves technical issues around cloud computing models, hybrid public and private clouds, multi cloud environments where we know we're not the only game in town. So there's a Microsoft Cloud, there's an IBM Cloud, there's another cloud. And all of those clouds have to be woven together in some sort of a multi-cloud management model. So that's the techie geek part. But the cultural change part is equally as challenging and important and you need both to get to 100,000 users at IBM. >> You know guys what this conversation brings into focus for me is that for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's laws, as the innovation engine for our industry, that feels like just so yesterday. Today, it's like you've got this data bedrock that we built up over the last decade. You've got machine intelligence or AI, that you now can apply to that data. And then for scale, you've got cloud. And there's all kinds of innovation coming in. Does that sort of innovation cocktail or sandwich makes sense in your business? >> So there's the innovation piece of it, which is new and exciting, the shiny, new toy. And that's definitely exciting and we definitely tried that. But from my perspective and the perspective of my company, it's not the shiny, new toy that's attractive, or that really moves the needle for us. It is the underlying risk. So if you have the shiny new toy of an autonomous vehicle, what mayhem is it going to cause?, right? What are the underlying risks that's what we are focused on. And Joe alluded to, to AI and algorithms and stuff. And it clearly is a very, it's starting to become a very big topic globally. Even people are starting to talk about the risks and dangers inherent in algorithms and AI. And for us, that's an opportunity that we need to study more, look into deeply to see if this is something that we can help address and solve. >> So you're looking for blind spots, essentially. And then and one of them is this sort of algorithmic risk. Is that the right way to look at it? I mean, how do you think about risk of algorithms? >> So yeah, so algorithmic risk would be I would call blind spot I think that's really good way of saying it. We look at not just blind spots, so risks that we don't even know about that we are facing. We also look at known risks, right? >> So we are one of the largest reinsurers in the world. And we insure just you name a risk, we reinsure it, right? so your auto risk, your catastrophe risk, you name it, we probably have some exposure to it. The blind spot as you call it are, anytime you create something new, there are pros and cons. The shiny, new toy is the pro. What risks, what damage, what liability can result there in that's the piece that we're starting to look at. >> So you got the potentially Joe these unintended consequences of algorithms. So how do you address that? Is there a way in which you've thought through, some kind of oversight of the algorithms? Maybe you could talk about IBM's point of view there. >> Well we have >> Yeah and that's a fantastic and interesting conversation that Jerry and I are having together on behalf of our organizations. IBM knowing in great detail about how these AI algorithms work and are built and are deployed, Jerry and his organization, knowing the bigger risk picture and how you understand, predict, remediate and protect against the risk so that companies can happily adopt these new technologies and put them everywhere in their business. So the name of the game is really understanding how as we all move towards a digital enterprise with big data streaming in, in every format, so we use AI to modify the data to a train the models and then we set some of the models up as self training. So they're learning on their own. They're enhancing data sets. And once we turn them on, we can go to sleep, so they do their own thing, then what? We need a way to understand how these models are producing results. Are they results that we agree with? Are these self training algorithms making these, like railroad trains going off the track? Or are they still on the track? So we want to monitor understand and remediate, but it's at scale again, my earlier comments. So you might be an organization, you might have 10,000 not models at work. You can't watch those. >> So you're looking at the intersection of risk and machine intelligence and then you're, if I understand it correctly applying AI, what I call machine intelligence to oversee the algorithms, is that correct? >> Well yes and you could think of it as an AI, watching over the other AI. That's really what we have 'cause we're using AI in as we envision what might or might not be the future. It's an AI and it's watching other AI. >> That's kind of mind blowing. Jerry, you mentioned autonomous vehicles before that's obviously a potential disruptor to your business. What can you share about how you guys are thinking about that? I mean, a lot of people are skeptical. Like there's not enough data, every time there's a another accident, they'll point to that. What's your point of view on that? From your corporation standpoint are you guys thinking is near term, mid term, very long term or it's sort of this journey, that there's quasi-autonomous that sort of gets us there. >> So on autonomous vehicles or algorithmic risk? >> On autonomous vehicles. >> So, the journey towards full automation is a series of continuous steps, right? So it's a continuum and to a certain extent, we are in a space now, where even though we may not have full autonomy while we're driving, there is significant feedback and signals that a car provides and acts or not in an automated manner that eventually move us towards full autonomy, right? So for example, the anti-lock braking system. That's a component of that, right? which is it prevents the car from skidding out of control. So if you're asking for a time horizon when it might have happened, yeah, at our previous firm, we had done some analysis and the horizons were as sort of aggressive as 15 years to as conservative as 50 years. But the component that we all agreed to where there was not such a wide range was that the cars are becoming more sophisticated because the cars are not just cars, any automobile or truck vehicles, they're becoming more automated. Where does risk lie at each piece? Or each piece of the value chain, right? And the answer is different. If you look at commercial versus personal. If you look at commercial space, autonomous fleets are already on the road. >> Right >> Right? And so the question then becomes where does liability lie? Owner, manufacturer, driver >> Shared model >> Shared, manual versus automated mode, conditions of driving, what decisions algorithm is making, which is when you know, the physics don't allow you to avoid an accident? Who do you end up hitting? (crosstalk) >> Again, not just the technology problem. Now, last thing is you guys are doing a panel, on wowing customers making customers the king, I think, is what the title of it is. What's that all about? And get into that a little bit? >> Sure. Well, we focus as IBM mostly on a B2B framework. So the example that I that I'll share to you is, somewhere between like making a customer or making a client the king, the example is that we're using some of our AI to create an alert system that we call Operations Risks Insights. And so the example that I wanted to share was that, we've been giving this away to nonprofit relief agencies who can deploy it around a geo-fenced area like say, North Carolina and South Carolina. And if you're a relief agency providing flood relief or services to people affected by floods, you can use our solution to understand the magnitude and the potential damage impact from a storm. We can layer up a map with not only normal geospatial information, but socio-economic data. So I can say find the relief agency and I've got a huge storm coming in and I can't cover the entire two-state area. I can say okay, well show me the area where there's greater population density than 1000 per square kilometer and the socio-economic level is, lower than a certain point and those are the people that don't have a lot of resources can't move, are going to shelter in place. So I want to know that because they need my help. >> That's where the risk is. Yeah, right they can't get out >> And we use AI to do to use that those are happy customers, and I've delivered wow to them. >> That's pretty wow, that's right. Jerry, anything you would add to that sort of wow customer experience? Yeah, absolutely, So we are a B2B company as well. >> Yeah. >> And so the span of interaction is dictated by that piece of our business. And so we tried to create wow, by either making our customers' life easier, providing tools and technologies that make them do their jobs better, cheaper, faster, more efficiently, or by helping create, goal create, modify products, such that, it accomplishes the former, right? So, Joe mentioned about the product that you launched. So we have what we call parametric insurance and we are one of the pioneers in the field. And so we've launched three products in that area. For earthquake, for hurricanes and for flight delay. And so, for example, our flight delay product is really unique in the market, where we are able to insure a traveler for flight delays. And then if there is a flight delay event that exceeds a