>> Narrator: The Wynn resort in Las Vegas It's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT conference 2016 brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back everybody. Professor Deepak Malhotra here. He's with the Harvard Business school and author of Negotiating the Impossible: How to Break Deadlocks and Resolve Ugly Conflicts. Parenthetical without money or muscle end parenthetical. Deepak, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. Thanks for having me here. Happy to be here. So what do you do in here? Well among the other things that I do with my time, I happen to be on the board of advisors for Nutanix. And I've been working with Nutanix for the last, a little over two years on various aspects of negotiation, deal making, training, etcetera. And so I attend a few of their conferences a few of the sessions. I talk at a few of their conferences as well. So that's what brings me here. >> So it's somewhat odd, right to have a negotiations expert come and talk to customers about negotiations. But I guess the angle would be if you're stuck in sort of a legacy world. You need to negotiate your way out is that. >> Well there's a couple of things going on there, right. So under one hand I think it shows a little bit about Nutanix's perspective. That it isn't a zero sum game. It's not we're going to train the Nutanix people so they can get an advantage over customers. I think the company really is focused on creating as much value as possible for the end user. And when you take that mind set it actually makes sense to be inclusive. And bring everybody in the ecosystem into the room. So it's not just, "Hey Professor Malhotra can you train our sales people?" It's you know we want to share your ideas with everybody. And I think that's really a good sign when a company is willing to do that. The second thing is as you just eluded to, a lot of the folks that are coming here and a lot of the people that are customers were thinking about moving in the direction of Nutanix. Or have bought into the idea. They still may need to sell it internally. They still may need to negotiate internally how do we change our organization or how do we move our organization from what its been doing to what it wants to be doing or it should be doing. And they're also many of the same skills can be useful. So why not educate them about some of the things they might not have thought about yet. >> So let's talk about your book a little bit. The premise. I guess I told you I haven't read it yet but I do have it. In the book you talked about a three thousand year old Treaty of Kadesh. And things that we can learn from three thousand years ago. Give us the basics and the premise. >> So this was. The books starts out with this story of the Treaty of Kadesh which I don't think is something that many business books start out talking about. Certainly, I hadn't seen it before I started researching it. And one of the interesting thing that happens is that there's a lesson embedded in the story of the Treaty of Kadesh that I think is as relevant today in negotiations of just about every kind in the business world and outside that, that's worth telling. And the basic story goes as follows. The Treaty of Kadesh is the most ancient peace treaty known to man kind. As far as we know it's as old a peace treaty as we have evidence of. And it was between the Egyptians and the Hittites. And these two parties were at war. And at some point they must of decided enough of this we need to put an end to this. There's too many cost internally and externally. Too many other threats. We need to find a way to resolve this kind of conflict. What often happens in these situations is that nobody wants to look weak. Nobody wants to be the one asking for peace because that might just embolden the other side. So what ends up happening is that somehow they overcome these hesitations. They reach this agreement. Now what's interesting is that we actually have access to both language's version of the treaty. So we have the Arcadian and the hieroglyphics. The hieroglyphics being the Egyptian version and the Arcadian being the one from the Hittites. And if you were to read both of these or if you were to first learn how to read these and then to read both of these. What you find is as you'd expect, they have a lot of the kinds of things that you would normally expect in a peace treaty. You know exchanging prisoners of war. Mutual assistance packs and things like this. And they're basically identical as they should be because they're the same peace treaty. But there is one difference. When you compare the two peace treaties the one difference that sort of stands out is that in the Egyptian version it says it's the Hittites who came asking for peace. And in the Hittite version it says it's the Egyptians who came asking for peace. And what it goes to show I think is that no matter how far back you go this need for every side to declare victory at the end of a negotiation at the end of a conflict. That need for every side to declare victory is as old as human beings themselves. When you understand that. I think it actually changes the way in which you try and negotiate these deals. How you think about what stands in the way of getting the deal done. Sometimes it's not the substance of the deal. You're already proposing something that's good enough. You're already have something on the table that's rich enough, valuable enough. They should say yes. But they might be other reasons they can't say yes. For example they might lose face. Or they may look bad. And when you recognize that I think you come at it a different way. >> Looking at your research. One of things you focus on is trust. And one of the challenges we have in technology is you know, people are entrenched with the way they do things. They're not likely to you know be first or go there. We've now got thousands of people using Nutanix but you know. How does Nutanix or others that are new get a proper seat at the table and be able to be part of a discussion that you know when you've got (mumbles) in there and the old ways of doing things. >> You know the way I see it. You have to get the economics right and you have to get the psychology right. The economics is you have to have a good product. It needs to be price appropriate. You need to be bringing value to the table. And be pricing based on that value proposition. So that's sort of basic business stuff. The problem is as I mentioned earlier. You may have the right product. You may have something that people, quote should be using. It is better than the alternative. But they might be these psychological hurdles that you need to get over. A prominent one being what you just eluded to which is when nobody else is doing it, nobody feels the urgency to do it. If you get the sense that you know there's not a mass of folks running after your product. They sort of feel like, well maybe that means something. Maybe it means it's not a big deal. Maybe it means it's not so urgent. Maybe it's not that good of a product. So the early hurdles that companies like these face are really big ones. You don't have a long list of customers that you can use to prove to other people that this is the way you should be going. There's always a risk that somebodies going to take a bet on this and if something goes wrong. It's sort of the old nobody lost their job buying IBM kind of mentality. And so as a negotiator and as a company that's starting out as an early stage company, especially in technology where you're doing something disruptive, you need to start thinking a little bit about how do we get them over that. How do we get them to start understanding that you know what. Here is a list of customers that are using it. And here's the testimonials, etcetera. You think about the pricing. The most common thing that happens when you walk into the room with a new disruptive technology is that the person on the other side says, "Are you crazy? "You're charging ten times what your competitor is charging. "You know you're sitting here telling me "to pay x. "If I do nothing I have to pay zero." Alright. "Nobody pays this kind of money for this kind of thing." That is a very common response sales people get when they are in an environment like this. And one of the things I advise people to do in that situation. Is to make sure they don't make the worst mistake a sales person can make in a moment where somebody says, "You're price is ten x what everybody else "is charging. "Nobody pays this much." The worst mistake a sales person can make is to apologize for the price being too high. Now they don't always do it by saying, "Oh my god I'm so sorry." But they seem apologetic. You know they're very quick to say, "Oh yeah I know it's high." >> "Let's see if we can do something." >> "I'm sure we can work something out. "But yeah you know I know it's a lot of money." The moment you go in that direction what you're basically doing is you're giving the other side a license to haggle with you. 'Cause what you're telling them is even you don't think the price is appropriate. A better response in a situation like this is for the sales person to say, "Listen I think the question you're asking me is, "how is it that despite our price being ten x "what some other people are charging, "we have a long list of people wanting to buy our product. "What kind of value must we be bringing to the table "for so many people wanting to buy this product? "Now I'm happy to talk about that value "because at the end of the day we all know nobody's "going to pay more for something than it's worth. "Nobody would do that, you're not going to do that. "So why don't we figure out what it's worth "and then you can make the right decision." And what you're doing there is you're shifting the conversion from price to value. You're shifting the frame of this conversation from how much am I having to pay and what's the cost to me to what is the value proposition. >> Stu's laughing. I mean your price is too high is the best sales objection ever. Right, you love to hear that as a sales person. Much better than your product sucks. (chuckles) Now the answer of this question is probably it depends. But when you advise your clients and your friends. When I go into a negotiation am I trying to get the best deal or am I trying to find common ground and get a win-win? >> Actually I don't think it depends. I think. (exhales loudly) Well I would. I would articulate the question slightly differently. Because in my experience it is possible to get a great deal and a great relationship. It's also possible to get neither. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to optimize on both. What's interesting is that very often we assume it's a zero sum game enough. That the only way for me to get a good deal is for me to sacrifice the relationship in some way. That's not how it works in most sort of richer context, more complicated deal scenarios. Because what people evaluate when they walk away from the table isn't just did I get a quote, good economic deal. When people think back and say, "Do I want to work with this person again? "Do I like this person? "Did I get a good deal?" Often what they're thinking about is not so much of the substance of what they got. What's in the agreement. But the process they went through. For example. You know did the negotiation go as long as should of or did it drag on too long or end too abruptly? Was my voice heard? Did both sides move away from their opening positions? Did the person haggle with me on every little thing, even though they knew and I knew it's not a big deal to them and is a big deal to me? Those sort of process elements if you navigate the process more effectively you can often get to a point where you get the deal that you think is right for you and you get a relationship that both sides can walk away feeling good about. And from my perspective you know what does depend in, on it. It depends on the situation is what kind of feeling do you want them to have walking away. You don't always need to have them love you. But at the very least they should respect you. Right? And I think it's perfectly fair even in a very contentious negotiation to keep as one of your objectives. You know when the deal ends I want them to be able to walk away saying, "You know what, I maybe didn't agree with this person. "It didn't go exactly the way I wanted it to go. "But you know I can respect this person "for the way they handled the situation. "And if I were them I hope I would do it the same way." >> So I wonder. If I look at the society as a whole, it seems as if we kind of retreated to our sides and I find that lots of people aren't open for debate. They're intractable in what's going on. How do I get beyond that? >> How do we change society, is that the question? >> Stu: Yeah. >> How much time do we have? >> Am I wrong. (laughs) Is it only ten percent of the people that are intractable or are most people reasonable? >> So I think what happens is, there's a few interesting dynamics. Now I wouldn't have the precise numbers. What I can say is that it is certainly the case that even a minority of people being in those entrenched positions, they get a lot more of the media. They get a lot more of the attention. They tend to be louder, etcetera. And they can often drive our sense of what's actually happening. And it can drive the narrative. Now that doesn't mean there aren't real differences. Like strong differences. You know what's interesting is if you take people that are not on the extremes. You take the moderates. Sometimes the way in which we engage with people on the other side of the argument pushes them to be more extreme. See when we ourselves show up, thinking of ourselves as relatively moderate, enlightened people who have a set of point of view. But you know what I'm very open to other peoples perspective. But then we get into the conversation. And we end up challenging people in a way they don't find particularly useful. We start poking holes. We start making it's about a winning and a losing and a debate. And there's going to be at the end of the day points, score based on who wins the argument. Then people end up getting more and more entrenched. Even in ways that they otherwise wouldn't be. So the question is can we get to a point where at least those people on each side. And I find on any political issue I can find people on both sides that I think are trying to do the right thing and have perhaps limited information but they're trying to do the best they can with that information. They have good intentions and they're reasonably smart people. In my experience, you don't need two people one of whom is either evil, or crazy, or irrational to have conflict. You just need two people. You see good, smart, reasonably well-intentioned people getting into conflict all the time. Which then becomes the question of this book, which is how do we manage those situations? How do we get people to back away from these entrenched positions? How do we overcome deadlock that allows both sides to walk away feeling a little bit better about the situation? >> So examples are instructive. So let's talk about some great negotiators. Who are they? Let's start with sports. Scott Boras. You know you think of him as an agent. I mean grinding the teams, the general managers. Is he a good negotiator? >> So I don't follow many of the sports deal making and negotiations enough to be able to really elaborate on who would be a good negotiator in sports. But I can say this. That in a context where it's really just about things like price. Just about the money. And a sports agent often is, it's not really all about that but it is the most (mumbles). It is the most (mumbles) issue. You're going to go at it a certain way. And it would be similar to a negotiation in the business world where all you care about is price. You're buying or selling a house. You're buying or selling a car. And from my perspective there are people who are very good at haggling. There's people who can hold their cards to the chest and they can be aggressive when they need to be. And they can be persuasive in certain things. But when you look at negotiation as a whole. I think of haggling as a very, very thing slice of what negotiation is about. That's sort of the easy stuff. You may not be naturally good at it. But what it takes to be good at it is not so hard. We teach that on sort of day one of class. Day one of class is the price haggle. It's the you know there's two sides and you want opposite things. And how do you frame it in the right way and what kind of concession rate should you make or not make. How do you justify your proposal etcetera. We cover that on day one. And the problem is there is in our owner president program where I teach there's 15 more days left. In our MBA program there's like 27 more days left. And there the question becomes how do we get past just being a good haggler. Somebody who can just put fist to the table and say take it or leave it. And all that kind of stuff. Which will work in certain defined contexts but will not carry over to more important deals. >> You're right. That is a narrow context in sports because the agent has all the leverage of the players performed. How 'about Donald Trump? He's negotiating isn't he when he says Mexico's going to build the wall. He wrote the book, Art of the Deal. >> He did write that book. Yeah we co-authored that book actually. So is he negotiating when he says that. In the broader sense of the word negotiation which is basically how do we interact with other human beings who see things differently than we do. He absolutely is negotiating. If the question then becomes is he doing it effectively. My view would be that, that he is not. (chuckles) And I think if you actually were to look at the evidence and then stack it up. I think you would find that he's not a very effective negotiator. >> We don't have to go there. That's good. >> Deepak: That's okay I don't mind. >> We'll leave it there. But how 'about (mumbles), right. I mean you've had like an epic negotiation to bring those two. Is that an example? I mean even though it ended in tragedy on both sides is that an example of a successful negotiation? >> So it's an example of a, it is an example of a successful negotiation. And I think even more instructively it's an example of one of the biggest barriers in conflicts like this. The hardest part is often to bring your own side with you. And that is a challenge for leadership. It's not just in the bubble of negotiation. This is about leadership generally. To be able to have someone who can not only personally be willing to do the kinds of things that make the kinds of sacrifices but to be able to move a group of folks who for years, sometimes decades or centuries have been thinking differently. And to your point what often happens with these peace makers is you know the risk is you do one of these things and you're going to get killed. And usually you get killed by your own side. And exactly in the context you're talking about that's usually what happens. And so here what we see is not only an impressive set of events that led to negotiation and the negotiation itself but you see a certain amount of courage that leaders don't often enough show. And again some leaders aren't placed well. They don't have the support going in. Or they just don't have the ability to do it. But even those that do. The question is are you willing to expend the social and political capital necessary and put yourself on the line to be able to do something that you think is worth doing? >> I said I wasn't going to ask you but I am going to ask you 'cause your answer is so good. The Iran Deal. Good deal, not a good deal? You see to your point about getting killed by your own side. >> So I was not involved with the Iran deal. I do work with sometimes governments negotiating difficult conflicts and such. But I was not in any way involved with the Iran deal. What I can say is, based on the folks I've talk to leading up to the Iran deal and then after the Iran deal. It is my sense looking at what was accomplished that is actually a phenomenal deal for when it was done. Could a better deal have been done ten years earlier? Yes. One of the hardest things to negotiate against in the real world is the status quo. It's a lot easier to negotiate don't create center (mumbles) when there are none than it is to negotiate remove the center (mumbles) you have already created. So if you could go back in time which I have not met anybody yet who's able to do effectively it would be possible to get a better deal. Where things were last year and the year before I can say that pretty much everybody you talk to before the deal was announced on either side of the political spectrum, Republicans, Democrats, left, right, Hawkish, Dovish, you name it. Nobody would of expected a deal this good for the American side at the time. Now you may still not like it. You may be against any deal and that's okay. You can certainly have that perspective but if you're going to get a deal in this environment and what was being said leading up to this. I think both sides were pretty surprised and I would even say impressed. Until it came time to start talking about it publicly at which point of course you have to go back to your narrative. So you know again, I had nothing to do with it. But when you look at it, it surprised most people in terms of what it came out to be. >> So what are you working on? Next projects? Things that are exciting you these days. >> So I have sort of three areas where my attention is going. One is on ethnic conflict and armed conflict. As I was eluding to earlier I do some work with governments that are dealing with insurgency and conflict. And looking at what we know and what do we not know about resolving these kind of things. And how we can maybe push forward in that direction. So that's an area of advisory work but also research that I'm doing. Second area is I'm working with doctors. Thinking about how they can be more effective in prescribing a course of action to patients. How they can have more effective kind of conversations when a patient comes in and has a strong set of beliefs about what they should and shouldn't do. Or they're resistant to change. Or they're unwilling to do things. How can you be more effective in the time you spend with patients. And I do work on gun violence. And we've been looking at mass shootings. And we just had some research that got a lot of coverage unfortunately because of the tragedy that took place in Orlando not so long ago. Looking at whether mass shootings really have any impact on gun laws. And we find some interesting results there. So in a sense I'm sort of looking at insurgency and dealing with cancer patients and then gun violence. >> Interesting topics. >> Deepak: All of the darkest stuff we can find. >> It's a tragic but timely. And then there's another sequence there. Do gun laws have an impact on mass shooting. >> Deepak: And that's basically the next set of projects. >> Excellent. Well thank you very much. (mumbles) >> Deepak: It was great. >> Fantastic. >> Deepak: Absolutely. >> Alright keep right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live this is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship production from .NEXT in Vegas. Be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's special program series "Women of the Cloud", brought to you by AWS. I'm your host for the program, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to this special series, Dr. Tendu Yogurtcu joins us, the CTO of Precisely. >> Lisa: Tendu, it's great to see you, it's been a while, but I'm glad that you're doing so well. >> Geez, it's so great seeing you too, and thank you for having me. >> My pleasure. I want the audience to understand a little bit about you. Talk to me a little bit about you, about your role and what are some of the great things that you're doing at Precisely. >> Of course. As CTO, my current role is driving technology vision and innovation, and also coming up with expansion strategies for Precisely's future growth. Precisely is the leader in data integrity. We deliver data with trust, with maximum accuracy, consistency, and also with context. And as a CTO, keeping an eye on what's coming in the business space, what's coming up with the emerging challenges is really key for me. Prior to becoming CTO, I was General Manager for the Syncsort big data business. And previously I had several engineering and R&D leadership roles. I also have a bit of academia experience. I served as a part-time faculty in computer science department in a university. And I am a person who is very tuned to giving back to my community. So I'm currently serving as a advisory board member in the same university. And I'm also serving as a advisory board member for a venture capital firm. And I take pride in being a dedicated advocate for STEM education and STEM education for women in particular, and girls in the underserved areas. >> You have such a great background. The breadth of your background, the experience that you have in the industry as well in academia is so impressive. I've known you a long time. I'd love the audience to get some recommendations from you. For those of the audience looking to grow and expand their careers in technology, what are some of the things that you that you've experienced that you would recommend people do? >> First, stay current. What is emerging today is going to be current very quickly. Especially now we are seeing more change and change at the increased speed than ever. So keeping an eye on on what's happening in the market if you want to be marketable. Now, some of the things that I will say, we have shortage of skills with data science, data engineering with security cyber security with cloud, right? We are here talking about cloud in particular. So there is a shortage of skills in the emerging technologies, AI, ML, there's a shortage of skills also in the retiring technologies. So we are in this like spectrum of skills shortage. So stay tuned to what's coming up. That's one. And on the second piece is that the quicker you tie what you are doing to the goals of the business, whether that's revenue growth whether that's customer retention or cost optimization you are more likely to grow in your career. You have to be able to articulate what you are doing and how that brings value to business to your boss, to your customers. So that becomes an important one. And then third one is giving back. Do something for the women in technology while being a woman in technology. Give back to your community whether that's community is gender based or whether it's your alumni, whether it's your community social community in your neighborhood or in your country or ethnicity. Give