pre established threshold, the customer gets paid without even having to file a claim. >> I love that product, I want to learn more about that. You can say (mumbles) but then it's like then it's not a wow experience for the customer, nobody's happy. So that's for Jerry. Guys, we're out of time. We're going to leave it there but Jerry, Joe, thanks so much for. >> We could go on Dave but thank you Let's do that down the road. Maybe have you guys in Boston in the fall? it'll be great. Thanks again for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from IBM CDO in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burress, and welcome to another CUBE conversation from our beautiful studios in wonderful Palo Alto, California. Enterprises have always struggled with how they're going to add more end points into their networks. More users, more devices, more machines, they need better speeds, lower latencies, greater security. How are they going to do it? Well, we've got a new set of standards coming along within the wifi world as well within the cellular world, to provide those greater densities, lower latencies, higher performance. Wifi Six is what we talk about within kind of the extension of the 802.11 family of protocols, but Wifi Six, like every other significant transformation has required that enterprises think differently about certain attributes of networking. So to have that conversation, we got Sachin Gupta who's a senior vice president of Cisco here, Sachin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Peter, very excited to be here. >> Alright, look, so I'm a CIO, and I am working with my team to incorporate these new technologies that are going to improve the quality of my endpoint services, and I'm looking at Wifi Six. What am I mainly worried about as I think about adopting these new technologies? >> So just before we just get into adopting of the new technologies, why are you going after Wi-Fi 6, like what's the reason for the CIO? And quite simply it's, all of the new use cases that are coming on, like everything, all the IoT endpoints have to connect securely, all the bandwidth hungry end users, and the immersive experiences I'm looking to enable, it could be augmented reality, it could be virtual reality, all those are driving a need for me to rethink access, and rethink the network overall. And Wi-fi 6 is one critical component of that. Wi-fi 6 promises four times the capacity, lower latency, a greater range, so the things you talked about in your set-up. So it's a wonderful technology to start addressing some of those problems, but in of it's own it's not sufficient. You got to go well beyond the standard in order to address the CIO problem. >> Okay, so specifically, so think about some of the adoption problems. I got the use cases nailed down, how am I thinking about where things are going to go? Am I going to have to lay out the network differently? What kinds of practical things do I have to start thinking about? >> Well first of all, you have to think about why are you moving, where are you moving with Wi-fi 6. So again, capacity, lower latency, better battery life, the new use cases it enables. After that you need to make sure that whatever you're going to connect, will interoperate. Right? So look, sometimes a standard comes out and it can take a few years before the endpoints and the infrastructure actually get the maximum capability from the new standard. And so we worked proactively with the likes of Samsung, with the likes of Intel, to make sure those endpoints, which any of the new Samsung Galaxy S10, already supports Wi-fi 6. Interaccess points work together to give you the best experience possible. So that's sort of step one. But there's many other things we need to think through. We're also thinking about the problem of just onboarding onto Wi-fi. You know the experience to onboard onto cellular, right? >> Oh, sure. >> You get off airplane mode >> And it works. >> It just works, you're on. What's the experience like on Wifi? >> Well it's certainly not just getting a message from my local carrier that I'm now roaming. You got to get on, yeah it's a lot more involved, you got to authenticate, exactly. >> Give me your phone number, give me your room number, I'll text you something, get on to the It's cumbersome, okay? And we want to make Wifi onboarding to something we call open roaming. Open roaming is a Cisco project, it's a consortium we've set up. That takes all the venue providers and the identity providers, brings them together. So that when you go round, and you roam with Wifi, you onboard the network just like you onboard with cellular. >> So get essentially the same experience you get in the cellular world. >> Same experience. It makes it easy for you to get connected. So those are some of the basic things, but you got to go beyond that then. Now you have to worry about, okay, what do those endpoints require, alright? Well, first of all you need to recognize what the endpoint is. Is this a light bulb, or is it a heart-rate monitor, is it a tablet of some sort, what is actually connecting? So for device recognition, and to understand the experience you're getting, I need virtual analytics. And that's something the infrastructure now needs to provide. So we for the first time now, we've embedded our own ACIG, our own silicon inside the access point. So that we can get visibility from layer one to seven. And now we can pinpoint, what is the device, is it behaving in a compliant way, and how do I deliver the right experience for it. So these are some of things to think about as you move, it's a yes I want Wi-fi 6, but again tying in back to the problem you're looking to solve, how does the entire solution address your problem. >> Alright so we've identified some of the issues that have to be addressed here, and Wifi Six is here. You said the Galaxy S10 already supports it. >> Our access points are shipping, yes. >> So talk to me about the role out of some of these new technologies, these new devices from Cisco, and how customers are going to have to think a little bit differently as they start to plan out their new network structure. >> That's a great question. So I think it's not about hey, I'm just going to roll out new AP's. You should really rethink networking. What am I trying to provide here? And that's why we came out with an architectural approach across the board which is intent based networking. And what we're really talking about there is how do you automate all of the things that IT needs to do, to deliver the security and experience for all of those users and things. How do you get the data, the power of data, the analytics out? And how do you deliver security and policy. >> But it's in the context of the application and the work that's being performed. >> Yes, it's the users and devices and the applications and data. What are you trying to achieve? That's what intent based networking is all about. And so, I love how your asking the question because if you think about the wireless AP's, we only talk about the top already with the endpoint, right? But then I think about the switching architecture, are you segmenting all of that traffic? Is it fully automated? Do you have an identity and policy engine? Can I take the location data that's coming out? Cause remember these APs now are multilingual. They speak BLE, they speak Zigbee and Thread, they're also Wi-fi 6. So how do I take the location data and deliver new business outcomes? How can I tell you that the wheelchair has left the premises? How can I tell you how many people walked in your store, verus walked outside it? How do I get you better asset utilization? Those outcomes are provided at the software step at the top. So you should really be thinking about what am I trying to do for my business, and what architectural approach allows me to deliver those outcomes that I'm looking for. And yes, Wi-fi 6 APs are one critical component there, but you should think about the entire solution though. >> So we got new access points that are Wifi Six enabled ready to go, how far back does this change go into the network? >> So the Wi-fi 6 APs, the beauty of these Wi-fi standards is they're backward compatible. So you can take all kinds of older endpoints, multiple generations, and get them to work in a Wi-fi 6 new environment. So that's nice because it's not a rip and replace of all your clients, when you put the new APs in, they're backward compatible, that's always the case. And a lot of the new software stack and the technology that I talked about with intent based networking, works with at least the two previous generations as well. So if you want some of that telemetry and analytics and security, you can start getting that with some of the APs you may already have, and then when you bring in Wi-fi 6, it's sort of purpose built for that architecture. >> Alright, so we've talked a lot about the use cases of the business side, let's spend a little bit of time describing the fact that you've got the sidecar co processor for analytics inside the APs. How is that going to change the work of IT, the work of network management and administration and security? >> That's a great one So, I'll give you one example of what that does. Today, if you want to go troubleshoot a wireless issue, you're literally walking around with a sensor acting like a client to go