back to your community. I think that's becoming really important. >> I think so too. I think that paying it forward is so critical. I'm sure that you have a a long list of mentors and sponsors that have guided you along the way. Giving back to the community paying it forward I think is so important. For others who might be a few years behind us or even maybe have been in tech for the same amount of time that are looking to grow and expand their career having those mentors and sponsors of women who've been through the trenches is inspiring. It's so helpful. And it really is something that we need to do from a diversity perspective alone, right? >> Correct. Correct. And we have seen that, we have seen, for example Covid impact in women in particular. Diverse studies done by girls who quote on Accenture that showed that actually 50% of the women above age 35 were actually dropping out of the technology. And those numbers are scary. However, on the other side we have also seen incredible amount of technology innovation during that time with cloud adoption increasing with the ability to actually work remotely if you are even living in not so secure areas, for example that created more opportunities for women to come back to workforce as well. So we can turn the challenges to opportunities and watch out for those. I would say tipping points. >> I love that you bring up such a great point. There are so, so the, the data doesn't lie, right? The data shows that there's a significant amount of churn for women in technology. But to your point, there are so many opportunities. You mentioned a minute ago the skills gap. One of the things we talk about often on theCUBE and we're talking about cybersecurity which is obviously it's a global risk for companies in every industry, is that there's massive opportunity for people of, of any type to be able to grow their skills. So knowing that there's trend, but there's also so much opportunity for women in technology to climb the ladder is kind of exciting. I think. >> It is. It is exciting. >> Talk to me a little bit about, I would love for the audience to understand some of your hands-on examples where you've really been successful helping organizations navigate digital transformation and their entry and success with cloud computing. What are some of those success stories that you're really proud of? >> Let me think about, first of all what we are seeing is with the digital transformation in general, every single business every single vertical is becoming a technology company. Telecom companies are becoming a technology company. Financial services are becoming a technology company and manufacturing is becoming a technology company. So every business is becoming technology driven. And data is the key. Data is the enabler for every single business. So when we think about the challenges, one of the examples that I give a big challenge for our customers is I can't find the critical data, I can't access it. What are my critical data elements? Because I have so high volumes growing exponentially. What are the critical data elements that I should care and how do I access that? And we work at Precisely with 99 of Fortune 100. So we have two 12,000 customers in over a hundred countries which means we have customers whose businesses are purely built on cloud, clean slate. We also have businesses who have very complex set of data platforms. They have financial services, insurance, for example. They have critical transactional workloads still running on mainframes, IBM i servers, SAP systems. So one of the challenges that we have, and I work with key customers, is on how do we make data accessible for advanced analytics in the cloud? Cloud opens up a ton of open source tools, AI, ML stack lots of tools that actually the companies can leverage for that analytics in addition to elasticity in addition to easy to set up infrastructure. So how do we make sure the data can be actually available from these transactional systems, from mainframes at the speed that the business requires. So it's not just accessing data at the speed the business requires. One of our insurance customers they actually created this data marketplace on Amazon Cloud. And the, their challenge was to make sure they can bring the fresh data on a nightly basis initially and which became actually half an hour, every half an hour. So the speed of the business requirements have changed over time. We work with them very closely and also with the Amazon teams on enabling bringing data and workloads from the mainframes and executing in the cloud. So that's one example. Another big challenge that we see is, can I trust my data? And data integrity is more critical than ever. The quality of data, actually, according to HBR Harvard Business Review survey, 47% of every new record of data has at least one critical data error, 47%. So imagine, I was talking with the manufacturing organization couple of weeks ago and they were giving me an example. They have these three letter quotes for parts and different chemicals they use in the manufacturing. And the single letter error calls a shutdown of the whole manufacturing line. >> Wow. >> So that kind of challenge, how do I ensure that I can actually have completeness of data cleanness of data and consistency in that data? Moreover, govern that on a continuous basis becomes one of the use cases that we help customers. And in that particular case actually we help them put a data governance framework and data quality in their manufacturing line. It's becoming also a critical for, for example ESG, environment, social and governance, supply chain, monitoring the supply chain, and assessing ESG metrics. We see that again. And then the third one, last one. I will give an example because I think it's important. Hybrid cloud becoming critical. Because there's a purest view for new companies. However, facilitating flexible deployment models and facilitating cloud and hybrid cloud is also where we really we can help our customers. >> You brought up some amazingly critical points where it comes to data. You talked about, you know, a minute ago, every company in every industry has to become a technology company. You could also say every company across every industry has to become a data company. They have to become a software company. But to your point, and what it sounds like precisely is really helping organizations to do is access the data access data that has high integrity data that is free of errors. Obviously that's business critical. You talked about the high percentage of errors that caused manufacturing shutdown. Businesses can't, can't have that. That could potentially be life-ending for an organization. So it sounds like what you're talking about data accessibility, data integrity data governance and having that all in real time is table stakes for businesses. Whether it's your grocery store, your local coffee shop a manufacturing company, and e-commerce company. It's table stakes globally these days. >> It is, and you made a very good point actually, Lisa when you talked about the local coffee shop or the retail. One other interesting statistic is that almost 80% of every data has a location attribute. So when we talk about data integrity we no longer talk about just, and consistency of data. We also talk about context, right? When you are going, for example, to a new town you are probably getting some reminders about where your favorite coffee shop is or what telecom company has an office in that particular town. Or if you're an insurance company and a hurricane is hitting southern Florida. Then you want to know how the path of that hurricane is going to impact your customers and predict the claims before they happen. Also understand the propensity of the potential customers that you don't yet have. So location and context, those additional attributes of demographics, visitations are creating actually more confident business insights. >> Absolutely. And and as the consumer we're becoming more and more demanding. We want to be able to transact things so easily whether it's in our personal life at the grocery store, at that cafe, or in our business life. So those demands from the customer are also really influencing the direction that companies need to go. And it's actually, I think it's quite exciting that the amount of personalization the location data that you talk about that comes in there and really helps companies in every industry deliver these the cloud can, these amazing, unique personalized experiences that really drive business forward. We could talk about that all day long. I have no problem. But I want to get in our final minutes here, Tendu. What do you see as in your crystal ball as next for the cloud? How do you see your role as CTO evolving? >> Sure. For what we are seeing in the cloud I think we will start seeing more and more focus on sustainability. Sustainable technologies and governance. Obviously cloud migrations cloud modernizations are helping with that. And we, we are seeing many of our customers they started actually assessing the ESG supply chain and reporting on metrics whether it's the percentage of face or energy consumption. Also on the social metrics on diversity age distribution and as well as compliance piece. So sustainability governance I think that will become one area. Second, security, we talked about IT security and data privacy. I think we will see more and more investments around those. Cybersecurity in particular. And ethical data access and ethics is becoming center to everything we are doing as we have those personalized experiences and have more opportunities in the cloud. And the third one is continued automation with AI, ML and more focus on automation because cloud enables that at scale. And the work that we need to do is too time-intensive and too manual with the amount of data. Data is powering every business. So automation is going to be an increased focus how my role evolves with that. So I have this unique combination. I have been open to non-linear career paths throughout my growth. So I have an understanding of how to innovate and build products that solve real business problems. I also have an understanding of how to sell them build partnerships that combined with the the scale of growth, the hyper growth that we have absorbed in precisely 10 times growth within the last 10 years through a combination of organic innovation and acquisitions really requires the speed of change. So change, implementing change at scale as well as at speed. So taking those and bringing them to the next challenge is the evolution of my role. How do I bring those and tackle keep an eye on what's coming as a challenge in the industry and how they apply those skills that I have developed throughout my career to that next challenge and evolve with it, bring the innovation to data to cloud and the next challenge that we are going to see. >> There's so much on the horizon. It's, there are certainly challenges, you know within technology, but there's so much opportunity. You've done such a great job highlighting your career path the, the big impact that you're helping organizations make leveraging cloud and the opportunity that's there for the rest of us to really get in there get our hands dirty and solve problems. Tendu, I always love our conversations. It's been such a pleasure having you back, back on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us on this special program series today. >> Thank you Lisa. And also thanks to AWS for the opportunity. >> Absolutely. This is brought, brought to us by AWS. For Dr.Tendu, you are good to go. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE special program series Women of the Cloud. We thank you so much for watching and we'll see you soon. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to "theCUBE" conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE," got a great security conversation, Ed Casper who's the founder and CEO of Cloud Storage Security, the great Cloud background, Cloud security, Cloud storage. Welcome to the "theCUBE Conversation," Ed. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> I got Lafomo on that background. You got the nice look there. Let's get into the storage blind spot conversation around Cloud Security. Obviously, reinforced has came up a ton, you heard a lot about encryption, automated reasoning but still ransomware was still hot. All these things are continuing to be issues on security but they're all brought on data and storage, right? So this is a big part of it. Tell us a little bit about how you guys came about the origination story. What is the company all about? >> Sure, so, we're a pandemic story. We started in February right before the pandemic really hit and we've survived and thrived because it is such a critical thing. If you look at the growth that's happening in storage right now, we saw this at reinforced. We saw even a recent AWS Storage Day. Their S3, in particular, houses over 200 trillion objects. If you look just 10 years ago, in 2012, Amazon touted how they were housing one trillion objects, so in a 10 year period, it's grown to 200 trillion and really most of that has happened in the last three or four years, so the pandemic and the shift in the ability and the technologies to process data better has really driven the need and driven the Cloud growth. >> I want to get into some of the issues around storage. Obviously, the trend on S3, look at what they've done. I mean, I saw my land at storage today. We've interviewed her. She's amazing. Just the EC2 and S3 the core pistons of AWS, obviously, the silicons getting better, the IaaS layers just getting so much more innovation. You got more performance abstraction layers at the past is emerging Cloud operations on premise now with hybrid is becoming a steady state and if you look at all the action, it's all this hyper-converged kind of conversations but it's not hyper-converged in a box, it's Cloud Storage, so there's a lot of activity around storage in the Cloud. Why is that? >> Well, because it's that companies are defined by their data and, if a company's data is growing, the company itself is growing. If it's not growing, they are stagnant and in trouble, and so, what's been happening now and you see it with the move to Cloud especially over the on-prem storage sources is people are starting to put more data to work and they're figuring out how to get the value out of it. Recent analysts made a statement that if the Fortune 1000 could just share and expose 10% more of their data, they'd have net revenue increases of 65 million. So it's just the ability to put that data to work and it's so much more capable in the Cloud than it has been on-prem to this point. >> It's interesting data portability is being discussed, data access, who gets access, do you move compute to the data? Do you move data around? And all these conversations are kind of around access and security. It's one of the big vulnerabilities around data whether it's an S3 bucket that's an manual configuration error, or if it's a tool that needs credentials. I mean, how do you manage all this stuff? This is really where a rethink kind of comes around so, can you share how you guys are surviving and thriving in that kind of crazy world that we're in? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, data has been the critical piece and moving to the Cloud has really been this notion of how do I protect my access into the Cloud? How do I protect who's got it? How do I think about the networking aspects? My east west traffic after I've blocked them from coming in but no one's thinking about the data itself and ultimately, you want to make that data very safe for the consumers of the data. They have an expectation and almost a demand that the data that they consume is safe and so, companies are starting to have to think about that. They haven't thought about it. It has been a blind spot, you mentioned that before. In regards to, I am protecting my management plane, we use posture management tools. We use automated services. If you're not automating, then you're struggling in the Cloud. But when it comes to the data, everyone thinks, "Oh, I've blocked access. I've used firewalls. I've used policies on the data," but they don't think about the data itself. It is that packet that you talked about that moves around to all the different consumers and the workflows and if you're not ensuring that that data is safe, then, you're in big trouble and we've seen it over and over again. >> I mean, it's definitely a hot category and it's changing a lot, so I love this conversation because it's a primary one, primary and secondary cover data cotton storage. It's kind of good joke there, but all kidding aside, it's a hard, you got data lineage tracing is a big issue right now. We're seeing companies come out there and kind of superability tangent there. The focus on this is huge. I'm curious, what was the origination story? What got you into the business? Was it like, were you having a problem with this? Did you see an opportunity? What was the focus when the company was founded? >> It's definitely to solve the problems that customers are facing. What's been very interesting is that they're out there needing this. They're needing to ensure their data is safe. As the whole story goes, they're putting it to work more, we're seeing this. I thought it was a really interesting series, one of your last series about data as code and you saw all the different technologies that are processing and managing that data and companies are leveraging today but still, once that data is ready and it's consumed by someone, it's causing real havoc if it's not either protected from being exposed or safe to use and consume and so that's been the biggest thing. So we saw a niche. We started with this notion of Cloud Storage being object storage, and there was nothing there protecting that. Amazon has the notion of access and that is how they protect the data today but not the packets themselves, not the underlying data and so, we created the solution to say, "Okay, we're going to ensure that that data is clean. We're also going to ensure that you have awareness of what that data is, the types of files you have out in the Cloud, wherever they may be, especially as they drift outside of the normal platforms that you're used to seeing that data in. >> It's interesting that people were storing data lakes. Oh yeah, just store a womp we might need and then became a data swamp. That's kind of like go back 67 years ago. That was the conversation. Now, the conversation is I need data. It's got to be clean. It's got to feed the machine learning. This is going to be a critical aspect of the business model for the developers who are building the apps, hence, the data has code reference which we've focused on but then you say, "Okay, great. Does this increase our surface area for potential hackers?" So there's all kinds of things that kind of open up, we start doing cool, innovative, things like that so, what are some of the areas that you see that your tech solves around some of the blind spots or with object store, the things that people are overlooking? What are some of the core things that you guys are seeing that you're solving? >> So, it's a couple of things, right now, the still the biggest thing you see in the news is configuration issues where people are losing their data or accidentally opening up to rights. That's the worst case scenario. Reads are a bad thing too but if you open up rights and we saw this with a major API vendor in the last couple of years they accidentally opened rights to their buckets. Hackers found it immediately and put malicious code into their APIs that were then downloaded and consumed by many, many of their customers so, it is happening out there. So the notion of ensuring configuration is good and proper, ensuring that data has not been augmented inappropriately and that it is safe for consumption is where we started and, we created a lightweight, highly scalable solution. At this point, we've scanned billions of files for customers and petabytes of data and we're seeing that it's such a critical piece to that to make sure that that data's safe. The big thing and you brought this up as well is the big thing is they're getting data from so many different sources now. It's not just data that they generate. You see one centralized company taking in from numerous sources, consolidating it, creating new value on top of it, and then releasing that and the question is, do you trust those sources or not? And even if you do, they may not be safe. >> We had an event around super Clouds is a topic we brought up to get bring the attention to the complexity of hybrid which is on premise, which is essentially Cloud operations. And the successful people that are doing things in the software side are essentially abstracting up the benefits of the infrastructures of service from HN AWS, right, which is great. Then they innovate on top so they have to abstract that storage is a key component of where we see the innovations going. How do you see your tech that kind of connecting with that trend that's coming which is everyone wants infrastructures code. I mean, that's not new. I mean, that's the goal and it's getting better every day but DevOps, the developers are driving the operations and security teams to like stay pace, so policy seeing a lot of policy seeing some cool things going on that's abstracting up from say storage and compute but then those are being put to use as well, so you've got this new wave coming around the corner. What's your reaction to that? What's your vision on that? How do you see that evolving? >> I think it's great, actually. I think that the biggest problem that you have to do as someone who is helping them with that process is make sure you don't slow it down. So, just like Cloud at scale, you must automate, you must provide different mechanisms to fit into workflows that allow them to do it just how they want to do it and don't slow them down. Don't hold them back and so, we've come up with different measures to provide and pretty much a fit for any workflow that any customer has come so far with. We do data this way. I want you to plug in right here. Can you do that? And so it's really about being able to plug in where you need to be, and don't slow 'em down. That's what we found so far. >> Oh yeah, I mean that exactly, you don't want to solve complexity with more complexity. That's the killer problem right now so take me through the use case. Can you just walk me through how you guys engage with customers? How they consume your service? How they deploy it? You got some deployment scenarios. Can you talk about how you guys fit in and what's different about what you guys do? >> Sure, so, we're what we're seeing is and I'll go back to this data coming from numerous sources. We see different agencies, different enterprises taking data in and maybe their solution is intelligence on top of data, so they're taking these data sets in whether it's topographical information or whether it's in investing type information. Then they process that and they scan it and they distribute it out to others. So, we see that happening as a big common piece through data ingestion pipelines, that's where these folks are getting most of their data. The other is where is the data itself, the document or the document set, the actual critical piece that gets moved around and we see that in pharmaceutical studies, we see it in mortgage industry and FinTech and healthcare and so, anywhere that, let's just take a very simple example, I have to apply for insurance. I'm going to upload my Social Security information. I'm going to upload a driver's license, whatever it happens to be. I want to one know which of my information is personally identifiable, so I want to be able to classify that data but because you're trusting or because you're taking data from untrusted sources, then you have to consider whether or not it's safe for you to use as your own folks and then also for the downstream users as well. >> It's interesting, in the security world, we hear zero trust and then we hear supply chain, software supply chains. We get to trust everybody, so you got kind of two things going on. You got the hardware kind of like all the infrastructure guys saying, "Don't trust anything 'cause we have a zero trust model," but as you start getting into the software side, it's like trust is critical like containers and Cloud native services, trust is critical. You guys are kind of on that balance where you're saying, "Hey, I want data to come in. We're going to look at it. We're going to make sure it's clean." That's the value here. Is that what I'm hearing you, you're taking it and you're saying, "Okay, we'll ingest it and during the ingestion process, we'll classify it. We'll do some things to it with our tech and put it in a position to be used properly." Is that right? >> That's exactly right. That's a great summary, but ultimately, if you're taking data in, you want to ensure it's safe for everyone else to use and there are a few ways to do it. Safety doesn't just mean whether it's clean or not. Is there malicious content or not? It means that you have complete coverage and control and awareness over all of your data and so, I know where it came from. I know whether it's clean and I know what kind of data is inside of it and we don't see, we see that the interesting aspects are we see that the cleanliness factor is so critical in the workflow, but we see the classification expand outside of that because if your data drifts outside of what your standard workflow was, that's when you have concerns, why is PII information over here? And that's what you have to stay on top of, just like AWS is control plane. You have to manage it all. You have to make sure you know what services have all of a sudden been exposed publicly or not, or maybe something's been taken over or not and you control that. You have to do that with your data as well. >> So how do you guys fit into the security posture? Say it a large company that might want to implement this right away. Sounds like it's right in line with what developers want and what people want. It's easy to implement from what I see. It's about 10, 15, 20 minutes to get up and running. It's not hard. It's not a heavy lift to get in. How do you guys fit in once you get operationalized when you're successful? >> It's a lightweight, highly scalable serverless solution, it's built on Fargate containers and it goes in very easily and then, we offer either native integrations through S3 directly, or we offer APIs and the APIs are what a lot of our customers who want inline realtime scanning leverage and we also are looking at offering the actual proxy aspects. So those folks