figure out what the behavior is, what's going on, how do I figure out what the interference is, why is the experience bad, right? Can take you hours, weeks, days, it's very costly. These new APs, and with our solution with W-fi 6, first of all, I get data with my relationship with Apple from the endpoint. So I get the view from a real client. Then on the access point itself, with that co processor, I can get layer one to seven data and packet captures to see did you fail during authentication, was there some sort of RF issue that's happening, what exactly is happening that's interfering with what's going on? Or, maybe the problem is not even there, it's somewhere else in the network. And the beauty of our Cisco DNA Center solution, which is our controller in intent based networking, is we see end to end. We see the entire network and we can help you pinpoint where that issue is and save a whole bunch of money you'd spend troubleshooting, to deliver the right experience. >> But it sounds as though some of the, historically, some of the analytics associated with network administration was very focused on the device. Intent based network is intended to focus on the application and service that's being provided, but the analytics didn't follow. So know what you're saying is we're going to follow the analytics so that the applications, the services become primary citizens within the network. >> That's exactly right So you have to be able to look at the client holistic view, the application performance holistic view, and the performance of each network element, and that's what the co processor that we talked about helps. Now another thing we did is, that portfolio now, on the enterprise side, we now run the same operating system that also helps simplify for IT. The entire access network with the Catalyst 9000 series, the new access points are called the Catalyst 9100, and we're making it part of one brand and one family, because it's one OS, one programmable architecture, one operational environment if you will, that simplifies the job of IT significantly as well, and then we're also introducing obviously with Wifi Six, our cloud managed Meraki access points to support those deployments as well. >> Alright so one more question on this and then I want to talk about something else in a second. But the beauty, or the essential feature of networking has to be a degree of openness. So new access points can talk to each other, new devices can talk to each other, et cetera. These are new technologies as you said they're going to roll out and diffuse, hopefully very very rapidly, but there will be both enterprise, but also some other network supplier issues. How is Cisco ensuring that your leadership and your thought leadership but also your engineering leadership gets into those other organizations at an appropriate rate so this entire industry can adopt and change and introduce these new kinds of capabilities. >> So I talked about that new family of the Catalyst 9000 series. Let me start there. So all the protocols we support are open interoperable so you can have my switch somebody else's AP, somebody else's AP my switch, all those combinations work. It supports net config open API's programmable models. We expose those through a Cisco dev net. So we have the largest developer community on top of sort of a networking infrastructure where you can write applications that can automate or can get data >> Or services? >> Or deploy services in a very open way. And then we do the same thing at our controller layer. On Cisco DNA Center, fully open so you can have partners ecosystem delivering services and applications on top of the network, on top of that controller. So we think about openness from every angle, and that's how you have to be in a networking world, right? I mean you need to be able to connect to anything. >> Right. Every significant change in networking, someone always presumed it was going to lead to various behavior by the leader to try to somehow close it down. You're saying that's not what's happening here. We're trying to dramatically extend the benefits and capabilities of networking because those enterprises need new use cases. >> But we are saying though, that if you buy that campus architecture, access architecture through Cisco, you're going to get a degree of consistency and automation and analytics and security that's unmatched. So you might as well go, but if you want to compose that with different components, that's absolutely doable. >> Alright, so one last question. The historical norm has been I get a cell service and I get Wifi. Cell had certain positive benefits, and Wifi had other positive benefits. We're talking about Wifi Six, but also we got to talk about 5G. How are the two of them going to work together in your estimation? >> Look, from a wireless standpoint, the problems that you're trying to solve are the same, right? I need more capacity, I need lower latency, more deterministic, better battery life, they're the same. So you need to solve those when you're in an SP outdoor ubiquitous environment, or whether your sort of indoor, where you have predominantly Wifi and that's where most of your traffic flows. So Wifi Six and 5G, it's a beautiful thing that they're both trying to allow you to be in this wireless first, cloud driven world, where most of your apps and data sit in the cloud, and where your experience is really optimized by the data and telemetry that's coming out of the infrastructure. So for me, it's not an or question, it's Wifi Six and 5G that allow you to start solving that problem. >> So everything just as we have today just more, better, faster, lower power. >> Yes, can I add one more thing? >> Of course! >> I just kind of need to do this, okay? So look, when you think about the wireless infrastructure and chaining that out, I talked about how it effects the rest of the network, right? So you do need to think about upgrading your switching infrastructure, we call it being wired for wireless, okay? So with that, we also introduced a new product called the Catalyst 9600. That's a modular core switch, so you're like why are you bringing this up Sasha? >> No, I know why you're bringing it up. >> After 20 years, we are providing the next generation of the Cat 6k, Cat 6k is iconic, it's the foundation of tens of thousands of mission critical networks in the world. This is next-gen, it's more than 10x the capacity, if you have all these endpoints and access points that have more capacity, you need to think about a switch that's bigger factor. >> Scales! >> But fits into intent based networking fully programmable the same way. Just want to do a shout-out for, look we've talked about every aspect of this. APs, switches, identity, everything. >> We're offering, Cisco is offering and the enterprises are going to adopt new classes of network technology at the endpoints, faster, better, but that's going to lead to new use cases, new services, and it's just going to drive that much more complexity and routing and switching and patching thorough the network, you got to be able to scale. >> Right, you have to think about all the components. >> Absolutely. Sachin Gupta is the senior vice president of Cisco, we've been talking about how to think through Wifi Six upgrades. Thank you very much for being on the CUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again I'm Peter Burress, and this has been a CUBE conversation. Until next time. (funky music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE Conversation. It's just a couple of days until RSA kicks off a huge security conference. I think the biggest security conference in the industry. And we've got a security expert here in the house and we're excited to have him stop by. It's Manish Gupta, the Founder and CEO of ShipLeft. Manish, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you too, thank you. >> Welcome. So you must be really busy getting everything buttoned up for next week. >> Oh yeah, absolutely ready to go. >> Alright so for the people that aren't familiar with ShiftLeft, give us kind of the basic overview. >> Yeah of course. So ShiftLeft about a two and a half year old company. We started with the problem of you know, the software's driving innovation all around us, right? I mean, we see it in autonomous cars, IoTs, increasingly SwaaS software in the cloud. And all of the software needs to be figured out, how are we going to protect it. And so it's a big problem, and we've been working on it for about two and a half years now. Raised our Series A and most recently in the last two weeks, we announced our Series B of 20 Million. >> Congratulations. >> Amazing team, yeah! >> So, you've been in the security space for a long time. >> Correct. >> And RSA's a giant conference. I don't know what the numbers will be this year. I'm sure it'll be north of 40 thousand people. Moscone North, South and West will be full. Every hotel is full. But it kind of begs a question, like, haven't we got some of the security thing figured out? It's just a never-ending kind of startup opportunities as there's new ways to approach this kind of fundamental problem which is, how do we keep the bad guys out. How do we keep them from doing bad things while the surface area expands exponentially. The attack surface expands. And we hear every day that people are getting breached and breached and breached. So the whole ecosystem, and kind of approach has completely changed over the time that you've been involved in this business. >> Indeed, as you said, I've been in cybersecurity for a long time. I like to say the last 15 years, first part of my career, I was focused on detecting viruses. Then it became worms. Then most recently at FireEye, we were detecting advanced malware nation-state attacks like APT1s and APT3s. But it was then that sort of, it dawned on me that, look about 80% of security money gets spent on detecting bad stuff, right? And that's reactive. Essentially what that means is we are letting the bad guy shoot first and then we are trying to figure out, okay what are we going to do now. >> We're waiting like 150 days right, down from 230 days, before we even-- >> Exactly. >> know that he's shootin' at us. >> That's right. Now couple that with as you said, the attack surface is ever increasing, right. Because we're using software in every which way which means all of this stuff needs to be protected. And so that's why we were wanted to start with a fresh perspective which is to say, let's not worry about attacks. Because that is not in our control. That's in the bad guys' control. What can we control? Which is our software. And so, that is why what we do at ShiftLeft is to understand the software very quickly, extract its attack surface in minutes, and then allow you to fix whatever you want to, whatever you can during the time frame you have available. And here comes the next innovation which is, if you don't fix anything, which is almost always the case, we will protect the application in production. Now the key is, we protect the application in production against its vulnerabilities. So we never ever react to threats. We don't care. >> So you have like a wrapper around the known vulnerabilities within the code. Is that a good desciption? >> Yes, you could absolutely, that's a good way of thinking about it is you know, let's say a million lines of code. We find 10 vulnerabilities in it. So it's only in 10 specific instances of the application. Now we also know what vulnerabilities exist on line 100 and line 200 and so on. And with that knowledge, we can very precisely protect each vulnerability. >> It's a really interesting approach. You know, one of the things I find fascinating with security is it's kind of like insurance. >> Mm hmm. >> In theory, you could spend 110% of all your revenue budget >> Correct. >> on security, but you can't so you have to make trade off decisions. You have to make business value decisions and you have to prioritize. So this is a really different approach, that you're offering an option either to fix the known, and/or just to protect the known, so that there's some variability in the kind of the degree of investment that the customer wants to spend. >> You summed it up well, Jeff. I think the fundamental challenge with security has been that. Is that ya know, 15 years ago we've asked our customers to buy antivirus. Then we asked them to buy intrusion detection. Then we asked them to buy nation-state or malware protection. Now we're asking them to buy machine learning based mechanisms to detect more threats, right? And so the funnel is like this, right, but it never goes down to zero. And so tomorrow some other approach will come up to detect the 0.1% of the malware. And guess what? The sys-os really don't have a choice right? Because they have to protect their organization. So they have to buy that tool also. Now in this entire process, you never get better, right? Notice that you never get better. All you're doing is just reacting. And because a virus from 15 years ago theoretically could still come and attack you, you can't throw away that too either. Right, and so that is precisely why I'm so passionate about work we're doing at ShiftLeft is we will protect you from, in sort of in bad continuous improvement for the first time in security. Find the vulnerabilities, fix them. But if you can't fix them, we will protect you. >> Now, what about another kind of big shift in the way software is delivered, is everything is an API to someone else's software. And oftentimes there's many many components that are being pulled in from many many places that contribute to, but aren't software that I control personally. >> Correct. >> So how do you guys deal with those types of challenges? >> Great question, great question. And you know, the popular saying is we are becoming an API economy. >> Right, right. >> And what we exchange on our APIs is increasingly a lot of data. And you're right. If you think about historical approaches, we will now have to break open the API on a network, to find out what it contains. And for various reasons, super hard to do, lots of operational efficiencies, inefficiencies, excuse me. And this is again where the ShiftLeft approach is rather unique. See because we go down to the very foundation. It's hard work right, but we go down to the very foundation, what is the source code of the API. So we will understand, okay, well this is what you should be putting in the API, right? But then I see that a variable called Personally Identifiable Information is being put into that API. I can now tell you before this becomes a problem that'll embarrass you in the newspapers. I, we will tell you, hey look, you are writing PII to a third party API without encryption, right. So you get to fix the problem at the very root where it starts. >> So but, can you wrap the known vulnerability in a partner piece of software? >> Absolutely we can. >> As it interfaces with my software? >> Correct. So, there are two aspects to it right. The first is what are you putting into that API, right, that is completely in your control. >> Right. >> Right, we don't really need to understand the API for that matter. So that is one particular use case we can absolutely protect you there, right. The second is when the API, when integrated into your application, makes your application vulnerable. Right, so I'll give you an example. This happened to one our our customers. This is a 3,500 person technical, technology company based here in Santa Clara. They were using a third party API. Very popular one. That third party API in turn was using a Jackson databind library, just an open source library. Now, as a company when we decide to use that API, we don't really worry about, we don't have visibility into like what all is it hurting. >> Downstream. >> Exactly. >> And how many feeds are in that one particular one. >> That's right. And so this is the supply chain of software. Right? Multiple components are now being brought together very quickly to create the functionality that you want to deliver to your users, to your customers. But in this pace of execution, we need tools like ShiftLeft to tell us hey what are we hurting. And whatever we are hurting, how is that impacting the security of our application. >> Right, right. Pretty interesting stuff, you got another component of something that's really important today that wasn't necessarily when you started this adventure. And that's the open source play. >> Yes. >> So as I understand it, you guys started really from more of an open source play and then ShiftLeft grew out of kind of commercializing what was that open source project. I wonder if can explain a little bit more. >> Yeah, I would love to. So the foundation of what we do is a technology called Core Property Graph. So, this is an invention of our chief scientist, Dr. Fabian Yamaguchi, one of the foremost authorities in the world, in the area of understanding code, right. And so as part of his PhD thesis, he came up with this technology and decided to open source a tool called Joern. >> Joern. J-O-E-R-N. >> That's right. >> Not easy to figure out, Joern yes. (laughing) >> Exactly. And it's actually his friend's name so that's how he named it. >> Ah, is that right? >> So he open sourced it and several organizations around the world have since used it to find very hard to find vulnerabilities. Right so as an example, this is a IEEE paper where this technology was used by Fabian to find 18 zero-day vulnerabilities in the main line Linux code, right. So arguably one of the most complex pieces of code on the planet, 15 million lines of code. Arguably one of the most analyzed pieces of code on the planet. And as recently as 2015, he finds 18 zero-days. And no false positives. Every single vulnerabilty has been acknowledged and fixed by the Linux community. That's the power. And so we use that as the foundation. So you write that as open source but since then we've done a lot of incremental work on enhancing it to make it enterprise ready. And that is a product we offer. as call this Ocular. Where we give you, think about it as my best analogy, is just like Google Maps for your source code. >> Yeah, I think it's a good analogy and he goes through that in one of his videos kind of explaining the mapping. >> Correct. >> Of different layers of kind of visibility into how you should look at software code. >> Indeed. >> Yeah alright, well before we let ya go, you got some exciting things happening next week beyond just the regular activities at RSA. You guys have been invited to participate in a special activity. I wonder if you can share a little bit and give a plug and maybe we can send some fans up to, I dunno if it's going to be audience participation in the judging. >> Yes. >> Go ahead and let us know what you're doing. >> Thank you for giving me that opportunity. Yeah super, super excited about, so we've been selected as one of the top 10 finalists for the RSA Innovation Sandbox. As you mentioned in your opening, RSA is the biggest security trade show in the world. And so now this has become the most seminal way of highlighting innovative work being done in the security industry. So I get three minutes to pitch ShiftLeft in front of an audience of about 1,500 to 2,000 people. Really looking forward to that. >> Well I dunno if you can speed this up to only three minutes (laughing) but I'm sure you'll be able to nail it. >> I will try. >> Alright well Manish, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and I'm sure we'll see you in San Francisco next week. >> Thank you very much, thank you. >> Alright, It's Manish, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watchin' and we'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)