who use the S3 APIs that our native AWS, puts and gets. We can actually leverage our put and get as an endpoint and when they retrieve the file or place the file in, we'll scan it on access as well, so, it's not just a one time data arrest. It can be a data in motion as you're retrieving the information as well >> We were talking with our friends the other day and we're talking about companies like Datadog. This is the model people want, they want to come in and developers are driving a lot of the usage and operational practice so I have to ask you, this fits kind of right in there but also, you also have the corporate governance policy police that want to make sure that things are covered so, how do you balance that? Because that's an important part of this as well. >> Yeah, we're really flexible for the different ways they want to consume and and interact with it. But then also, that is such a critical piece. So many of our customers, we probably have a 50/50 breakdown of those inside the US versus those outside the US and so, you have those in California with their information protection act. You have GDPR in Europe and you have Asia having their own policies as well and the way we solve for that is we scan close to the data and we scan in the customer's account, so we don't require them to lose chain of custody and send data outside of the accoun. That is so critical to that aspect. And then we don't ask them to transfer it outside of the region, so, that's another critical piece is data residency has to be involved as part of that compliance conversation. >> How much does Cloud enable you to do this that you couldn't really do before? I mean, this really shows the advantage of natively being in the Cloud to kind of take advantage of the IaaS to SAS components to solve these problems. Share your thoughts on how this is possible. What if there was no problem, what would you do? >> It really makes it a piece of cake. As silly as that sounds, when we deploy our solution, we provide a management console for them that runs inside their own accounts. So again, no metadata or anything has to come out of it and it's all push button click and because the Cloud makes it scalable because Cloud offers infrastructure as code, we can take advantage of that and then, when they say go protect data in the Ireland region, they push a button, we stand up a stack right there in the Ireland region and scan and protect their data right there. If they say we need to be in GovCloud and operate in GovCloud East, there you go, push the button and you can behave in GovCloud East as well. >> And with server lists and the region support and all the goodness really makes a really good opportunity to really manage these Cloud native services with the data interaction so, really good prospects. Final question for you. I mean, we love the story. I think it is going to be a really changing market in this area in a big way. I think the data storage relationship relative to higher level services will be huge as Cloud native continues to drive everything. What's the future? I mean, you guys see yourself as a all encompassing, all singing and dancing storage platform or a set of services that you're going to enable developers and drive that value. Where do you see this going? >> I think that it's a mix of both. Ultimately, you saw even on Storage Day the announcement of file cash and file cash creates a new common name space across different storage platforms and so, the notion of being able to use one area to access your data and have it come from different spots is fantastic. That's been in the on-prem world for a couple of years and it's finally making it to the Cloud. I see us following that trend in helping support. We're super laser-focused on Cloud Storage itself so, EBS volumes, we keep having customers come to us and say, "I don't want to run agents in my EC2 instances. I want you to snap and scan and I don't want to, I've got all this EFS and FSX out there that we want to scan," and so, we see that all of the Cloud Storage platforms, Amazon work docs, EFS, FSX, EBS, S3, we'll all come together and we'll provide a solution that's super simple, highly scalable that can meet all the storage needs so, that's our goal right now and where we're working towards. >> Well, Cloud Storage Security, you couldn't get a more a descriptive name of what you guys are working on and again, I've had many contacts with Andy Jassy when he was running AWS and he always loves to quote "The Innovator's Dilemma," one of his teachers at Harvard Business School and we were riffing on that the other day and I want to get your thoughts. It's not so much "The Innovator's Dilemma" anymore relative to Cloud 'cause that's kind of a done deal. It's "The Integrator's Dilemma," and so, it's the integrations are so huge now. If you don't integrate the right way, that's the new dilemma. What's your reaction to that? >> A 100% agreed. It's been super interesting. Our customers have come to us for a security solution and they don't expect us to be 'cause we don't want to be either. Our own engine vendor, we're not the ones creating the engines. We are integrating other engines in and so we can provide a multi engine scan that gives you higher efficacy. So this notion of offering simple integrations without slowing down the process, that's the key factor here is what we've been after so, we are about simplifying the Cloud experience to protecting your storage and it's been so funny because I thought customers might complain that we're not a name brand engine vendor, but they love the fact that we have multiple engines in place and we're bringing that to them this higher efficacy, multi engine scan. >> I mean the developer trends can change on a dime. You make it faster, smarter, higher velocity and more protected, that's a winning formula in the Cloud so Ed, congratulations and thanks for spending the time to riff on and talk about Cloud Storage Security and congratulations on the company's success. Thanks for coming on "theCUBE." >> My pleasure, thanks a lot, John. >> Okay. This conversation here in Palo Alto, California I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special cloud virtual event, theCUBE on cloud. This is our continuing editorial series of the most important stories in cloud. We're going to explore the cutting edge most relevant technologies and companies that will impact business and society. We have special guests from Jeff Barr, Michael Liebow, Jerry Chen, Ben Haynes, Michael skulk, Mike Feinstein from AWS all today are presenting the top startups in the AWS ecosystem. This is the AWS showcase of startups. I'm showing with Dave Vellante. Dave great to see you. >> Hey John. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So awesome day today. We're going to feature a 10 grade companies amplitude, auto grid, big ID, cordial Dremio Kong, multicloud, Reltio stardog wire wheel, companies that we've talked to. We've researched. And they're going to present today from 10 for the rest of the day. What's your thoughts? >> Well, John, a lot of these companies were just sort of last decade, they really, were keyer kicker mode, experimentation mode. Now they're well on their way to hitting escape velocity which is very exciting. And they're hitting tens of millions dollars of ARR, many are planning IPO's and it's just it's really great to see what the cloud has enabled and we're going to dig into that very deeply today. So I'm super excited. >> Before we jump into the keynote (mumbles) our non Huff from AWS up on stage Jeremy is the brains behind this program that we're doing. We're going to do this quarterly. Jeremy great to see you, you're in the global startups program at AWS. Your job is to keep the crops growing, keep the startups going and keep the flow of innovation. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Made it to startup showcase day. I'm super excited. And as you mentioned my team the global startup program team, we kind of provide white glove service for VC backed startups and help them with go to market activities. Co-selling with AWS and we've been looking for ways to highlight all the great work they're doing and partnering with you guys has been tremendous. You guys really know how to bring their stories to life. So super excited about all the partner sessions today. >> Well, I really appreciate the vision and working with Amazon this is like truly a bar raiser from theCUBE virtual perspective, using the virtual we can get more content, more flow and great to have you on and bring that the top hot startups around data, data ops. Certainly the most important story in tech is cloud scale with data. You you can't look around and seeing more innovation happening. So I really appreciate the work. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, and don't forget, we're making this a quarterly series. So the next one we've already been working on it. The next one is Wednesday, June 16th. So mark your calendars, but super excited to continue doing these showcases with you guys in the future. >> Thanks for coming on Jeremy. I really appreciate it,. Dave so I want to just quick quickly before we get Jeff up here, Jeff Barr who's a luminary guests for us this week who has been in the industry has been there from the beginning of AWS the role of data, and what's happened in cloud. And we've been watching the evolution of Amazon web services from the beginning, from the startup market to dominate in the enterprise. If you look at the top 10 enterprise companies Amazon wasn't on that list in 2010 they weren't even bringing the top 10 Andy Jassy's keynote at reinvent this past year. Highlighted that fact, I think they were number five or four as vendor in just AWS. So interesting to see that you've been reporting and doing a lot of analysis on the role of data. What's your analysis for these startups and as businesses need to embrace the new technologies and be on the right side of history not part of that old guard, incumbent failed model. >> Well, I think again, if you look back on the early days of cloud, it was really about storage and networking and compute infrastructure. And then we collected all this data and now you're seeing the next generation of innovation and value. We're going to talk to Michael Liebow about this is really if you look at all the value points in the leavers, it's all around data and data is going through a massive change in the way that we think about it, that we talk about it. And you hear that a lot. Obviously you talk about the volumes, the giant volumes but there's something else going on as AWS brings the cloud to the edge. And of course it looks at the data centers, just another edge device, data is getting highly decentralized. And what we're seeing is data getting into the hands of business owners and data product builders. I think we're going to see a new parlance emerge and that's where you're seeing the competitive advantage. And if you look at all the real winners these days in the marketplace especially in the digital with COVID, it all comes back to the data. And we're going to talk about that a lot today. >> One of the things that's coming up in all of our cube interviews, certainly we've seen, I mean we've had a great observation space across all the ecosystems, but the clear thing that's coming out of COVID is speed, agility, scale, and data. If you don't have that data you are going to be a non-player. And I think I heard some industry people talking about the future of how the stock market's going to work and that if you're not truly in market with an AI or machine learning data value play you probably will be shorted on the stock market or delisted. I think people are looking at that as a table stakes competitive advantage item, where if you don't have some sort of data competitive strategy you're going to be either delisted or sold short. And that's, I don't think delisted but the point is this table-stakes Dave. >> Well, I think too, I think the whole language the lingua franca of data is changing. We talk about data as an asset all the time, but you think about it now, what do we do with assets? We protect it, we hide it. And we kind of we don't share it. But then on the other hand, everybody talks about sharing the data and that is a huge trend in the marketplace. And so I think that everybody is really starting to rethink the whole concept of data, what it is, its value and how we think about it, talk about it, share it make it accessible, and at the same time, protect it and make it governed. And I think you're seeing, computational governance and automation really hidden. Couldn't do this without the cloud. I mean, that's the bottom line. >> Well, I'm super excited to have Jeff Barr here from AWS as our special keynote guests. I've been following Jeff's career for a long, long time. He's a luminaries, he's a technical, he's in the industry. He's part of the community, he's been there from the beginning AWS just celebrate its 15th birthday as he was blogging hard. He's been a hardcore blogger. I think Jeff, you had one of the original ping service. If I remember correctly, you were part of the web services foundational kind of present at creation. No better guests to have you Jeff thanks for coming up on our stage. >> John and Dave really happy to be here. >> So I got to ask you, you've been blogging hard for the past decade or so, going hard and your job has evolved from blogging about what's new with Amazon. A couple of building blocks a few services to last reinvent them. You must have put out I don't know how many blog posts did you put out last year at every event? I mean, it must have been a zillion. >> Not quite a zillion. I think I personally wrote somewhere between 20 and 25 including quite a few that I did in the month or so run up to reinvent and it's always intense, but it's always really, really fun. >> So I've got to ask you in the past couple of years, I mean I quoted Andy Jassy's keynote where we highlight in 2010 Amazon wasn't even on the top 10 enterprise players. Now in the top five, you've seen the evolution. What is the big takeaway from your standpoint as you look at the enterprise going from Amazon really dominating the start of a year startups today, you're in the cloud, you're born in the cloud. There's advantage to that. Now enterprises are kind of being reborn in the cloud at the same time, they're building these new use cases rejuvenating themselves and having innovation strategy. What's your takeaway? >> So I love to work with our customers and one of the things that I hear over and over again and especially the last year or two is really the value that they're placing on building a workforce that has really strong cloud skills. They're investing in education. They're focusing on this neat phrase that I learned in Australia called upskilling and saying let's take our set of employees and improve their skill base. I hear companies really saying we're going to go cloud first. We're going to be cloud native. We're going to really embrace it, adopt the full set of cloud services and APIs. And I also see that they're really looking at cloud as part of often a bigger picture. They often use the phrase digital transformation, in Amazon terms we'd say they're thinking big. They're really looking beyond where they are and who they are to what they could be and what they could grow into. Really putting a lot of energy and creativity into thinking forward in that way. >> I wonder Jeff, if you could talk about sort of how people are thinking about the future of cloud if you look at where the spending action is obviously you see it in cloud computing. We've seen that as the move to digital, serverless Lambda is huge. If you look at the data it's off the charts, machine learning and AI also up there containers and of course, automation, AWS leads in all of those. And they portend a different sort of programming model a different way of thinking about how to deploy workloads and applications maybe different than the early days of cloud. What's driving that generally and I'm interested in serverless specifically. And how do you see the next several years folding out? >> Well, they always say that the future is the hardest thing to predict but when I talked to our enterprise customers the two really big things that I see is there's this focus that says we need to really, we're not simply like hosting the website or running the MRP. I'm working with one customer in particular where they say, well, we're going to start on the factory floor all the way up to the boardroom effectively from IOT and sensors on the factory floor to feed all the data into machine learning. So they understand that the factory is running really well to actually doing planning and inventory maintenance to putting it on the website to drive the analytics, to then saying, okay, well how do we know that we're building the right product mix? How do we know that we're getting it out through the right channels? How are our customers doing? So they're really saying there's so many different services available to us in the cloud and they're relatively easy and straightforward to deploy. They really don't think in the old days as we talked about earlier that the old days where these multi-year planning and deployment cycles, now it's much more straightforward. It's like let's see what we can do today. And this week and this month, and from idea to some initial results is a much, much shorter turnaround. So they can iterate a lot more quickly which is just always known to produce better results. >> Well, Jeff and the spirit of the 15th birthday of AWS a lot of services have been built from the original three. I believe it was the core building blocks and there's been a lot of history and it's kind of like there was a key decoupling of compute from storage, those innovations what's the most important architectural change if any has happened or built upon those building blocks with AWS that you could share with companies out there as many people are coming into the cloud not just lifting and shifting and having that innovation but really building cloud native and now hybrid full cloud operations, day two operations. However you want to look at it. That's a big thing. What architecturally has changed that's been innovative from those original building blocks? >> Well, I think that the basic architecture has proven to be very, very resilient. When I wrote about the 15 year birthday of Amazon S3 a couple of weeks ago one thing that I thought was really incredible was the fact that the same APIs that you could have used 15 years ago they all still work. The put, the get, the list, the delete, the permissions management, every last one of those were chosen with extreme care. And so they all still work. So one of the things you think about when you put APIs out there is in Amazon terms we always talk about going through a one-way door and a one way door says, once you do it you're committed for the indefinite future. And so you we're very happy to do that but we take those steps with extreme care. And so those basic building blocks so the original S3 APIs, the original EC2 APIs and the model, all those things really worked. But now they're running at this just insane scale. One thing that blows me away I routinely hear my colleagues talking about petabytes and exabytes, and we throw around trillions and quadrillions like they're pennies. It's kind of amazing. Sometimes when you hear the scale of requests per day or request per month, and the orders of magnitude are you can't map them back to reality anymore. They're simply like literally astronomical. >> If I can just jump in real quick Dave before you ask Jeff, I was watching the Jeff Bezos interview in 1999 that's been going around on LinkedIn in a 60 minutes interview. The interviewer says you are reporting that you can store a gigabyte of customer data from all their purchases. What are you going to do with that? He basically nailed the answer. This is in 99. We're going to use that data to create, that was only a gig. >> Well one of the things that is interesting to me guys, is if you look at again, the early days of cloud, of course I always talked about that in small companies like ours John could have now access to information technology that only big companies could get access to. And now you've seen we just going to talk about it today. All these startups rise up and reach viability. But at the same time, Jeff you've seen big companies get the aha moment on cloud and competition drives urgency and that drives innovation. And so now you see everybody is doing cloud, it's a mandate. And so the expectation is a lot more innovation, experimentation and speed from all ends. It's really exciting to see. >> I know this sounds hackneyed and overused but it really, really still feels just like day one. We're 15 plus years into this. I still wake up every morning, like, wow what is the coolest thing that I'm going to get to learn about and write about today? We have the most amazing customers, one of the things that is great when you're so well connected to your customers, they keep telling you about their dreams, their aspirations, their use cases. And we can just take that and say we can actually build awesome things to help you address those use cases from the ground on up, from building custom hardware things like the nitro system, the graviton to the machine learning inferencing and training chips where we have such insight into customer use cases because we have these awesome customers that we can make these incredible pieces of hardware and software to really address those use cases. >> I'm glad you brought that up. This is another big change, right? You're getting the early days of cloud like, oh, Amazon they're just using off the shelf components. They're not buying these big refrigerator sized disc drives. And now you're developing all this custom Silicon and vertical integration in certain aspects of your business. And that's because workload is demanding. You've got to get more specialized in a lot of cases. >> Indeed they do. And if you watch Peter DeSantis' keynote at re-invent he talked about the fact that we're researching ways to make better cement that actually produces less carbon dioxide. So we're now literally at the from the ground on up level of construction. >> Jeff, I want to get a question from the crowd here. We got, (mumbles) who's a good friend of theCUBE cloud Arate from the beginning. He asked you, he wants to know if you'd like to share Amazon's edge aspirations. He says, he goes, I mean, roadmaps. I go, first of all, he's not going to talk about the roadmaps, but what can you share? I mean, obviously the edge is key. Outpost has been all in the news. You obviously at CloudOps is not a boundary. It's a distributed network. What's your response to-- >> Well, the funny thing is we don't generally have technology roadmaps inside the company. The roadmap is always listen really well to customers not just where they are, but the customers are just so great at saying, this is where we'd like to go. And when we hear edge, the customers don't generally come to us and say edge, they say we need as low latency as possible between where the action happens within our factory floors and our own offices and where we might be able to compute, analyze, store make decisions. And so that's resulted in things like outposts where we can put outposts in their own data center or their own field office, wavelength, where we're working with 5G telecom providers to put computing storage in the carrier hubs of the various 5G providers. Again, with reducing latency, we've been doing things like local zones, where we put zones in an increasing number of cities across the country with the goal of just reducing the average latency between the vast majority of customers and AWS resources. So instead of thinking edge, we really think in terms of how do we make sure that our customers can realize their dreams. >> Staying on the flywheel that AWS has built on ship stuff faster, make things faster, smaller, cheaper, great mission. I want to ask you about the working backwards document. I know it's been getting a lot of public awareness. I've been, that's all I've learned in interviewing Amazon folks. They always work backwards. I always mentioned the customer and all the interviews. So you've got a couple of customer references in there check the box there for you. But working backwards has become kind of a guiding principles, almost like a Harvard Business School case study approach to management. As you guys look at this working backwards and ex Amazonians have written books about it now so people can go look at, it's a really good methodology. Take us back to how you guys work back from the customers because here we're featuring 10 startups. So companies that are out there and Andy has been preaching this to customers. You should think about working backwards because it's so fast. These companies are going into this enterprise market your ecosystem of startups to provide value. What things are you seeing that customers need to think about to work backwards from their customer? How do you see that? 'Cause you've been on the community side, you see the tech side customers have to move fast and work backwards. What are the things that they need to focus on? What's your observation? >> So there's actually a brand new book called "Working Backwards," which I actually learned a lot about our own company from simply reading the book. And I think to me, a principal part of learning backward it's really about humility and being able to be a great listener. So you don't walk into a customer meeting ready to just broadcast the latest and greatest that we've been working on. You walk in and say, I'm here from AWS and I simply want to learn more about who you are, what you're doing. And most importantly, what do you want to do that we're not able to help you with right now? And then once we hear those kinds of things we don't simply write down kind of a bullet item of AWS needs to improve. It's this very active listening process. Tell me a little bit more about this challenge and if we solve it in this way or this way which one's a better fit for your needs. And then a typical AWS launch, we might talk to between 50 and 100 customers in depth to make sure that we have that detailed understanding of what they would like to do. We can't always meet all the needs of these customers but the idea is let's see what is the common base that we can address first. And then once we get that first iteration out there, let's keep listening, let's keep making it better and better and better as quickly. >> A lot of people might poopoo that John but I got to tell you, John, you will remember this the first time we ever met Andy Jassy face-to-face. I was in the room, you were on the speaker phone. We were building an app on AWS at the time. And he was asking you John, for feedback. And he was probing and he pulled out his notebook. He was writing down and he wasn't just superficial questions. He was like, well, why'd you do it that way? And he really wanted to dig. So this is cultural. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the classic Amazon. And that's the best thing about it is that you can go from zero startups zero stage startup to traction. And that was the premise of the cloud. Jeff, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on this love to get your opinion. You've seen this grow from the beginning. And I remember 'cause I've been playing with AWS since the beginning as well. And it says as an entrepreneur I remember my first EC2 instance that didn't even have custom domain support. It was the long URL. You seen the startups and now that we've been 15 years in, you see Dropbox was it just a startup back in the day. I remember these startups that when they were coming they were all born on Amazon, right? These big now unicorns, you were there when these guys were just developers and these gals. So what's it like, I mean, you see just the growth like here's a couple of people with them ideas rubbing nickels together, making magic happen who knows what's going to turn into, you've been there. What's it been like? >> It's been a really unique journey. And to me like the privilege of a lifetime, honestly I've like, you always want to be part of something amazing and you aspire to it and you study hard and you work hard and you always think, okay, somewhere in this universe something really cool is about to happen. And if you're really, really lucky and just a million great pieces of luck like lineup in series, sometimes it actually all works out and you get to be part of something like this when it does you don't always fully appreciate just how awesome it is from the inside, because you're just there just like feeding the machine and you are just doing your job just as fast as you possibly can. And in my case, it was listening to teams and writing blog posts about their launches and sharing them on social media, going out and speaking, you do it, you do it as quickly as possible. You're kind of running your whole life as you're doing that as well. And suddenly you just take a little step back and say, wow we did this kind of amazing thing, but we don't tend to like relax and say, okay, we've done it at Amazon. We get to a certain point. We recognize it. And five minutes later, we're like, okay, let's do the next amazingly good thing. But it's been this just unique privilege and something that I never thought I'd be fortunate enough to be a part of. >> Well, then the last few minutes we have Jeff I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us for this inaugural launch of theCUBE on cloud startup showcase. We are showcasing 10 startups here from your ecosystem. And a lot of people who know AWS for the folks that don't you guys pride yourself on community and ecosystem the global startups program that Jeremy and his team are running. You guys nurture these startups. You want them to be successful. They're vectoring out into the marketplace with growth strategy, helping customers. What's your take on this ecosystem? As customers are out there listening to this what's your advice to them? How should they engage? Why is these sets of start-ups so important? >> Well, I totally love startups and I've spent time in several startups. I've spent other time consulting with them. And I think we're in this incredible time now wheres, it's so easy and straightforward to get those basic resources, to get your compute, to get your storage, to get your databases, to get your machine learning and to take that and to really focus on your customers and to build what you want. And we see this actual exponential growth. And we see these startups that find something to do. They listen to one of their customers, they build that solution. And they're just that feedback cycle gets started. It's really incredible. And I love to see the energy of these startups. I love to hear from them. And at any point if we've got an AWS powered startup and they build something awesome and want to share it with me, I'm all ears. I love to hear about them. Emails, Twitter mentions, whatever I'll just love to hear about all this energy all those great success with our startups. >> Jeff Barr, thank you for coming on. And congratulations, please pass on to Andy Jassy who's going to take over for Jeff Bezos and I saw the big news that he's picking a successor an Amazonian coming back into the fold, Adam. So congratulations on that. >> I will definitely pass on your congratulations to Andy and I worked with Adam in the past when AWS was just getting started and really looking forward to seeing him again, welcoming back and working with him. >> All right, Jeff Barr with AWS guys check out his Twitter and all the social coordinates. He is pumping out all the resources you need to know about if you're a developer or you're an enterprise looking to go to the next level, next generation, modern infrastructure. Thanks Jeff for coming on. Really appreciate it. Our next guests want to bring up stage Michael Liebow from McKinsey cube alumni, who is a great guest who is very timely in his McKinsey role with a paper he and his colleagues put out called cloud's trillion dollar prize up for grabs. Michael, thank you for coming up on stage with Dave and I. >> Hey, great to be here, John. Thank you. >> One of the things I loved about this and why I wanted you to come on was not only is the report awesome. And Dave has got a zillion questions, he want us to drill into. But in 2015, we wrote a story called Andy Jassy trillion dollar baby on Forbes, and then on medium and silken angle where we were the first ones to profile Andy Jassy and talk about this trillion dollar term. And Dave came up with the calculation and people thought we were crazy. What are you talking about trillion dollar opportunity. That was in 2015. You guys have put this together with a serious research report with methodology and you left a lot on the table. I noticed in the report you didn't even have a whole section quantified. So I think just scratching the surface trillion. I'd be a little light, Dave, so let's dig into it, Michael thanks for coming on. >> Well, and I got to say, Michael that John's a trillion dollar baby was revenue. Yours is EBITDA. So we're talking about seven to X, seven to eight X. What we were talking back then, but great job on the report. Fantastic work. >> Thank you. >> So tell us about the report gives a quick lowdown. I got some questions. You guys are unlocking the value drivers but give us a quick overview of this report that people can get for free. So everyone who's registered will get a copy but give us a quick rundown. >> Great. Well the question I think that has bothered all of us for a long time is what's the business value of cloud and how do you quantify it? How do you specify it? Because a lot of people talk around the infrastructure or technical value of cloud but that actually is a big problem because it just scratches the surface of the potential of what cloud can mean. And we focus around the fortune 500. So we had to box us in somewhat. And so focusing on the fortune 500 and fast forwarding to 2030, we put out this number that there's over a trillion dollars worth of value. And we did a lot of analysis using research from a variety of partners, using third-party research, primary research in order to come up with this view. So the business value is two X the technical value of cloud. And as you just pointed out, there is a whole unlock of additional value where organizations can pioneer on some of the newest technologies. And so AWS and others are creating platforms in order to do not just machine learning and analytics and IOT, but also for quantum or mixed reality for blockchain. And so organizations specific around the fortune 500 that aren't leveraging these capabilities today are going to get left behind. And that's the message we were trying to deliver that if you're not doing this and doing this with purpose and with great execution, that others, whether it's others in your industry or upstarts who were motioning into your industry, because as you say cloud democratizes compute, it provides these capabilities and small companies with talent. And that's what the skills can leverage these capabilities ahead of slow moving incumbents. And I think that was the critical component. So that gives you the framework. We can deep dive based on your questions. >> Well before we get into the deep dive, I want to ask you we have startups being showcased here as part of the, it will showcase, they're coming out of the ecosystem. They have a lot of certification from Amazon and they're secure, which is a big issue. Enterprises that you guys talk to McKinsey speaks directly to I call the boardroom CXOs, the top executives. Are they realizing that the scale and timing of this agility window? I mean, you want to go through these key areas that you would break out but as startups become more relevant the boardrooms that are making these big decisions realize that their businesses are up for grabs. Do they realize that all this wealth is shifting? And do they see the role of startups helping them? How did you guys come out of them and report on that piece? >> Well in terms of the whole notion, we came up with this framework which looked at the opportunity. We talked about it in terms of three dimensions, rejuvenate, innovate and pioneer. And so from the standpoint of a board they're more than focused on not just efficiency and cost reduction basically tied to nation, but innovation tied to analytics tied to machine learning, tied to IOT, tied to two key attributes of cloud speed and scale. And one of the things that we did in the paper was leverage case examples from across industry, across-region there's 17 different case examples. My three favorite is one is Moderna. So software for life couldn't have delivered the vaccine as fast as they did without cloud. My second example was Goldman Sachs got into consumer banking is the platform behind the Apple card couldn't have done it without leveraging cloud. And the third example, particularly in early days of the pandemic was Zoom that added five to 6,000 servers a night in order to scale to meet the demand. And so all three of those examples, plus the other 14 just indicate in business terms what the potential is and to convince boards and the C-suite that if you're not doing this, and we have some recommendations in terms of what CEOs should do in order to leverage this but to really take advantage of those capabilities. >> Michael, I think it's important to point out the approach at sometimes it gets a little wonky on the methodology but having done a lot of these types of studies and observed there's a lot of superficial studies out there, a lot of times people will do, they'll go I'll talk to a customer. What kind of ROI did you get? And boom, that's the value study. You took a different approach. You have benchmark data, you talked to a lot of companies. You obviously have a lot of financial data. You use some third-party data, you built models, you bounded it. And ultimately when you do these things you have to ascribe a value contribution to the cloud component because fortunate 500 companies are going to grow even if there were no cloud. And the way you did that is again, you talk to people you model things, and it's a very detailed study. And I think it's worth pointing out that this was not just hey what'd you get from going to cloud before and after. This was a very detailed deep dive with really a lot of good background work going into it. >> Yeah, we're very fortunate to have the McKinsey Global Institute which has done extensive studies in these areas. So there was a base of knowledge that we could leverage. In fact, we looked at over 700 use cases across 19 industries in order to unpack the value that cloud contributed to those use cases. And so getting down to that level of specificity really, I think helps build it from the bottom up and then using cloud measures or KPIs that indicate the value like how much faster you can deploy, how much faster you can develop. So these are things that help to kind of inform the overall model. >> Yeah. Again, having done hundreds, if not thousands of these types of things, when you start talking to people the patterns emerge, I want to ask you there's an exhibit tool in here, which is right on those use cases, retail, healthcare, high-tech oil and gas banking, and a lot of examples. And I went through them all and virtually every single one of them from a value contribution standpoint the unlocking value came down to data large data sets, document analysis, converting sentiment analysis, analytics. I mean, it really does come down to the data. And I wonder if you could comment on that and why is it that cloud is enabled that? >> Well, it goes back to scale. And I think the word that I would use would be data gravity because we're talking about massive amounts of data. So as you go through those kind of three dimensions in terms of rejuvenation one of the things you can do as you optimize and clarify and build better resiliency the thing that comes into play I think is to have clean data and data that's available in multiple places that you can create an underlying platform in order to leverage the services, the capabilities around, building out that structure. >> And then if I may, so you had this again I want to stress as EBITDA. It's not a revenue and it's the EBITDA potential as a result of leveraging cloud. And you listed a number of industries. And I wonder if you could comment on the patterns that you saw. I mean, it doesn't seem to be as simple as Negroponte bits versus Adam's in terms of your ability to unlock value. What are the patterns that you saw there and why are the ones that have so much potential why are they at the top of the list? >> Well, I mean, they're ranked based on impact. So the five greatest industries and again, aligned by the fortune 500. So it's interesting when you start to unpack it that way high-tech oil, gas, retail, healthcare, insurance and banking, right? Top. And so we did look at the different solutions that were in that, tried to decipher what was fully unlocked by cloud, what was accelerated by cloud and what was perhaps in this timeframe remaining on premise. And so we kind of step by step, expert by expert, use case by use case deciphered of the 700, how that applied. >> So how should practitioners within organizations business but how should they use this data? What would you recommend, in terms of how they think about it, how they apply it to their business, how they communicate? >> Well, I think clearly what came out was a set of best practices for what organizations that were leveraging cloud and getting the kind of business return, three things stood out, execution, experience and excellence. And so for under execution it's not just the transaction, you're not just buying cloud you're changing their operating model. And so if the organization isn't kind of retooling the model, the processes, the workflows in order to support creating the roles then they aren't going to be able, they aren't going to be successful. In terms of experience, that's all about hands-on. And so you have to dive in, you have to start you have to apply yourself, you have to gain that applied knowledge. And so if you're not gaining that experience, you're not going to move forward. And then in terms of excellence, and it was mentioned earlier by Jeff re-skilling, up-skilling, if you're not committed to your workforce and pushing certification, pushing training in order to really evolve your workforce or your ways of working you're not going to leverage cloud. So those three best practices really came up on top in terms of what a mature cloud adopter looks like. >> That's awesome. Michael, thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. Last question I have for you as we wrap up this trillion dollar segment upon intended is the cloud mindset. You mentioned partnering and scaling up. The role of the enterprise and business is to partner with the technologists, not just the technologies but the companies talk about this cloud native mindset because it's not just lift and shift and run apps. And I have an IT optimization issue. It's about innovating next gen solutions and you're seeing it in public sector. You're seeing it in the commercial sector, all areas where the relationship with partners and companies and startups in particular, this is the startup showcase. These are startups are more relevant than ever as the tide is shifting to a new generation of companies. >> Yeah, so a lot of think about an engine. A lot of things have to work in order to produce the kind of results that we're talking about. Brad, you're more than fair share or unfair share of trillion dollars. And so CEOs need to lead this in bold fashion. Number one, they need to craft the moonshot or the Marshot. They have to set that goal, that aspiration. And it has to be a stretch goal for the organization because cloud is the only way to enable that achievement of that aspiration that's number one, number two, they really need a hardheaded economic case. It has to be defined in terms of what the expectation is going to be. So it's not loose. It's very, very well and defined. And in some respects time box what can we do here? I would say the cloud data, your organization has to move in an agile fashion training DevOps, and the fourth thing, and this is where the startups come in is the cloud platform. There has to be an underlying platform that supports those aspirations. It's an art, it's not just an architecture. It's a living, breathing live service with integrations, with standardization, with self service that enables this whole program. >> Awesome, Michael, thank you for coming on and sharing the McKinsey perspective. The report, the clouds trillion dollar prize is up for grabs. Everyone who's registered for this event will get a copy. We will appreciate it's also on the website. We'll make sure everyone gets a copy. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thanks, Michael. >> Okay, Dave, big discussion there. Trillion dollar baby. That's the cloud. That's Jassy. Now he's going to be the CEO of AWS. They have a new CEO they announced. So that's going to be good for Amazon's kind of got clarity on the succession to Jassy, trusted soldier. The ecosystem is big for Amazon. Unlike Microsoft, they have the different view, right? They have some apps, but they're cultivating as many startups and enterprises as possible in the cloud. And no better reason to change gears here and get a venture capitalist in here. And a friend of theCUBE, Jerry Chen let's bring them up on stage. Jerry Chen, great to see you partner at Greylock making all the big investments. Good to see you >> John hey, Dave it's great to be here with you guys. Happy marks.Can you see that? >> Hey Jerry, good to see you man >> So Jerry, our first inaugural AWS startup showcase we'll be doing these quarterly and we're going to be featuring the best of the best, you're investing in all the hot startups. We've been tracking your careers from the beginning. You're a good friend of theCUBE. Always got great commentary. Why are startups more important than ever before? Because in the old days we've talked about theCUBE before startups had to go through certain certifications and you've got tire kicking, you got to go through IT. It's like going through security at the airport, take your shoes off, put your belt on thing. I mean, all kinds of things now different. The world has changed. What's your take? >> I think startups have always been a great way for experimentation, right? It's either new technologies, new business models, new markets they can move faster, the experiment, and a lot of startups don't work, unfortunately, but a lot of them turned to be multi-billion dollar companies. I thing startup is more important because as we come out COVID and economy is recovery is a great way for individuals, engineers, for companies for different markets to try different things out. And I think startups are running multiple experiments at the same time across the globe trying to figure how to do things better, faster, cheaper. >> And McKinsey points out this use case of rejuvenate, which is essentially retool pivot essentially get your costs down or and the next innovation here where there's Tam there's trillion dollars on unlock value and where the bulk of it is is the innovation, the new use cases and existing new use cases. This is where the enterprises really have an opportunity. Could you share your thoughts as you invest in the startups to attack these new waves these new areas where it may not look the same as before, what's your assessment of this kind of innovation, these new use cases? >> I think we talked last time about kind of changing the COVID the past year and there's been acceleration of things like how we work, education, medicine all these things are going online. So I think that's very clear. The first wave of innovation is like, hey things we didn't think we could be possible, like working remotely, e-commerce everywhere, telemedicine, tele-education, that's happening. I think the second order of fact now is okay as enterprises realize that this is the new reality everything is digital, everything is in the cloud and everything's going to be more kind of electronic relation with the customers. I think that we're rethinking what does it mean to be a business? What does it mean to be a bank? What does it mean to be a car company or an energy company? What does it mean to be a retailer? Right? So I think the rethinking that brands are now global, brands are all online. And they now have relationships with the customers directly. So I think if you are a business now, you have to re experiment or rethink about your business model. If you thought you were a Nike selling shoes to the retailers, like half of Nike's revenue is now digital right all online. So instead of selling sneakers through stores they're now a direct to consumer brand. And so I think every business is going to rethink about what the AR. Airbnb is like are they in the travel business or the experience business, right? Airlines, what business are they in? >> Yeah, theCUBE we're direct to consumer virtual totally opened up our business model. Dave, the cloud premise is interesting now. I mean, let's reset this where we are, right? Andy Jassy always talks about the old guard, new guard. Okay we've been there done that, even though they still have a lot of Oracle inside AWS which we were joking the other day, but this new modern era coming out of COVID Jerry brings this up. These startups are going to be relevant take territory down in the enterprises as new things develop. What's your premise of the cloud and AWS prospect? >> Well, so Jerry, I want to to ask you. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> The other night, last Thursday, I think we were in Clubhouse. Ben Horowitz was on and Martine Casado was laying out this sort of premise about cloud startups saying basically at some point they're going to have to repatriate because of the Amazon VIG. I mean, I'm paraphrasing and I guess the premise was that there's this variable cost that grows as you scale but I kind of shook my head and I went back. You saw, I put it out on Twitter a clip that we had the a couple of years ago and I don't think, I certainly didn't see it that way. Maybe I'm getting it wrong but what's your take on that? I just don't see a snowflake ever saying, okay we're going to go build our own data center or we're going to repatriate 'cause they're going to end up like service now and have this high cost infrastructure. What do you think? >> Yeah, look, I think Martin is an old friend from VMware and he's brilliant. He has placed a lot of insights. There is some insights around, at some point a scale, use of startup can probably run things more cost-effectively in your own data center, right? But I think that's fewer companies more the vast majority, right? At some point, but number two, to your point, Dave going on premise versus your own data center are two different things. So on premise in a customer's environment versus your own data center are two different worlds. So at some point some scale, a lot of the large SaaS companies run their own data centers that makes sense, Facebook and Google they're at scale, they run their own data centers, going on premise or customer's environment like a fortune 100 bank or something like that. That's a different story. There are reasons to do that around compliance or data gravity, Dave, but Amazon's costs, I don't think is a legitimate reason. Like if price is an issue that could be solved much faster than architectural decisions or tech stacks, right? Once you're on the cloud I think the thesis, the conversation we had like a year ago was the way you build apps are very different in the cloud and the way built apps on premise, right? You have assume storage, networking and compute elasticity that's independent each other. You don't really get that in a customer's data center or their own environment even with all the new technologies. So you can't really go from cloud back to on-premise because the way you build your apps look very, very different. So I would say for sure at some scale run your own data center that's why the hyperscale guys do that. On-premise for customers, data gravity, compliance governance, great reasons to go on premise but for vast majority of startups and vast majority of customers, the network effects you get for being in the cloud, the network effects you get from having everything in this alas cloud service I think outweighs any of the costs. >> I couldn't agree more and that's where the data is, at the way I look at it is your technology spend is going to be some percentage of revenue and it's going to be generally flat over time and you're going to have to manage it whether it's in the cloud or it's on prem John. >> Yeah, we had a quote on theCUBE on the conscious that had Jerry I want to get your reaction to this. The executive said, if you don't have an AI strategy built into your value proposition you will be shorted as a stock on wall street. And I even went further. So you'll probably be delisted cause you won't be performing with a tongue in cheek comment. But the reality is that that's indicating that everyone has to have AI in their thing. Mainly as a reality, what's your take on that? I know you've got a lot of investments in this area as AI becomes beyond fashion and becomes table stakes. Where are we on that spectrum? And how does that impact business and society as that becomes a key part of the stack and application stack? >> Yeah, I think John you've seen AI machine learning turn out to be some kind of novelty thing that a bunch of CS professors working on years ago to a funnel piece of every application. So I would say the statement of the sentiment's directionally correct that 20 years ago if you didn't have a web strategy or a website as a company, your company be sure it, right? If you didn't have kind of a internet website, you weren't real company. Likewise, if you don't use AI now to power your applications or machine learning in some form or fashion for sure you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to everyone else. And just like if you're not using software intelligently or the cloud intelligently your stock as a company is going to underperform the rest of the market. And the cloud guys on the startups that we're backing are making AI so accessible and so easy for developers today that it's really easy to use some level of machine learning, any applications, if you're not doing that it's like not having a website in 1999. >> Yeah. So let's get into that whole operation side. So what would you be your advice to the enterprises that are watching and people who are making decisions on architecture and how they roll out their business model or value proposition? How should they look at AI and operations? I mean big theme is day two operations. You've got IT service management, all these things are being disrupted. What's the operational impact to this? What's your view on that? >> So I think two things, one thing that you and Dave both talked about operation is the key, I mean, operations is not just the guts of the business but the actual people running the business, right? And so we forget that one of the values are going to cloud, one of the values of giving these services is you not only have a different technology stack, all the bits, you have a different human stack meaning the people running your cloud, running your data center are now effectively outsource to Amazon, Google or Azure, right? Which I think a big part of the Amazon VIG as Dave said, is so eloquently on Twitter per se, right? You're really paying for those folks like carry pagers. Now take that to the next level. Operations is human beings, people intelligently trying to figure out how my business can run better, right? And that's either accelerate revenue or decrease costs, improve my margin. So if you want to use machine learning, I would say there's two areas to think about. One is how I think about customers, right? So we both talked about the amount of data being generated around enterprise individuals. So intelligently use machine learning how to serve my customers better, then number two AI and machine learning internally how to run my business better, right? Can I take cost out? Can I optimize supply chain? Can I use my warehouses more efficiently my logistics more efficiently? So one is how do I use AI learning to be a more familiar more customer oriented and number two, how can I take cost out be more efficient as a company, by writing AI internally from finance ops, et cetera. >> So, Jerry, I wonder if I could ask you a little different subject but a question on tactical valuations how coupled or decoupled are private company valuations from the public markets. You're seeing the public markets everybody's freaking out 'cause interest rates are going to go up. So the future value of cash flows are lower. Does that trickle in quickly into the private markets? Or is it a whole different dynamic? >> If I could weigh in poly for some private markets Dave I would have a different job than I do today. I think the reality is in the long run it doesn't matter as much as long as you're investing early. Now that's an easy answer say, boats have to fall away. Yes, interest rates will probably go up because they're hard to go lower, right? They're effectively almost zero to negative right now in most of the developed world, but at the end of the day, I'm not going to trade my Twilio shares or Salesforce shares for like a 1% yield bond, right? I'm going to hold the high growth tech stocks because regardless of what interest rates you're giving me 1%, 2%, 3%, I'm still going to beat that with a top tech performers, Snowflake, Twilio Hashi Corp, bunch of the private companies out there I think are elastic. They're going to have a great 10, 15 year run. And in the Greylock portfolio like the things we're investing in, I'm super bullish on from Roxanne to Kronos fear, to true era in the AI space. I think in the long run, next 10 years these things will outperform the market that said, right valuation prices have gone up and down and they will in our careers, they have. In the careers we've been covering tech. So I do believe that they're high now they'll come down for sure. Will they go back up again? Definitely, right? But as long as you're betting these macro waves I think we're all be good. >> Great answer as usual. Would you trade them for NFTs Jerry? >> That $69 million people piece of artwork look, I mean, I'm a longterm believer in kind of IP and property rights in the blockchain, right? And I'm waiting for theCUBE to mint this video as the NFT, when we do this guys, we'll mint this video's NFT and see how much people pay for the original Dave, John, Jerry (mumbles). >> Hey, you know what? We can probably get some good bang for that. Hey it's all about this next Jerry. Jerry, great to have you on, final question as we got this one minute left what's your advice to the people out there that either engaging with these innovative startups, we're going to feature startups every quarter from the in the Amazon ecosystem, they are going to be adding value. What's the advice to the enterprises that are engaging startups, the approach, posture, what's your advice. >> Yeah, when I talk to CIOs and large enterprises, they often are wary like, hey, when do I engage a startup? How, what businesses, and is it risky or low risk? Now I say, just like any career managing, just like any investment you're making in a big, small company you should have a budget or set of projects. And then I want to say to a CIO, Hey, every priority on your wish list, go use the startup, right? I mean, that would be 10 for 10 projects, 10 startups. Probably too much risk for a lot of tech companies. But we would say to most CIOs and executives, look, there are strategic initiatives in your business that you want to accelerate. And I would take the time to invest in one or two startups each quarter selectively, right? Use the time, focus on fewer startups, go deep with them because we can actually be game changers in terms of inflecting your business. And what I mean by that is don't pick too many startups because you can't devote the time, but don't pick zero startups because you're going to be left behind, right? It'd be shorted as a stock by the John, Dave and Jerry hedge fund apparently but pick a handful of startups in your strategic areas, in your top tier three things. These really, these could be accelerators for your career. >> I have to ask you real quick while you're here. We've got a couple minutes left on startups that are building apps. I've seen DevOps and the infrastructure as code movement has gone full mainstream. That's really what we're living right now. That kind of first-generation commercialization of DevOps. Now DevSecOps, what are the trends that you've seen that's different from say a couple of years ago now that we're in COVID around how apps are being built? Is it security? Is it the data integration? What can you share as a key app stack impact (mumbles)? >> Yeah, I think there're two things one is security is always been a top priority. I think that was the only going forward period, right? Security for sure. That's why you said that DevOps, DevSecOps like security is often overlooked but I think increasingly could be more important. The second thing is I think we talked about Dave mentioned earlier just the data around customers, the data on premise or the cloud, and there's a ton of data out there. We keep saying this over and over again like data's new oil, et cetera. It's evolving and not changing because the way we're using data finding data is changing in terms of sources of data we're using and discovering and also speed of data, right? In terms of going from Basser real-time is changing. The speed of business has changed to go faster. So I think these are all things that we're thinking about. So both security and how you use your data faster and better. >> Yeah you were in theCUBE a number of years ago and I remember either John or I asked you about you think Amazon is going to go up the stack and start developing applications and your answer was you know what I think no, I think they're going to enable a new set of disruptors to come in and disrupt the SaaS world. And I think that's largely playing out. And one of the interesting things about Adam Selipsky appointment to the CEO, he comes from Tableau. He really helped Tableau go from that sort of old guard model to an ARR model obviously executed a great exit to Salesforce. And now I see companies like Salesforce and service now and Workday is potential for your scenario to really play out. They've got in my view anyway, outdated pricing models. You look at what's how Snowflake's pricing and the consumption basis, same with Datadog same with Stripe and new startups seem to really be a leading into the consumption-based pricing model. So how do you, what are your thoughts on that? And maybe thoughts on Adam and thoughts on SaaS disruption? >> I think my thesis still holds that. I don't think Selipsky Adam is going to go into the app space aggressively. I think Amazon wants to enable next generation apps and seeing some of the new service that they're doing is they're kind of deconstructing apps, right? They're deconstructing the parts of CRM or e-commerce and they're offering them as services. So I think you're going to see Amazon continue to say, hey we're the core parts of an app like payments or custom prediction or some machine learning things around applications you want to buy bacon, they're going to turn those things to the API and sell those services, right? So you look at things like Stripe, Twilio which are two of the biggest companies out there. They're not apps themselves, they're the components of the app, right? Either e-commerce or messaging communications. So I can see Amazon going down that path. I think Adam is a great choice, right? He was a longterm early AWS exact from the early days latent to your point Dave really helped take Tableau into kind of a cloud business acquired by Salesforce work there for a few years under Benioff the guy who created quote unquote cloud and now him coming home again and back to Amazon. So I think it'll be exciting to see how Adam runs the business. >> And John I think he's the perfect choice because he's got operations chops and he knows how to... He can help the startups disrupt. >> Yeah, and he's been a trusted soldier of Jassy from the beginning, he knows the DNA. He's got some CEO outside experience. I think that was the key he knows. And he's not going to give up Amazon speed, but this is baby, right? So he's got him in charge and he's a trusted lieutenant. >> You think. Yeah, you think he's going to hold the mic? >> Yeah. We got to go. Jerry Chen thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on our inaugural cube on cloud AWS startup event. Now for the 10 startups, enjoy the sessions at 12:30 Pacific, we're going to have the closing keynote. I'm John Ferry for Dave Vellante and our special guests, thanks for watching and enjoy the rest of the day and the 10 startups. (upbeat music)

(speaks in foreign language) >> Narrator: Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent, and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. >> Welcome to Thought Leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis, and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today, we're going to hear from experienced leaders, who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital-first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, Chief Data Strategy Officer for ThoughtSpot is Cindi Hausen. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of Successful Business Intelligence Unlock The Value of BI and Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair. Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I am well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today? (gentle music) >> Thanks, Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our, you know, sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting way more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time, and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, and generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know, we are living through these difficult times, we want an event to be, this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is, how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, change is sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping. You know, it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step. You know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, in most businesses it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to to, first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, "You know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the skills." Sometimes they may feel that, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, there are people in the company, who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is this silo of people with the answers and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap. These sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all I know the business needs, and the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is. You may need to bring some external stimuli to start that domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we have brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading her bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patents, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, you know, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age, where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides with a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle. I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle. It's over to you. (gentle music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. This is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So, I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights, data and of course, as you said, leadership. First, a little bit about myself, a little background. As I said, I always wanted to play football and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent and in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the athletic department, so I'm testament. Till you can start, a journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football, you know this is a really big rivalry, and when you choose sides your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL, he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight. From Universal Studios, Disney, to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job, I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with a team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often, I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests or customers. But today, I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment, is execution. Precise, repeatable execution and most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that. Assembling teams to execute these plans and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions, at the right time and based upon data. So that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves, and it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kind of world class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney. In '90s I was at Disney leading a project called Destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool and then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today. Like the MagicBand, Disney's Magical Express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data, more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately, leading to moving into IT and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s, I was at Universal Studio's theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wand shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything, from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contact tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data actually enabling your business. Without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First, RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone, all-in-one solution in the cloud and Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is The Result in Knowing. I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First, just hit on it, is change. how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First, let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it. And thankfully, for the most part, knock on wood, we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, The 2020 Draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage, to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately, to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements and we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time, being in the live broadcast event space. Talking about bungee jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky, but it ended up being also rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at its level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact. Those with the best stats usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats. Since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little... This year is our 101st year and athlete's ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured and I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently. And how fast do you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to the next level. It's powered by Amazon Web Services and we gather this data, real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course, it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns, speed, match-ups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about, for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know, more than 10 years ago agile practices began sweeping companies. Where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change and we've seen it through this pandemic, is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties, so influence and collaboration, and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL an even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses, 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies, that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-oppetition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units, who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with, first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an a line person. >> Well, then I can't do my job without you. >> Great and I'm getting the feeling now, you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take him to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> Oh that sounds good, I'll watch your watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders, when you're trying to prioritize the different voices you have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there are so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission and if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together. You sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known and when anything challenges that, we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent and that means listening to every single stakeholder. Even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic, and having a mission, and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling, so thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. >> (gentle music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, "This is going to be catastrophic," and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again. This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with and this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, is it really two sides of the same coin? Real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "You know, Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin, one reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting, largely parametrized reports, on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports. At best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change, complacency. And sometimes that complacency, it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, "No, we're measured on least to serve." So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm, so data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with the leader, a data and analytics leader, what does their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI driven insights, not on-premises but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place but it's in a data lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is via newer methods, whether it's Slack or Teams, allowing for that real-time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals. Whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers, it's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, "Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that." There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, to fail fast and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact, what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard Business Review partnered with us to develop this study to say, "Just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years, why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor." 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises and state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state-of-the-art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics. At ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics, and this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point, oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately. But you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lock-step with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non-analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years. Now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization but I would also say, equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful, if you look at products like Power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure Synapse, or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in-memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter-operate. The pace of change, its acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple of years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture and if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT Score that I worked on or the Data Warehousing Institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders. You have told me now culture is absolutely so important, and so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data. It said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross-selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture and they're trying to fix this, but even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples. Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers and even though the U.S. Federal Government said, "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, They said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions. Bring in a change agent, identify the relevance or I like to call it WIIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Digital Officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe you have the CDO of Just Eat, a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in, disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM What's In It For Me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So, if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers you ask them about data. They'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIIFM and sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then embed these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next, I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro Chief Data Officer of Western Union and before joining Western Union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (gentle music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and the technology teams into the future? As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms, and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that. As part of that partnership and it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at, how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go onto Bing or you go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us is the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone, or an engineer to go pull information or pull data. We actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that they actually need it, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on a journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, our... The local environments and as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and to GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So a big portion of it though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together, to really help to drive these holistic end-to-end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what decisions need to be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization and as part of that, it really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, Especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both in my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes, both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what do our customers want, what do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform, and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support your current business lines, but how do you actually use your information and your data to actually better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth. And really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom, that was great. Thanks so much and now going to have to drag on you for a second. As a change agent you've come in, disrupted and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but there have been some great opportunities to integrate changes and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now, I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric but even going back to Sam's Clubs. Gustavo, welcome. (gentle music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is, you know, a high reward situation. I have been part of many transformations and I have led many transformations. And, what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so, in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started, barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI and also, how you communicate. Especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so, how do we get started? So, I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand, not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very in tune what is happening in society socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example and for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. But I do it thinking about the mission of, how do I make change for the bigger workforce or the bigger good despite the fact that this might have perhaps implication for my own self interest in my career. Right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seen, politically speaking, but are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think we're they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is, I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past and what they show is that, if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act, cultural issues, politics and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a deadline to say, "Hey, in two years we're going to make this happen. What do we need to do, to empower and enable these change agents to make it happen? You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So, I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I've been doing transformations, most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset and what that means is that, we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful. What worked in the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders, who have a digital mindset and they're up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going in a way that is super-fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI. It's very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went on implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions or the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, the opportunity here is that you need to redefine what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same user experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept and so we need to think about, how do we gain that user experience with these augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes, and technology to enable that. And finally and obviously with COVID, a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest on growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent and your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard but it's not efficient and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there and just to put in terms of perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously, this is going to vary by organization maturity, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with and I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level. But in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or a tag price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to having perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flawed data. By using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CHRO, CEO, "Are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure?" If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is, I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously and love modeling, and, you know, data and optimization theory, and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value and in this case, for example, for Schneider. There was this tagline, make the most of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that, I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically, how to bring in the right leaders because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress, you know. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution. And finally, you need to make it super-simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal. It was actually launched in July of this year and we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many, many factors but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know. You're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tableu to other tools like, you know, ThoughtSpot. You need to really explain them what is the difference and how this tool can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit but in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal. Going back to Cindi's points, that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to this stage and like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, initiating culture so people can understand, why you truly need to invest on augmented analytics. And so, what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know, a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics. Hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week for employee to save on average. User experience, our ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings, a user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations things and the users. In HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize, this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent, you need to have courage to make this decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these great resource for this organization and that give me the confident to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it's just to say, thank you for everybody who has belief, obviously in our vision, everybody who has belief in, you know, the work that we were trying to do and to make the life of our, you know, workforce or customers and community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, work with mentors, work with people in the industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of transformation. It's not easy to do, it's high effort, but it's well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon. Take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (light music) Now I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. Now one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations. And you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. Now as as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID has broken everything and it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you. If I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader, what do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long-lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I said, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I've been doing it for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing of the areas across not only a specific business. As you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club, Walmart retail. I've been in energy management, technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to just continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do, is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations, that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions, organizations, and do the change management, the essential mindset that's required for this kind of effort. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring and Cindi you love data and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can, you know, add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine and it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking, is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data, and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are, finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important and as Michelle said, more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom, I want to go to you. So, I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses is in some way, shape, or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth, actually, in our digital business over the last 12 months really, even acceleration, right, once COVID hit. We really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers in today, that there's been a huge need, right, to send money to support family, to support friends, and to support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very honored to be able to support those customers that, across all the centers today, but as part of the acceleration, we need to make sure that we have the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because during these times, during this pandemic, right, this is the most important time and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And doing that some of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really our products and our services come into play that, you know, and really support those families. So, it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo. Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that it was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you're pushing your people too hard? Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, "Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right, it forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension or you need to be okay, you know, debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand and you are seeing that, "Hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal. The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We can not just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about Utah, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? >> Yeah, you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, this is what I tell my team, is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. Meaning that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan and to align and to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So it's part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right? It's how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which was pre-COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, not my watch or for whatever, variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that, you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well first off, Tom, just freaked me out. What do you mean, this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable and now I think it's, you know what, you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So, if you really want to survive, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable. The power and politics are going to happen, break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where Sudheesh is going to go bungee jumping. (all chuckling) >> Guys, fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really, virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things. Whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise-wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service. You know, sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament results. You know, what does that mean? Getting it right. Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization, data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. Thank you, theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I heard from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it, she said it really well. That is be brave and drive, don't go for a drive alone. That is such an important point. Often times, you know the right thing that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen, but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding, the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voice is heard and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes. The importance of building the quorum, and that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time in a matter of months. If they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway, that is I would like you to go to ThoughtSpot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to ThoughtSpot.com/beyond. Our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us, it's, again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we have been working to release, something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond. Thank you, thank you so much.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of BizOps Manifesto Unveiled, brought to you by BizOps Coalition. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE for our ongoing coverage of the big unveil. It's the BizOps Manifesto Unveil and we're going to start that again. >> From the top. >> Three. >> Crew Member: Yeah, from the top. Little bleep bleep bleep, there we go. >> Manifesto. >> Crew Member: Second time's the charm, coming to you in five, four, three, two. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the BizOps Manifesto Unveiling. Things have been in the works for a while and we're excited to have our next guest, one of the really the powers behind this whole effort and he's joining us from Boston. It's Serge Lucio, the Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom. Serge, great to see you. >> Good to see you, Jeff, Glad to be here. >> Absolutely. So, you've been in this business for a very long time, you've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the BizOps Manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today in 2020? >> Yeah, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So, about 20 years ago, the Agile Manifesto was created. And the goal of the Agile Manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the effort to build software. And if you roll back kind of 20 years later and if you look at the current state of the industry, the Project Management Institute estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we recently surveyed a number of executives in partnership with Harvard Business Review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and IT. And that's been kind of the case for almost 20 years now. So, the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach. And many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, have been using different terms, right? Some are talking about value stream management, some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the Site Reliability Engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So, we believe that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around that one concept. And so, in many ways, the BizOps concept and the BizOps Manifesto are around bringing together a number of ideas which have been emerging in the last five years or so and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so, the hope is that by joining our forces and defining the key principles and values, we can help the industry, not just by providing them with support, but also the tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody is seeking. >> Right, right. So, COVID, now, we're six months into it approximately, seven months into it, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening, we've got two ways to go. But one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you seen all the memes in social media is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change 'cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning, there was no more conversation, you suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right? So, the reliance on these tools increases dramatically. But I'm curious kind of short of the beginnings of this effort and short of kind of COVID which came along unexpectedly, I mean, what were those inhibitors 'cause we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has adopted kind of rapid change and iterative delivery and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes? >> Well, you have to understand that IT is kind of its own silos and traditionally, IT has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of the traditional dynamic between IT and the business is basically one of kind of supplier up to kind of a business. And if you go back to I think Elon Musk a few years ago basically had these concepts of the machines to build the machines and he went as far as saying that the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about building kind of the engine to deliver on the value. And so, in many ways, we have missed on this shift from kind of IT becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. And it's all about culture. Now, culture is the sum total of behaviors and the reality is that if you look at IT, especially in the last decade, with Agile, with DevOps, with hybrid infrastructures, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze the system, it's very challenging for IT to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone to actually include business as kind of an integral part of a delivery chain. And so, it's both kind of a combination of culture, which is required, as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together. And then, given the volume, variety, velocity of the data, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so, it's really kind of a combination of those things, which are coming together today to really help organizations kind of get to the next level. >> Right, right. So, let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about the coalition, the BizOps Coalition. I just like that you put down these really simple kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, business outcomes over individual projects and outputs, trust and collaboration over siloed teams and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, over opinions and judgment and learn to respond and pivot. I mean, Serge, these sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, isn't everyone working to these values already? And I think you touched on it, on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today or the person that's across the street that's doing it is going to knock them right off their block. >> Yeah, so that's very true. So, I'll mention another survey we did I think about six months ago. It was in partnership with an industry analyst. And we surveyed, again, a number of IT executives to understand how many were tracking business outcomes, how many of these software executives, IT executives were tracking business outcomes. And there were less than 15% of these executives who were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery. And you see that every day, right? So, in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so. And we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives which were not strategic for us. I take another example. For instance, one of our customers in the airline industry uncovered, for instance, that a number of... That they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. And yet, the IT teams, whether it's operations or software development, were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so, the connectivity between the inwards metrics that IT is using, whether it's database uptime, cycle time or whatever metric we use in IT, are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so, at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with the software delivery chain, right? This system which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and starting to infuse some of the Agile culture and principles that emerge from the software side into the business side. Of course, the Lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamic on the business side. And so, I think this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform now, COVID obviously has been a key driver for that. The technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of also the cultural shifts through Agile, through DevOps, through the SRE movement, through Lean business transformation. All these things are coming together and are really creating kind of conditions for the BizOps Manifesto to exist. So, Clayton Christensen, great Harvard Professor, "Innovator's Dilemma", still my all-time favorite business book, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change 'cause that's what their customers are asking for and there's a good ROI.' When you talk about companies not measuring the right thing, I mean, clearly, IT has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right? That's always the case, but hopefully, that's an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics in BizOps that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions, on whether they should move project A along or project B? >> So, there are really two things, right? So, I think what you were talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right? And which is a key challenge, right? In my own experience, right? Driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who's doing what. I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is, how many people do I have in that specific initiative at any point in time and just tracking down information is extremely difficult. And again, back to the Project Management Institute, they have estimated that on average, IT organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives which are not strategically aligned. So, that's one dimension on portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that's we're really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the IT metrics. So, I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality and I've always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key philosophy, if you will. And so, if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right? And fitness for purpose for a core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So, the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. And yet, if you look at our IT operations are operating, they were using kind of a same type of inward metrics, like a database uptime or a cycle time or what is my point velocity, right? And so, the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that the IT is using which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, if I'm trying to build a core banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe a social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so, what you want is for everybody across IT to look at these metric and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain which ultimately contribute to that business metric? In some cases, cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so, it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate. The key challenge you mentioned around the disruption that we see is or the investor's dilemma is really around the fact that many IT organizations are essentially applying the same approaches for innovation, right? For basically scrap work than they would apply to kind of other more traditional projects. And so, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed IT. And yes, it exists, but in reality, are really organizations truly differentiating how they operate their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve? And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >> I love that. Again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right? And it's horses for courses, as you said. This project, what you're measuring and how you define success isn't necessarily the same as on this other project. So, let's talk about some of the principles. We talked about the values, but I think it's interesting that the BizOps coalition just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that super insightful, but I guess you just got to get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right? And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven the software to change in software development because if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you got to come out with a new blue sword. So, whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and making that the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So, informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI. And the big data thing with Hadoop started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's increasing your average ticket or increasing your checkout rate with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So, it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you guys started when we had big giant MRDs and PRDS and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully, not too many patches subsequently to that. >> It's interesting, right? Again, back to one of these surveys that we did with about 600 IT executives. And we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. And one of them was really around requirements. And it was really around kind of what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly, over 80% of the IT executives said that the best approach, their preferred approach, is for requirements to be completely defined before software development starts. So, let me pause there. We're 20 years after the Agile Manifesto, right? And for 80% of these IT executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and IT, which is still very much contract-based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for IT to deliver on time on budget, right? But what is the incentive for IT to actually deliver on the business outcomes, right? How often is IT measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria. And so, that's really the fundamental shift that we really need to drive out as an industry. And, we talk about kind of this imperative for organizations to operate as one. And back to the the "Innovator's Dilemma", the key difference between these larger organization is really kind of a... If you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to startups? Why is it that more than 40% of personal loans today are issued, not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christensen covered at length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of the