(funky music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering CISCO Live Europe. Brought to you by CISCO and it's ecosystem partners. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host, Stu Miniman. Our next guest Sachin Gupta, senior vice-president of product management in Cisco's enterprise networking business, it's the crown jewels of Cisco, Sachin got the keys to the kingdom. Runs project management, so we get all the info from you, thanks for joining us. Good to see you again, good to see you again, king alumni. >> Yes, thanks. >> Thanks for coming on, I know you've got a keynote at 12 coming up shortly, thanks for spending the time, I'll get right to it. Networking is being reinvented, David Geckler said that onstage yesterday in the keynote. It's not changing, it's just shaping differently for customer needs intent-based networking, we talked briefly last year at Cisco Live in North America moving up the stack, it's here. Intent-based networking, cloud connections, IOT, all kinds of edge con activity, everything's connected, now on to the network. This is real. >> This is real, and John, look, it's been really exciting, right? We've gone through an 18 month journey here, when we first introduced in tent-based networking we talked about moving away from CLI box by box to really solving the problem at an abstracted, intent layer. Specify what user groups and what segments you want, what experience you want to deliver for those applications, and then the network feeding the data back up so you can learn from it, you can manage it, you can troubleshoot it in a much, much simpler way. We're now into this, as I said, 18 months. We have thousands of customers already using intent based networking we talked about software defining access for automated segmentation in the campus, talked about insurance, and then we've been adding capability along the way. And in just this week, David Geckler had people on stage, talked about more innovations with intent-based networking in the data center with ACI anywhere, with innovations on hyper flex. Liz came on and talked about IOT, and how that fits into the framework. And then Gordon talked about what we're doing with SD Ren, really, really exciting stuff going on there. >> Well, why don't you take a minute and quickly explain for the folks watching want to get us on the record so we can get definition. What is intent-based networking? What does it mean, what's the impact for the customers, what is it? >> Intent-based networking means that you can now express your business intent. Here's the outcome I'm looking for from the infrastructure. The system and the architecture will convert that automatically, provision, all the underlying components get the data and the context back out and prove to you that the intent you wanted was delivered. >> And what is changing now, more than ever, because applications are coming on. We see DevNet, we're in the DevNet zone. Seeing a lot of activity, developers. >> Yeah, so now you've got networks that are preventable instead of individual devices that you have to learn from the ground up, all their bells and whistles, you can now live at that intent layer, add an API layer on top of the controllers and move much more quickly. You can now start thinking about multiple domains, and how you cross those domains. >> What is the big product change, if any, especially software, is key to all of this? We've got plenty of hardware. You mentioned Liz in IOT, still runs router, she takes that software, she packages them. We interviewed her yesterday, she was talking about the synergies between code bases in which she customizes for the IOT market, then you've got the intent-based networking. What's the product look like, what's the products as they get more horizontal? >> Yes, so make no mistake, the hardware is still very important. Silicon ASIC's very important, but the magic now is in the software layer. So it starts with the operating system, and Liz talked about how we now have the Cisco IOS EXE operating system, which is modular hot patchable API driven programmable, and now runs across the entire portfolio. It runs on her ruggedized IOT infrastructure, runs on our switches, run on the wireless controller, runs on the routers and the SDWAN nodes, virtual and physical, same operating system. And then the SD controller layer on top of that. So for the campus, you've got DNA centers. So let's code DNA center, and then for the WAN you've got Cisco, the TeleV manage solution that provides a controller layer for automation, for analytics on top of the infrastructure. >> I wonder if we can unpack that SDWAN piece a bit, because WAN's been around a long time. I think back to the 90s, WAN was something that helped us get the internet. In the 2000s there was WAN optimization, I worked on a lot of replication solutions. I'm not sure that people understand the connection between SDWAN and really enabling the multi-cloud world that we need today, and the portfolio that Cisco has to attract that. >> You mentioned the 90s, I joined Cisco in 97, and I actually worked in WAN technical support. (laughing) So I've been with WAN for a very long time. And the customers aren't waking up and saying hey, I need a new WAN. That's not how the conversation starts. What's happening is it's a business transformation question. The companies, the customers are using infrastructure as a service, AWS services. They're using ACER, they're using Google Cloud platform. They're using all the SaaS products. Webex from Cisco, right, they're using Office 365. They're using all of these new applications and their data is not sitting in the data center. I mean, as we've noticed this week, the data center moves to where your data is. Well now, if your data isn't in it's data center that's conveniently connected through a WAN connection and it's all over the place. It's in the cloud, in many clouds. You have to think about, how do you get traffic in and out, how do you deliver security, and in this world where you may be using internet connections and all kinds of connections, how do you deliver the right application experience, and then oh, by the way, how do you manage all of this? That's what SDWAN is about, I need to transfer my business as I move applications or consume cloud services, I need to re-architect my WAN, and SDWAN helps me go do that. >> A big piece of that is what a network person needs to manage today, a lot of what they need to manage, they don't own. They don't control it, and some of that means I can't necessarily put a box that I can dial into and do this, so I need a software piece that I can put there as part of my overall configuration. >> Yes, you need a software piece, and you need something that scales to something that is cloud delivered. You can't be going to hundreds or thousands of sites and manually provisioning these for these services. You need to be able to have virtual services. If you're consuming a cloud service, you need your router or your service presence, your SDWAN presence in the cloud, right? So virtual network functions, virtual services become really critical in this world. >> Just on scale, you know, I've worked with Cisco on a lot of branch solutions over my career, there's lots of different components of scale that these type of solutions play into. >> Okay, people say if everything is in the cloud, does the scale requirement go down? All you think about is do I have 100 sites and I had one or two data centers. Alright, well now I have the same hundred sites, and I have hundreds of services. SaaS applications I'm consuming, and as I said, infrastructure as a service. And I still have some data centers for my legacy applications as well. So the complexity has actually increased, the scale requirement has increased. I need a much better software method, a software define method, to manage all of this. >> This is a key point, a lot of inflection points in the industry always have an abstraction layer to abstract away complexities. So you got two things going on here that are pretty clear, there's more complexity and more scale. So software's the perfect solution to manage that, is that what you're saying? >> Software's the perfect solution to manage this, and that's sort of one more level to that complexity. Because your traffic isn't neatly going from your branch through sort of a lease line or MPLS circuit that you can VPN into a data center, it's a more complicated traffic flow. I might be connecting directly to the internet securely is a huge concern. >> This is a great point, I was going to ask you the flow question, you know the old expression "follow the money and you'll find your answers." In networking, in this business, follow the traffic. Remember, north, south, east, west. That became a paradigm that helped shape a lot of network architecture. Now you have new traffic patterns. Can you give some color around the new traffic patterns and with cloud, comes with Edge, it's not just north, south, east, west, it's everywhere, so give- >> So a new traffic pattern now can be, instead of from the branch through your headquarters to your data center, now the traffic pattern is direct internet access to the SaaS application. Or go to a regional hub that I have in a co-location facility. Well, in the old world you had a security stack in your DMC. So it had your best firewall, your best IPS solution, all layered in there. Now in this new world with your traffic hitting directly, those applications and data in the cloud, you have to rethink security. So what we did in our SDWAN solution, we embed the best Cisco security technology application firewall, URL filtering, IPS solutions natively in our SDWAN software stack. And so you can deploy this across hundreds of branches now, and so you have assurance that the same level of security that you had in your data center can be delivered in a distributed way, in an easy way. And what happens is, customers also want to consume cloud security. You know, maybe I don't want to run in my branch, I actually have a SaaS application, I want to use the Cisco Umbrella service. Alright, so this is a secure internet gateway that processes this traffic, makes sure things are clean, makes sure we are safe, the customers are safe, and we can now integrate with cloud services in our SDWAN solution with just one click. >> How important is this security paradigm you just mentioned? Because there probably will be consequences. We've seen IOT become a talking point around oh, surface area, more surface area for the security breaches. This security paradigm's different. Why is it important and what are the consequences if not followed? >> If you don't follow this paradigm, I think the risk you run into that first of all, you will make a compromise on application experience because you're so worried about security. Let me give you an example, customers may choose, hey, you know what, I'll continue hair pinning all my traffic through my headquarters because I have a rich security stack there, and suffer an application experience because I'm going this way to get to the cloud asset rather than going directly, and so by enabling that rich security stack to be virtually enabled anywhere you want it, anywhere you need it, we can ensure that you can have the maximum level security that you need in your architectural design, and still get the application experience by selecting the best path for your application. >> And it's good business to be in enabling technology. We've seen that, you guys have lived that at Cisco. What is the most important story coming out of Cisco, out of this show, as you guys move forward that customers and the industry should pay attention to in your opinion? What's the most important story? >> I think the most important part of the story is, intent-based networking and the architectural shift, the reinvention that it's created isn't about any single domain, right? This is happening in the WAN to solve application experience problems, SaaS application experience problems, security problems, automations, scale. It's happening in the campus for segmentation, prevent lateral movement of threats. It's happening in the data center with ACI, and the customers want simple outcomes. What they're looking for is users, devices, things connecting to applications and data, doesn't matter where they sit, and ensuring that from a policy based model, they can automate end to end, and they can get the visibility, the telemetry end to end to solve problems and to learn and to improve the network. >> So cross domain traffic, application probability of the network, and the role of data that plays in that seems to be a common thread. >> Beautifully summarized, John, that's exactly right. >> Well, what's coming up in the keynote? What are you going to talk about at noon here in Barcelona? >> Yeah so in the keynote, I'm going to recap why have we done this, why does it matter, and why isn't CLI still going to work for you, and why did we need to reinvent networking? And then talk about the journey so far, all the new things we've announced, and then what I'm really excited about is I have a partner coming on stage with me talking about how we're delivering SDWAN solutions for our customers, how does that conversation work, and what should you really worry about as you select the service, design the architecture you're going to go with. >> Sachin, I want to go back in time, jog your memory, I remember back in the 90s, multi vendor was a big word, multi vendor improbability. Multi vendor meant working with multiple industry standard stuff. I hear multi cloud, I get a similar vibe. This seems to be the trend that people want to pay attention to just as much as hybrid cloud or maybe more on the multi cloud side, some are even saying, multi cloud is hotter than hybrid cloud. Do you agree with that, and how does multi vendor, multi cloud jive to Cisco? You guys thrived in a multi vendor world. What's your thoughts on this multi cloud? >> I think in both of those situations, customers are looking for freedom. It needs to be open, API driven. I should be able to move my traffic from one place to the other, my applications from one place to the other and not feel locked in. And so it's critical to support open protocols, open APIs and to provide customers that freedom. An SDWAN actually helps provide that. We're using open protocols open APIs, but at the same time, if I need to move my service from here to there, and I still need to deliver security, application experience, scale, automation, you can do that. So we provide that freedom to run that application in the multi cloud environment. >> One of the things that comes up all the time when we have conversations with the geeks out there at the conferences, it's microservices in containers on one side, and then on the networking side it's still latency and cost, you've still got latency issues and cost to move traffic around. Still a dynamic, how are you guys still looking there? 'Cause latency is certainly super important, and networking will be moving packets around, moving traffic around, and cost, there's still cost. Is this the concept of data center moving to the applications? How do you guys look at that cost equation and the latency equation, that's still important, can't change the laws of physics. >> The cost of latency equation is still really important, but the problem has changed, now. As your applications now, your data center is sort of moving with the cloud. Think about Office 365, we still need to help you get the best experience for Office 365 as if you were running an on-prem solution. For that we need to do things very different, we need to manage latency, to manage jitter, to manage cost overall. So what we've done is we use an API integration with Office 365 to give you 40% better performance for that fast application, and we're doing this for many applications. So I think you're right, you're solving for similar things, but now everything's changed on here. The applications are in a different place. So you just have to solve them in a fundamentally new way. >> And that's the traffic patterns, really comes down to it, and that's a tell sign of user expectation, user behavior, application behavior, this is the new normal. >> This is the new normal. >> What are you excited for looking forward as you look at your business, you look at Cisco, positioning style, I like the new position, very tight, very good, I like A Bridge to Tomorrow, A Bridge to the Future, kind of makes sense. Bridge, I like the double entendre there. But as you look at the portfolio coming together with multi cloud, what are you excited about? >> Look, and I've heard this from many customers and partners this week as well at Cisco live, we've been on this journey for many years. Building out intent-based networking for each of these domains, and now we've got thousands of customers already using it. But the conversations are going from hey, why did we need to do this? To, hey, help me perfect my design, and I now need to connect two or three domains together, how do we go do that? So we're now having richer, more mature next phase conversations. So it's working with our customers to realize that value across all of the domains from anywhere where there are users and things start anywhere with data and application sessions. >> And the network is foundational with the security architecture, you can build on that, that's where the magic will happen from your perspective, you see that. >> That's where the magic will happen, and you know what, only Cisco can pull this off. Because we have leadership in every one of those domains, and we're following the same architectural principles across all of them. >> So if someone said Sachin, this is not your grandfather's SDWAN, what do you respond to that? How do you update that narrative? What is the SDWAN new message, what's the new picture for SDWAN, what does that mean? >> The new SDWAN is about connecting to your applications and data in any cloud in a multi cloud environment, SaaS, IOS applications, it doesn't matter. Any private data center, still delivering the best security, best application experience in an automated way at the skill that you need. >> Okay, at the center of the value properties, have been saying on theCUBE for nine years, finally it's happening, a lot of stuff coming together meeting the road, congratulations on your success, and thanks for spending the time to come in. Great to see you, good luck on your keynote. This is theCUBE coverage live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from Cisco Live after this short break, stay with us. (funky music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman. This is our one day coverage of UiPath. UiPath Forward Americas. UiPath does these events all over the world. They've reached about 14,000 customers to date and about 1,500 here, Stu. A great show, a lot of energy. We're watching the ascendancy of robotic process automation, the simplification of software robots. Courtney Dominiguez is here, she's the Vice President of World Fuel Services and she's joined by Ashim Gupta who's the UiPath's Chief Customer Success Officer. Welcome folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> So, Courtney, let's start with you. World Fuel Services: what's that all about? >> So we're a logistics company, an energy logistics company. We're actually based here in Miami, Florida so it was a short commute over to the Fountain Blue for the day. >> Lucky you. >> Yes, exactly. So, yeah, we do fuel globally, all over the world. So we do for aviation, marine, and land. We also focus on renewable energy and we're really developing over in Europe as well. >> So, interesting, a lot of interesting drivers and dynamics in your business, fast moving, a lot of change, sometimes hard to predict. >> Yes. >> In terms of your role, talk about your role and what some of the key business drivers are that force you to be on top of your game. >> Yeah, so, I'm in charge of shared services and automation for the company so it's really my role to help us operate more efficiently and do things smarter. You know everybody's being challenged to do more with less and as you grow the business, your transaction accounts grow as well so we're really in charge of transforming and providing solutions. UiPath is a component, a big component, of what we're going to be rolling out and helping to really do transformation. >> So, Ashim, Courtney saying, do more with less, that's got to be music to your ears. Your job is to make, Courtney, her company, successful. So, talk about your role and how you actually make your success. >> Sure, so, one, I was a former customer. So you look at Daniel Dines' strategy and UiPath's strategy and it's bringing people in who really have a passion for the industry and have that experience to go and try and operationalize a lot of our mission. As a former customer, I know a lot of times you get sold software and you don't get a lot of the tools or you got to go buy another set of tools to make the first set of tools work. So customer success is about giving technical talent and really great experts and put them in the hands of our best customers to answer the questions that are out there as they embark on their RPA journey. That can go from anything from infrastructure, technical hurdles that they may face to how to really think about RPA, how to eventualize it within their areas. And by doing that, we get people to up that adoption curve, they start seeing the benefits of RPA and it becomes a no-brainer, both for the company to invest in and employees to understand the value that RPA brings. >> So, Courtney, was RPA kind of a no-brainer for you? Was it a, "What is this technology?" How did you go about sort of bringing RPA into your organization? >> Yeah, I think all of the above. So, it seems very intuitive. You know, you want to do things smarter and do things more efficiently but that makes people nervous too so there's a lot of people that say, "I like what I do" "and if you do it smarter and more efficient," "do you still need me?" And I also think that, from the top, it's easy to say robots, and that sounds really cool but really putting it into the water supply is a different story. So, one of the things that we did, we hosted a RPA awareness day, partnered with UiPath. They came in and worked with us on that. And then after that we hosted a bot-a-thon. So, we went out and we had our whole enterprise download the community version of UiPath and just had them start experimenting and coming up with their own ideas and honestly, it was a great crowd-sourcing engine for us. And we just came up with an instant pipeline of ideas and people really caught on and bought into it at that point. So it was fantastic. >> Courtney, I want you to expand a little bit on that. In my career, I've always said, "I know next quarter," "next year, I'm going to have more to do." When I managed a group in operations it was, "You need to figure out what you can get rid of," "you know, what you can," I mean automated a decade ago was quite different than what you do today but I like what you said about how you engaged everybody and got them to, kind of, get over that fear of the unknown. How long's the process going to take? Did you have senior management involvement in the planning? >> Yeah honestly, this was a great, ground roots kind of a way of getting it out and it didn't take long at all. I mean we've only been on this journey a couple of months quite honestly and it's caught on like wildfire and we're really excited about it. So you know, I think it's great that we were able to partner some of our great, younger talent with some of our more, people who've been doing it for a long time. And we partnered together, we partnered them together and then they came up with their own ideas. It's easy for me to, Monday morning, quarterback, and stand on the other side and say, "Oh, you should do this or do that" but the people that are doing it everyday are the ones who have the best ideas. They know what they don't want to do. They know what they want to spend their time working on. So they're the best ones to figure out how to make that other stuff that's not quite as fun go away. So, yeah, it's been fantastic. >> So, Ashim, if I could ask, how do you help your customers figure out what the right metric is? What is success for them? You've been on the customer side, you've been talking to users, it's often like, "Oh, I think I'm going to be able" "to save money but maybe it's growing revenue." There's a lot of pieces there. >> I mean, a lot of it starts with listening because I don't think there's one right answer. You know, a lot of software companies come in and say, "It is just about cost", or, "It is just about X". We think about it very differently. Some of our customers think about it in terms of cost equality, getting accurate data, getting things done 100% accurate and getting data quality up. Some of them, it is a productivity game, right? It's important to get that cost down. We have customers in Japan who are using it to augment their workforce because they need more workers than the market can supply and RPA gets it. So I would say the first is listening to our customers. The second piece of it is, then, there are some standard things across our customer base that we're all learning together. You know, one of our customers started looking at the time, the run time of a bot. Or how long, how much infrastructure does it consume? So we're able to get best practices across to be able to figure out what are the right metrics that suits our customers' needs. >> Courtney, I'm trying to understand if it was a top-down initiative or a bottoms-up or both? >> It's both, yeah I think it's really both. So I think it's that top level setting the direction and saying, "This is what we want to do." One of the things we have at World Fuel is, a lot of people have the mantra, and Dan said this this morning as well, is, "We don't want to touch the keyboard." Right? We want to be no-touch. We want things to come through seamlessly. So that's getting great data quality at the beginning with customer onboarding and then getting it all the way through and out the door because, at the end of the day, we need to get the invoices out and the money back in, right? And I need accurate data to do that and do things efficiently. So, I think it's from the top saying, "We want to be no-touch", and then it's up to my team to help provide solutions and work with the businesses and figure out how to make that happen. >> So it sounds like you had this ideation initiative and did you just pick one or two or did you say, "Okay, guys, go?" Where did you start, what did you have to do to really prove out the value? >> We did, we definitely picked one or two. It went with quick wins but when you go with quick wins and you say, "This is what we did in a really short" "amount of time with minimal effort," "think of the art of the possible, think of what we can do?" And now our focus is not on quick wins. Our focus is on, "How do we transform our business? "How do we take this tool and really apply it" "and transform the way we work?" So I think it's important to have those quick wins initially and just kind of set the stage because that gets everybody thinking, "Wow, this can be really big." >> What kind of person was required to build the robots? Somebody who's fairly technical or was it a business person, was it a team, two people team? >> I have the best team ever and I really think we got a lot of them internally. Really, citizen, kind of data, scientist people. Not anybody that was necessarily trained in it. Now we're getting more and more data scientists added to the team. So we're getting more developer-type skills. We also have BAs, so we've got some people who are great at looking at process and how can we make things more efficient? It's a combination but I do really think that some of our best resources have just been people that are really eager to learn. I mean, UiPath does an amazing job of putting the certification and the academy, and so many online tools it's free. I mean, it's so easy to work with them and really pick it up. You know you don't need a lot of training and that's one of the reasons we selected UiPath you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out. And they really make it all so readily available. >> A lot of the customers we talked to today on theCUBE have gone through a business case, some rigorous, some sort of back-of-napkin, What kind of business case and justification did you go through? >> So we started small with the bots. So we said, "Lets prove it out with a small number of bots" "and if we can do that, then we can scale". And we were just chatting earlier that now we really want to look at it and say, "Over the next three", "six, 12 months, how can we really scale this" "and what do we think that looks like?" Again, start small and then, now okay now we know what's out there and we know what we can get so let's go big and we're ready to do that now. >> So did you go through a rigorous, sort of, quantification of the business value or was it more like, "Hey, it's low risk. Let's try it, see what we get." >> Yeah, yeah, it's low risk, let's just do it. >> I mean what was the result, what was the business event? >> Honestly, it's been fantastic. I mean the results back that we've had have been savings of 100,000s of dollars with minimal, again, minimal effort and minimal, really unsure of what we were going to get out of it. So, it's phenomenal. >> And the denominator, and I say denominator I'm talking about benefit divided by cost-- >> Yeah. >> Sounds like the denominator was pretty low. >> Pretty low, yeah. >> One of the best ways to get our eyes, lower the denominator. I always talk to my kids about this when it comes to college cost so you know what I mean, (laughing) And really, with the community version, getting that out there and free and just having people start playing around with it? I mean, that right there keeps your cost pretty low because they're funneling and putting ideas in the pipeline and then when it comes time to develop it and make it production ready, that's where our effort is involved but to just get that into the pipeline with a little bit of effort and a little bit of cost is a no-brainer. >> So it's clear, your strategy as a company is to lower the barriers to entry for your clients, train them, free training, get them hooked, and then let the rest of it soar. >> Yeah, I mean, one is we share that, our CEO talked about that today, we share that joy that automation brings to a lot of people's work. That's what drives them. So for us, it's not about nickel and diming people every step of the way, it is arming them with what they need to fulfill the mission for what we sold them automation or RPA for. And that's a huge part of it so it goes beyond just the academy, just the training, you know, it's the intimacy that we want to keep with our customers. So we're growing very fast in our number of employees. So, even though, I think we're getting close to 2,000 customers, our goal is to get to 2,000 employees here very quickly. And our CEO really stresses customer first in that equation so we learn and we do little pivot points along the way. An example could be internal marketing, helping people drive awareness. You know, the bot-a-thon that Courtney had for her team, we want to be able to sponsor those things. You know, be partners in getting that name of RPA out there. So it's everything they need to try to get up that curve. >> Courtney, your enthusiasm is palpable, as much of the feedback that we've had from customers, but if you had to do it over again, would you change anything, would you go faster? Would you have done anything differently if you'd had a mulligan? >> One of the concerns is that I feel like we've got a lot of momentum and I want to keep it going. So I want to, like Ashim, we need to scale our team as well so that we're able to handle that pipeline of work coming in and that we don't stall out because I really see a lot of enthusiasm for what we're developing and we want to be able to keep up with that. I love moving fast, I wish we could move faster, I push my team to say, "How much faster can we go?", because there's commitments as well at the board level saying, you know, "What are you guys doing and how are you transforming?" But I wouldn't do anything over so far. So far it's been fantastic. >> You know It strikes me that when you put in a robot, and automate a process, you're saving for an individual, and arm or a leg, you know, Lots of arms and legs. How have you thought about virtualizing those arms and legs into a team that can really drive this to your last point, through the organization, to keep that momentum going? >> Yeah, that's what we're looking in now, right? We want to look at that digital roadmap and say, not arms and legs, but we actually want to look at real resources and that doesn't necessarily mean a resource reduction, it just means being able to scale and do things more efficiently and hopefully, redeploy those resources to do stuff that requires a brain, right? >> Ashim, I'm curious. Do you have some tools to help customers as to how they scale and grow and keep the momentum going? It reminds me of a rocket going on, you've got those booster levels, and you want to reach escape velocity but then probably, keep accelerating. >> Yeah, so you'll start seeing our platform expanding this. At this conference, and Daniel must have talked about it, we launched UiPath Go. Getting openness and collaboration within organizations and across organizations, that's really what our Go platform will enable people to do. Sharing automations, learning best practices, being able to connect with different companies, different partners at a fast pace, that's so important because there's not a cookie cutter approach to this, we need collective knowledge to ramp up the speed and then, slowly by slowly, the features that we're starting to do: sharable libraries within the platform, you're going to see other process discovery type automations come out or tools that we're starting to roll out to our customers. And then we have events. Yesterday, Courtney was a part of our customer advisory counsel. It is incredible, when you put customers like Courtney in a room, who are so passionate and are incredible, sharing what's working and what's not and everybody leaves saying, "Okay, these are the two things that I'm either" "going to look out for or that I'm going" "to do differently to make sure the journey happens ahead." Those are just a few. >> Courtney, Daniel was on earlier today and we were asking him to give some advice to these young people, you know, he's kind of inspirational. He talked about this morning in his keynote about people laughed him out of their office and so forth. And one of the things he said is, "I didn't think big enough," "I started to think bigger, you got to think bigger." So as you put on your think-big hat, where do you think this could go? >> So I really see UiPath and RPA collaborating, right? I mean, we were investing in a lot of smart tools and I want to see how all of those tools can work together. I don't want it to be just UiPath or just another tool, or workflow tool. I want to see how they can all, because to me, that's where the value really comes in. I mean if you're leveraging best-of-breed options and best-of-breed tools and then we can say, "How do all of these work together?" That's transformational. So, really, at the end of next year, what I want my team and what I want my leaders to say is, "Wow. They have really transformed the way that we work" "and the way that we do business." To me, that's a win. If Ashim can make me successful in that, I'll be a happy camper. >> Awesome, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. We're seeing some of these trends that we talked about: the productivity gap, we have more jobs than we have employees to fill those jobs. The productivity line's not moving. RPA and the ascendancy of RPAs promises to change that and we'll be covering that ongoing. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward Americas. Stu Miniman And Dave Vellante. We will be right back.