dynamic between business and IT and partner, right? To deliver on a specific business outcome. >> Right, I love that. That's a great summary and in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where the problem with the Agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos 'cause you have all these autonomous people working kind of independently. So, it's even a harder challenge for the business leaders, as you said, to know what's actually going on. But Serge, I want to close and talk about the coalition. So clearly, these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition? Why take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your competition and the broader industry to say, "Hey, we as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, these values, these principles?" >> So first, I think we want everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we're all from our own different vantage point realizing that things have to change. And again, back to whether it's value stream management or Site Reliability Engineering or BizOps, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. And so, I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about consulting, Agile transformation experts, whether we're talking about vendors, right? To provides kind of tools and technologies or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of in a much more consistent way. The second aspect, to me, is for these concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or vendors, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our own customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. So, our objective with the coalition is to be pretty, pretty broad. And our hope is by starting to basically educate our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change some of dynamics. So, we're very pleased that if you look at some of the companies which have joined the manifesto, so we have vendors, such as Tasktop, or Appvance or PagerDuty, for instance, or even Planview, one of my direct competitors, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or Capgemini or smaller firms like Business Agility Institute or AgilityHealth. And so, our goal really is to start to bring together thought leaders, people who've been helping large organizations do digital transformation, vendors who are providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this digital transformation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of education, support and tools that the industry needs. >> Yeah, that's great, Serge, and congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign on to the manifesto, putting the coalition together and finally today, getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public opportunity. So again, really good values, really simple principles, something that shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice 'cause it is and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So, thank you for sharing the story and again, congrats to you and the team. >> Thank you, thanks, Jeff, appreciate it. >> My pleasure, all righty, Serge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps Manifesto, go to bizopsmanifesto.org, read it and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage on theCUBE of the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat 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. >> All right, welcome back to "the Cube's" coverage here from Palo Alto, California in our studio with remote interviews during this time of COVID-19 with our quarantine crew. I'm John Furrier, your host of "the Cube" and we have here the award winners for the best EDU solution from NorthBay Solutions, Jim Keller, the president and from Harvard Business Publishing and the University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton, PhD and Data Privacy Officer of University of Pittsburgh IT. Thanks for coming on gentlemen, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So, Jim, we'll start with you. What is the solution that you guys had got the award for? And talk about how it all came about. >> Yeah, thank you for asking and it's been a pleasure working with Chad and the entire UPitt team. So as we entered this whole COVID situation, our team really got together and started to think about how we could help AWS customers continue their journey with AWS, but also appreciate the fact that everyone was virtual, that budgets were very tight, but nonetheless, the priorities remained the same. So we devised a solution which we called jam sessions, AWS jam sessions, and the whole principle behind the notion is that many customers go through AWS training and AWS has a number of other offerings, immersion days and boot camps and other things, but we felt it was really important that we brought forth a solution that enables customers to focus on a use case, but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team. So we formulated what we call jam sessions, which are essentially very focused two week engagements, rapid prototyping engagements. So in the context of Chad and UPitt team, it was around a data lake and they had been, and Chad will certainly speak to this in much more detail, but the whole notion here was how does a customer get started? How does, a customer prove the efficacy of AWS, prove that they can get data out of their on premises systems, get it into AWS, make it accessible in the form, in this case, a data lake solution and have the data be consumable. So we have an entire construct that we use which includes structured education, virtual simultaneous rooms where development occurs with our joint rep prototyping teams. We come back again and do learnings, and we do all of this in the construct of the agile framework, and ideally by the time we're done with the two weeks, the customer achieves some success around achieving the goal of the jam session. But more importantly, their team members have learned a lot about AWS with hands on work, real work, learn by doing, if you will, and really marry those two concepts of education and doing, and come out of that with an opportunity then to think about the next step in that journey, which in this case would be the implementation of a data lake in a full scale project kind of initiative. >> Chad, talk about the relationship with NorthBay Solutions. Obviously you're a customer, you guys are partnering on this, so it's kind of you're partnering, but also they're helping you. Talk about the relationship and how the interactions went. >> Yeah, so I would say the challenge that I think a lot of people in my role are faced with where the demand for data is increasing and demand for more variety of data. And I'm faced with a lot of aging on premise hardware that I really don't want to invest any further in. So I know the cloud's in the future, but we are so new with the cloud that we don't even know what we don't know. So we had zeroed in on AWS and I was talking with them and I made it very clear. I said "Because of our inexperience, we have talented data engineers, but they don't have this type of experience, but I'm confident they can learn." So what I'm looking for is a partner who can help us not only prove this out that it can work, which I had high confidence that it could, but help us identify where we need to be putting our skilling up. You know, what gaps do we have? And AWS has just so many different components that we also needed help just zeroing in on for our need, what are the pieces we should really be paying attention to and developing those skills. So we got introduced to NorthBay and they introduced us to the idea of the jam session, which was perfect. It was really exactly what I was looking for. We made it very clear in the early conversations that this would be side by side development, that my priority was of course, to meet our deliverables, but also for my team to learn how to use some of this and learn what they need to dive deeper in at the end of the engagement. I think that's how it got started and then I think it was very successful engagement after that. >> Talk about the jam sessions, because I love this. First of all, this is in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace with rapid innovation, now more than ever with virtual workforces at home, given the situation. You know, rapid agile, rapid innovation, rapid development is a key kind of thing. What is a jam session? What was the approach? Jim you laid a little bit about it out, but Chad, what's your take on the jam sessions? How does it all work? >> I mean, it was great, because of large teams that NorthBay brought and the variety of skills they brought, and then they just had a playbook that worked. They broke us up into different groups, from the people who'd be making the data pipeline, to the people who then would be consuming it to develop analytics projects. So that part worked really well, and yes, this rapid iterative development. Like right now with our current kind of process and our current tool, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts, to our data scientists, because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer and I don't want to be giving that answer, so what we're really focused on is how do we tighten up our process? How do we select the right tools so that we can say, "We'll be two weeks from start to finish" and you'll be able to make those data available. So the engagement with NorthBay, the jam session scheduled like that really helped us prove that once you have the skills and you have the right people, you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business more quickly, which is really what it's all about for us. >> Jim, I'll get your thoughts because, you know, we see time and time again with the use cases with the cloud, when you got smart people, certainly people who play with data and work with data, They're pretty savvy, right? They know limitations, but when you get the cloud, it's like if a car versus a horse, right? Got to go from point A to point B, but again, the faster is the key. How did you put this all together and what were the key learnings? >> Yeah, so John, a couple of things that are really important. One is, as Chad mentioned, really smart people on the U-PIT side that wanted to really learn and had a thirst for learning. And then couple that with the thing that they're trying to learn in an actual use case that we're trying to jointly implement. A couple of things that we've learned that are really important. One is although we have structure and we have a syllabi and we have sort of a pattern of execution, we can never lose sight of the fact that every customer is different. Every team member is different. And in fact, Chad, in this case had team members, some had more skills on AWS than others. So we had to be sensitive to that. So what we did was we sort of used our general formula for the two weeks. Week one is very structured, focused on getting folks up to speed and normalize in terms of where they are in their education of AWS, the solution we're building and then week two is really meant to sort of mold the clay together and really take this solution that we're trying to execute around and tailor it to the customer so that we're addressing the specific needs, both from their team member perspective and the institution's perspective in total. We've learned that starting the day together and ending the day with a recap of that day is really important in terms of ensuring that everyone's on the same page, that they have commonality of knowledge and then when we're addressing any concerns. You know, this stuff we move fast, right? Two weeks is not a long time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done, so if there is anxiety, or folks feel like they're falling behind, we want to make sure we knew that, we wanted to address that quickly, either that evening, or the next morning, recalibrate and then continue. The other thing that we've learned is that, and Chad and entire U-Pit team did a phenomenal job with this, was really preparation. So we have a set of preliminary set of activities that we work with our customers to sort of lay the foundation for, so that on day one of the jam session, we're ready to go. And since we're doing this virtually, we don't have the luxury of being in a physical room and having time to sort of get acclimated to the physical construct of organizing rooms and chairs and tables and all that. We're doing all that virtually. So Chad and the team were tremendous in getting all the preparatory work done Thinking about what's involved in a data lake, it's the data and security and access and things our team needed to work with their team and the prescription and the formula that we use is really three critical things. One is our team members have to be adept at educating on a virtual whiteboard, in this case. Secondly, we want to do side by side development. That's the whole goal and we want team members to build trust and relationships side by side. And then thirdly, and importantly, we want to be able to do over the shoulder mentoring, so that as Chad's team members were executing, we could guide them as we go. And really those three ingredients were really key. >> Chad, talk about the data lake and the outcome as you guys went through this. What was the results of the data Lake? How did it all turn out? >> Yeah, the result was great. It was exactly what we were looking for. The way I had structured the engagement and working with Jim to do this is I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to one, prove that we can do what we do today with a star schema mart model that creates a lot of reports that are important to the business, but doesn't really help us grow in our use of data. So there was a second component of it that I said, I want to show how we do something new and different that we can't do with our existing tools, so that I can go back to our executive leadership and say "Hey, by investing in this, here's all the possibilities we can do and we've got proof that we can do it." So some natural language processing was one of those and leveraging AWS comprehend was key. And the idea here was there are, unfortunately, it's not as relevant today with COVID, but there are events happening all around campus and how do students find the right events for them? You know, they're all in the calendar. Well, with a price of natural language processing using AWS comprehend and link them to a student's major, so that we can then bubble these up to a student "Hey, do you know of all these thousands of events here are the 10 you might be most interested in." We can't do that right now, but using these tools, using the skills that that NorthBay helped us develop by working side by side will help us get there. >> A beautiful thing is with these jam sessions, once you get some success, you go for the next one. This sounds like another jam session opportunity to go in there and do the virtual version. As the fall comes up, you have the new reality. And this is really kind of what I like about the story is you guys did the jam session, first of all, great project, but right in the middle of this new shift of virtual, so it's very interesting. So I want to get your thoughts, Chad, as you guys looked at this, I mean on any given Sunday, this is a great project, right? You can get people together, you go to the cloud, get more agile, get the proof points, show it, double down on it, playbook, check. But now you've got the virtual workforce. How did that all play out? Anything surprise you? Any expectations that were met, or things that were new that came out of this? 'Cause this is something that is everyone is going through right now. How do I come out of this, or deal with current COVID as it evolves? And then when I come out of it, I want to have a growth strategy, I want to have a team that's deploying and building. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, it's a good question and I was a little concerned about it at first, because when we had first begun conversations with NorthBay, we were planning on a little bit on site and a little bit virtual. Then of course COVID happened. Our campus is closed, nobody's permitted to be there and so we had to just pivot to a hundred percent virtual. I have to say, I didn't notice any problems with it. It didn't impede our progress. It didn't impede our communication. I think the playbook that NorthBay had really just worked for that. Now they may have had to adjust it and Jim can certainly talk to that, But those morning stand-ups for each group that's working, the end of day report outs, right? Those were the things I was joining in on I wasn't involved in it throughout the day, but I wanted to check in at the end of the day to make sure things are kind of moving along and the communication, the transparency that was provided was key, and because of that transparency and that kind of schedule they already had set up at North Bay, We didn't have any problems having it a fully virtual engagement. In fact, I would probably prefer to do virtual engagements moving forward because we can cut down on travel costs for everybody. >> You know, Jim, I want to get your thoughts on this, 'cause I think this is a huge point that's not just represented here and illustrated with the example of the success of the EDU solution you guys got the award for, but in a way COVID exposes all the people that have been relying on waterfall based processes. You've got to be in a room and argue things out, or have meetings set up. It takes a lot of time and when you have a virtual space and an agile process, yeah you make some adjustments, but if you're already agile, it doesn't really impact too much. Can you share your thoughts because you deployed this very successfully virtually. >> Yeah, it's certainly, you know, the key is always preparation and our team did a phenomenal job at making sure that we could deliver equal to, or better than, virtual experience than we could an on-site experience, but John you're absolutely right. What it forces you to really do is think about all the things that come natural when you're in a physical room together, but you can't take for granted virtually. Even interpersonal relationships and how those are built and the trust that's built. As much as this is a technical solution and as much as the teams did really phenomenal AWS work, foundationally it all comes down to trust and as Chad said, transparency. And it's often hard to build that into a virtual experience. So part of that preparatory work that I mentioned, we actually spend time doing that and we spent time with Chad and other team members, understanding each of their team members and understanding their strengths, understanding where they were in the education journey and the experiential journey, a little bit about them personally. So I think the reality in the in the short and near term is that everything's going to be virtual. NorthBay delivers much of their large scale projects virtually now. We have a whole methodology around that and it's proven actually it's made us better at what we do quite frankly. >> Yeah it definitely puts the pressure on getting the job done and focusing on the creativity in the building out. I want to ask you guys both the same question on this next round, because I think it's super important as people see the reality of cloud and this certainly has been around, the benefits of there, but still you have the mentality of "we have to do it ourselves", "not invented here", "It's a managed service", "It's security". There's plenty of objections. If you really want to avoid cloud, you can come up with something if you really looked for it. But the reality is is that there are benefits. For the folks out there that are now being accelerated into the cloud for the reasons with COVID and other reasons, What's your advice to them? Why cloud? What's the bet? What comes out of making a good choice with the cloud? Chad, as people sitting there going "okay, I got to get my cloud mojo going" What's your advice to those folks sitting out there watching this? >> So I would say, and Jim knows this, we at Pitt have a big vision for data, a whole universe of data where just everything is made available and I can't estimate the demand for all of that yet, right? That's going to evolve over time, so if I'm trying to scale some physical hardware solution, I'm either going to under scale it and not be able to deliver, or I'm going to invest too much money for the value I'm getting. By moving to the cloud, what that enables me to do is just grow organically and make sure that our spend and the value we're getting from the use are always aligned. And then, of course, all the questions about, scalability and extensibility, right? We can just keep growing and if we're not seeing value in one area, we can just stop and we're no longer spending on that particular area and we can direct that money to a different component of the cloud. So just not being locked in to a huge expensive product is really key, I think. >> Jim, your thoughts on why cloud and why now? Obviously it's pretty obvious reasons, but benefits for the naysayer sitting on the fence? >> Yeah, it's a really important question, John and I think Chad had a lot of important points. I think there's two others that become important. One is agility. Whether that's agility with respect to if you're in a competitive market place, Agility in terms of just retaining team members and staff in a highly competitive environment we all know we're in, particularly in the IT world. Agility from a cost perspective. So agility is a theme that comes through and through over and over and over again, and as Chad rightfully said, most companies and most organizations they don't know the entirety of what it is they're facing, or what the demands are going to be on their services, so agility is really, is really key. And the second one is, the notion has often been that you have to have it all figured out before you can start and really our mantra in the jam session was sort of born this way. It's really start by doing. Pick a use case, pick a pain point, pick an area of frustration, whatever it might be and just start the process. You'll learn as you go and not everything is the right fit for cloud. There were some things for the right reasons where alternatives might be be appropriate, but by and large, if you start by doing and in fact, through jam session, learn by doing, you'll start to better understand, enterprise will start to better understand what's most applicable to them, where they can leverage the best bang for the buck, if you will. And ultimately deliver on the value that IT is meant to deliver to the line of business, whatever that might be. And those two themes come through and through. And thirdly, I'll just add speed now. Speed of transformation, speed of cost reduction, speed of future rollout. You know, Chad has users begging for information and access to data, right? He and the team are sitting there trying to figure how to give it to them quickly. So speed of execution with quality is really paramount as well these days. >> Yeah and Chad also mentioned scale too, cause he's trying to scale up as key and again, getting the cloud muscles going for the teams and culture is critical because matching that incentives, I think the alignment is critical point. So congratulations gentlemen on a great award, best EDU solution. Chad, while I have you here, I want to just get your personal thoughts, but your industry expert PhD hat on, because one of the things we've been reporting on is in the EDU space, higher ed and other areas, with people having different education policies, the new reality is with virtualized students and faculty, alumni and community, the expectations and the data flows are different, right? So you had stuff that people used, systems, legacy systems, kind of as a good opportunity to look at cloud to build a new abstraction layer and again, create that alignment of what can we do development wise, because I'm sure you're seeing new data flows coming in. I'm sure this kind of thinking going on around "Okay, as we go forward, how do we find out what classes to attend if they're not onsite?" This is another jam session. So I see more and more things happening, pretty innovative in your world. What's your take on all this? >> My take, so when we did the pivot, we did a pivot right after spring break to be virtual for our students, like a lot of universities did. And you learn a lot when you go through a crisis kind of like that and you find all the weaknesses. And we had finished the engagement, I think, with NorthBay by that point, or were in it and seeing how if we were at our future state, you know, might end up the way I envisioned the future state, I can now point to these specific things and give specific examples about how we would have been able to more effectively respond when these new demands on data came up, when new data flows were being created very quickly and able to point out to the weaknesses of our current ecosystem and how that would be better. So that was really key and this whole thing is an opportunity. It's really accelerated a lot of things that were kind of already in the works and that's why it's exciting. It's obviously very challenging and at Pitt we're really right now trying to focus on how do we have a safe campus environment and going with a maximum flexibility and all the technology that's involved in that. And, you know, I've already got, I've had more unique data requests come to my desk since COVID than in the previous five years, you know? >> New patterns, new opportunities to write software and it's great to see you guys focused on that hierarchy of needs. I really appreciate it. I want to just share with you a funny story, not funny, but interesting story, because this highlights the creativity that's coming. I was riffing on Zoom with someone in a higher ed university out here in California and it wasn't official business, was just more riffing on the future and I said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had like an abstraction layer that had leveraged Canvas, Zoom and Discord?" All the kids are on Discord if they're gamers. So you go "Okay, why discord? It's a hang space." People, it's connective tissue. "Well, how do you build notifications through the different silos?" You know, Canvas doesn't support certain things and Canvas is the software that most universities use, but that's a use case that we were just riffing on, but that's the kind of ideation that's going to come out of these kinds of jam sessions. Are you guys having that kind of feeling too? I mean, how do you see this new ideation, rapid prototype? I only think it's going to get faster and accelerated. >> As Chad said, his requests are we're multiplying, I'm sure and people aren't, you know, folks are not willing to wait. We're in a hurry up, 'hurry up, I want it now' mentality these days with both college attendees as well as those of us who are trying to deliver on that promise. And I think John, I think you're absolutely right and I think that whether it be the fail fast mantra, or whether it be can we make even make this work, right? Does it have legs? Is it is even viable? And is it even cost-effective? I can tell you that we do a lot of work in Ed tech, we do a lot of work in other industries as well And what the the courseware delivery companies and the infrastructure companies are all trying to deal with as a result of COVID, is they've all had to try to innovate. So we're being asked to challenge ourselves in ways we never been asked to challenge ourselves in terms of speed of execution, speed of deployment, because these folks need answers, you know, tomorrow, today, yesterday, not six months from now. So I'll use the word legacy way of thinking is really not one that can be sustained, or tolerated any longer and I want Chad and others to be able to call us and say, "Hey, we need help. We need help quickly. How can we go work together side by side and go prove something. It may not be the most elegant, it may not be the most robust, but we need it tomorrow." And that's really the spirit of the whole notion of jam session. >> And new expectations means new solutions. Chad, we'll give you the final word. Going forward, you're on this wave right now, you got new things coming at you you're getting that foundation set. What's your mindset as you ride this wave? >> I'm optimistic. It really is, it's an exciting time to be in this role, the progress we've made in the calendar year 2020, despite the challenges we've been faced with, with COVID and budget issues, I'm optimistic. I love what I saw in the jam session. It just kind of confirmed my belief that this is really the future for the University of Pittsburgh in order to fully realize our vision of maximizing the value of data. >> Awesome! Best EDU solution award for AWS public sector. Congratulations to NorthBay Solutions. Jim Keller, president, and University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Great insights and again, the wave is here, new expectations, new solutions, clouds there, and you guys got a good approach. Congratulations on the jam session, thanks. >> Thank you, John. Chad, pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. >> See you soon. >> This is "the Cube" coverage of AWS public sector partner awards. I'm John Furrier, host of "the Cube". Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage here from Palo Alto, California in our studio with remote interviews during this time of covert 19 with our quarantine crew. I'm John Furrier, your host of the Cube, and we have here the award winners for the best CDU solution from North based loses. Jim Keller, the president and from Harvard Business Publishing and University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burden PhD in data privacy officer of University of Pittsburgh. Thanks for coming on, gentlemen. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. >>So, Jim, we'll start with you. What is the solution that you guys have got the award for and talk about how it all came about? >>Yeah. Thank you for asking. And, uh, it's been a pleasure Worldwide chat and the entire you pitch team. So? So as we as we enter this this this whole covitz situation, our team really got together and started to think about how we could help AWS customers continue their journey with AWS, but also appreciate the fact that everyone was virtual. The budgets were very tight, but Nonetheless, the priorities remained the same. Um, So So we devised a solution which which we call jam sessions, AWS jam sessions and the whole principle behind the notion is that many customers go through AWS training and AWS has a number of other offerings, immersion days and boot camps and other things. But we felt it was really important that we brought forth a solution that enables customers to focus on a use case but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team. So we formulated what we call jam sessions, which are essentially very focused, too. Weak engagements, rapid prototyping engagements. So in the context of Chad on the pitch team, it was around a data lake and they had been channels certainly speak to this in much more detail. But the whole notion here was how do you How does the customer get started out? Is how does a customer prove the efficacy of AWS proved that they can get data out of their on premises systems, get it into AWS, make it accessible in the form in this case, a data lake solution, and have the data be consumable. So we have an entire construct that we use, which includes structured education, virtual simultaneous rooms where development occurs with our joint sap prototyping teams. We come back again and do learnings, and we do all of this in the construct of the agile framework. And ideally, by the time we're done with the two weeks, um, the customer achieves some success around achieving the goal of the jam session. But more importantly, their team members have learned a lot about AWS with hands on work, real work. Learn by doing if you will, um, and really marry those two concepts of education and doing and come out of that with an opportunity then to think about the next step in that journey, which in this case be Thea implementation of a data lake in a full scale project kind of initiative. >>Talk about the relationship with the North based solutions. So your customer, you guys were partnering on this, so it's kind of your partnering, but also your they're helping you talk about the relationship and how the interactions went. >>Yeah, so I was faced with a challenge that I think a lot of people in my role is faced with where the demand for data is increasing and demand for more variety of data. And I'm faced with a lot of aging on premise hardware that, um I really don't want to invest any further. And so I know the clouds in the future, but we are so new with the cloud that we don't even know what we don't know. So it has zeroed in on AWS and I was talking with them and I made it very clear. I said, you know, because of our inexperience, you know, we have talented data engineers, but they don't have this type of experience, but I'm confident they can learn. What I'm looking for is a partner who can help us not only prove this out, that it can work, which I had high confidence that it could, but help us identify where we need to be putting our still skilling up. You know what gaps do we have? And you know, aws has so many different components. But we also needed help zeroing in on or our need. You know, what are the pieces we should really be paying attention to and developing those skills. So we got introduced to North Bay and they introduced us to the idea of the jam session, which was perfect. It was really exactly what I was looking for. Um, you know, we made it very clear in the early conversations that this would be side by side development, that my priority was, of course, to meet our deliverables. But it also for my team to learn how to use some of this and learn what they need to dive deeper in at the end of the engagement. I think that's how we got started on then. It was very successful engagement after that >>talk about the jam sessions because I love this. First of all, this is in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace, with rapid innovation now more than ever, with virtual workforces at home given situation, rapid, agile, rapid innovation, rapid development is a key kind of thing. What is a jam session was the approach. Give me a little bit about of it out, but what's your take on the jam sessions? Had it all has it all work? >>It was great because of the large team that north a broad and the variety of skills they brought and then they just had a playbook that worked, right? They broke us up into different groups from the people who be making the data pipeline to the people who then would be consuming it to develop analytics projects. Um, so that part works really well. And, yes, this rapid iterative development, You know, right now, with our current kind of process in our current tools, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts who are data scientists because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer. And I don't want to be giving that answer. So what we're really focused on is how do we tighten up our process? How do we still like the right tools so that we can pay, you know, will be two weeks from start to finish and you know you'll be able to make the data available. So the engagement with North of the jam session scheduled like that really helped us prove that. You know, once you have the skills and have the right people, you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business more quickly, which is really what it's all about. We're out, >>Jim. I want get your thoughts because, you know, we see time and time again with the use cases with the cloud When you got smart people, certainly people who play with data and work with data, they're not. They're pretty savvy. They know the limitations. But when you get the cloud, it's like a car versus a horse or, you know, get a go from point A to point B. But again, the faster is the key. How did you put this all together And what were the key learnings? >>Yeah. So, uh, John, you know, a couple of things that are really important. One is, as Chad mentioned, really smart people, um, on the it side that wanted to wanted to really learn and had had a thirst for learning. Um, and then couple that with the thing that they're trying to learn in the actual use case that we're trying to jointly jointly implement a couple of things that we've learned that they're they're really important. One is, although we have structure, we have a Silla by and we have sort of a pattern of execution. We never lose sight of the fact that every customer's different. Every team members different and in fact chat in this case that team members some had more skills on AWS than others, so we had to be sensitive to that. So what we did was we sort of use our general formula for for the two weeks one week one is very structured, focused on getting folks up to speed and normalize in terms of where they are in their education of aws solution we're building, um, and then we two is really meant to sort of multiple together and really take this the solution that we're trying to execute around, um, and tailor it to the customer. So they were addressing the specific needs both from their team member of perspective and, uh, and the institutions perspective, Um, in total. We've learned that starting the day together and ending today with the recap of that day is really important in terms of ensuring that everyone's on the same page, that they have commonality of knowledge. And then we were addressing any concerns. You know, this stuff we move fast, right? Two weeks is is not a long time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done. So if there is anxiety or folks feel like they're falling behind, you want to make sure we knew that we want to address that quickly that evening or the next morning, recalibrate and and then continue. The other thing that we've learned is that and Chad, the entire Cube team did a phenomenal job of this was really preparation. So we want to We we We have a set of preliminary set of activities that we that we work with our customers sort of lay the foundation for, so that on day one of the jam session, we're ready to go. And with this we're doing this virtually. We don't have the luxury of being in a physical room and having time to sort of get acclimated to the physical constructive of organizing rooms and shares and tables. All of that, we're doing all that virtually so. Joe and the team were tremendous and getting all the preparatory work done. The thing about was involved in a data lake. It's the data and security and access of things Our team needed to work with their team and the prescription that in the formula that we use is really 33 critical things. One is our team members have to be adept that educating on a white board in this case. Secondly, we want to do side by side element. That's that's the whole goal. And then we want team members to to build trust and relationship side by side and then, thirdly and importantly, we want to be able to do over the shoulder mentoring. So as Chad's team members were executing, UI could guide them as we go. And those really those three ingredients really >>talk about the Data Lake on the outcome. As you guys went through this, what was the results of the Data Lake? How did it all? How'd it all turn out? >>Yeah, the result was great. It was exactly what we're looking for. The way I had structured the engagement and working with Jim to do this is I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to one prove that we can do what we do today with a star schema Martin model that creates a lot of reports that are important to the business but doesn't really help us grow in our use of data. There was a second component of it that I said, I want I want to show how we do something new and different that we can't do with our existing tools so that I can go back to our executive leadership and say, Hey, you know, by investing in this year's all the possibilities we can do and we've got proof that we can do it. So some natural language processing was one of those and leveraging aws comprehend with key and And the idea here was there are unfortunately relevant today with Cove it. But there are events happening all around campus. And how do students find the right events for them? You know, they're all in the calendar will live pricing national language processing using AWS comprehend and link them to a student's major so that we can then bubble these up to a student. Hey, you know of all these thousands of events here and you might be most interested in you can't do that right now, but using these tools using the skills that north they helped us develop working side by side will help us get there, >>you know, beautiful thing is with these jam sessions. You want to get some success, You go for the next one. You get this Sounds like another jam session opportunity to go in there and do the virtual version as well. As the fall comes up, you have the new reality. And this >>is >>really kind of What I like about this story is you guys did the jam session. First of all, great project, but right in the middle of this new shift of virtual, so it's very interesting. So I want to get your thoughts, Chad, You know, as you guys look at this, I mean on any given Sunday, this is a great project. You get people together, you have the cloud get more agile, get the proof points, show it double down on it. Playbook check. But now you've got the virtual workforce. How did that all play out? Anything surprise you any expectations that were met or things that were new that came out of this? Because this is something that everyone is going through right now. How do I come out of this or deal with current Cove it as it evolves and when I come out of it. I don't have a growth strategy in a team that's deploying and building. What's your take on? >>Yeah, so, yeah, you know, it's a good question. And I was a little concerned about it at first, cause when we had first begun conversations with North Bay, we were planning on a little bit on site and a little bit virtual. And of course, Cove. It happened. Our campuses closed. Nobody's permitted to be there. And so we had to just pivot to 100% virtual. I have to say I didn't notice any problems with it. It didn't impede our progress that didn't impede our communication. I think the playbook that North they had really just worked for that. Now they may have had to adjust it, and Jim can certainly part of that. But you know those morning stand ups for each group that's working the end of day worn out right? That's what those were the things I was joining in on, you know, it wasn't involved in it throughout the day, but I wanted to check in at the end of the day to make sure things are kind of moving along and the communication the transparency that was provided with key, and because of that transparency and that kind of schedule, they already have set up North Bay. We didn't see we didn't have any problems having a fully virtual engagement. In fact, I would probably prefer to do for two engagements moving forward because we can cut down on travel costs for everybody. >>You know, Jim O. Negative thoughts that I think is a huge point that's not just representing with here and illustrate with the example of the success of the EU solution. You guys got the award for, but in a way, covert exposes all the people that are been relying on waterfall based processes. You got to be in a room and argue things out. Our have meetings set up. It takes a lot of time when you when you have a virtual space and an agile process, you make some adjustments. But if you're already agile, it doesn't really impact too much. Can you share your thoughts because you deployed this very successfully? Virtually. >>Yeah, I know it is. Certainly, um, the key is always preparation and on our team did a phenomenal job of making sure that we could deliver equal to or better than virtual experience than we could on site and on site experience. But, John, you're right. You're absolutely right. But it forces you to really do is think about all the things that come natural when you're when you're in a physical room together, you can't take for granted virtually, um, even even interpersonal relationships and how those were built and the trust that's built in. And this whole, as much as this is a technical solution and as much as the teams did you really phenomenal aws work, foundational Lee. It all comes down to trust it, as Chad said, transparency, and it's hard, often hard to to build that into a virtual experience. So part of that preparatory work that I mentioned, we actually spend time doing that. And we spent time with Chad and other team members understanding each of their team members and understanding their strengths, understanding where they were in the education journey and experiential journey a little bit about them personally, right? So so I think. Look, I think the reality in the short and near term is that everything is gonna be virtual North Bay delivers much of their large scale projects. Virtually now, we have a whole methodology around that, and, um, and it's proven. Actually, it's made us better at what we do. >>Yeah, definitely puts the pressure on getting the job done and focusing on the creativity the building out. I want to ask you guys both the same question on this next round, because I think it's super important as people see the reality of cloud and there certainly has been around the benefits of there. But still you have, you know, mentality of, you know, we have to do it ourselves, not invented here. It's a managed services security. You know, there's plenty of objections. If you really want to avoid cloud, you can come up with something if you really look for it. Um, but the reality is, is that there are benefits for the folks out there that are now being accelerated into the cloud for the reasons we cove it and other reasons. What's your advice to them? Why cloud, what's the what's the bet? What comes? What comes out of making a good choice with the cloud? Chad? Is people sitting there going? Okay, I got to get my cloud mojo going What's your What's your What's your advice to those folks sitting out there watching this? >>Yeah, so I would say it. And Jim does this, you know, we have a big vision for data, you know, the whole universe of data. Where does everything is made available? And, um, I can't estimate the demand for all of that yet, right, That's going to evolve over time. So if I'm trying to scale some physical hardware solution, I'm either going to under scale it and not be able to deliver. Or I'm gonna invest too much money for the value in getting what? By moving to the cloud. What that enables me to do is just grow organically and make sure that our spend and the value we're getting from the use are always aligned. Um And then, of course, all the questions that you have availability and acceptability, right? We can just keep growing. And if we're not seeing value in one area, we can just we're no longer spending on that particular area, and we contract that money to a different components of the cloud, so just not being locked into a huge expense up front is really key, I think, >>Jim, your thoughts on Why Cloud? Why now? It's pretty obvious reasons, but benefits for the naysayers sitting on the fence who are? >>Yeah, it's It's a really important question, John and I think that had a lot of important points. I think there's two others that become important. One is, um, agility. Whether that's agility with respect to your in a competitive marketplace, place agility in terms of just retaining team members and staff in a highly competitive environment will go nowhere in particularly in the I t world, um, agility from a cost perspective. So So agility is a theme that comes through and through, over and over and over again in this change, right? So, he said, most companies and most organizations don't they don't know the entirety of what it is they're facing or what the demands are gonna be on their services. The agility is really is really key, and the 2nd 1 is, you know, the notion has often been that you have to have it all figured out. You could start and really our mantra and the jam session was sort of born this way. It's really start by doing, um, pick a use case, Pick a pain point, pick an area of frustration, whatever it might be. And just start the process you learn as you go. Um, and you know, not everything is the right fit for cloud. There are some things for the right reasons where alternatives might be might be appropriate. But by and large, if you if you start by doing And in fact, you know the jam session, learn by doing, and you start to better understand, enterprise will start to better understand what's most applicable to that where they can leverage the best of this bang for the buck if you will, um, and ultimately deliver on the value that that I t is is meant to deliver to the line of business, whatever that whatever that might be. And those two themes come through and through. And thirdly, I'll just add speed now. Speed of transformation, Speed of cost reduction, speed of feature rollout. Um, you know, Chad has users begging for information and access to data. Right? And the team we're sitting there trying to figure how to give it to him quickly. Um, so speed of execution with quality is really paramount as well these days >>and channels. You mentioned scale too, because he's trying to scale up as key and again getting the cloud muscles going for the teams. And culture is critical because, you know, matching that incentives. I think the alignment is critical. Point point. So congratulations, gentlemen. On great award best edu solution, Chad, While I have you here, I want to just get your personal thoughts. Put your industry expert PhD hat on because, you know, one of the things we've been reporting on is a lot of in the edu space higher ed in other areas with people having different education policies. The new reality is with virtual virtualized students and faculty alumni nine in community, the expectations and the data flows are different. Right? So you you had stuff that people use systems, legacy systems, >>kind of. >>It's a good opportunity to look at cloud to build a new abstraction layer and again create that alignment of what can we do? Development wise? I'm sure you're seeing new data flows coming in. I'm sure there's kind of thinking going on around. Okay. As we go forward, how >>do >>we find out who's what. Classes to attend if they're not on site this another jam session. So I see more, more things happening pretty innovative in your world. What's your take on all this? >>Um, I take, you know, So when we did the pivot, we did a pivot right after spring. Great toe. Be virtual for our students, Like a lot of universities dead. And, um, you learn a lot when you go through a crisis kind of like that. And you find all the weaknesses And we had finished the engagement. I think north by that point, or it were in it. And, um, seeing how if we were at our future state, you know, the way I envision the future state, I can now point to the specific things and get specific examples of how we would have been able to more effectively on when these new demands on data came up when new data flows were being created very quickly and, you know, able to point out to the weaknesses of our current ecosystem and how that would be better. Um, so that was really key. And then, you know, it's a This whole thing is an opportunity. It's really accelerated a lot of things that were kind of already in the works, and that's why it's exciting. It's obviously very challenging, you know, and that if it were really right now trying to focus on how do we have a safe campus environment and going with a maximum flexibility and older technology that's involved in that? And, you know, I've already got you know, I've had more unique data requests. >>My desk >>is coded and in the previous five years, you know, >>new patterns, new opportunities to write software. And it's great to see you guys focused on the hierarchy of needs. Really appreciate. I want to just share a funny story. Not funny, but interesting story, because this highlights the creativity that's coming. I was riffing on Zoom with someone in Higher Ed University out here in California, and it was wasn't official. Business was just more riffing on the future, and I said, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you have, like an abstraction layer that had leverage, canvas, zoom and discord and all the kids are on discourse, their game received. Okay, why discord? It's the hang space people are his connective tissue Well, how do you build notifications through the different silos? So canvas doesn't support certain things? And campuses? The software. Most companies never say years, but that's a use case that we were just riffing on. But that's the kind of ideation that's going to come out of these kinds of jam sessions. You guys having that kind of feeling to? How do you see this new ideation? Rapid prototyping. I only think it's gonna get faster. Accelerated >>It was. Chad said, you know, his requests are multiplying. I'm sure on people are you know, folks are not willing to wait, you know, we're in a hurry up. Hurry up. I wanted now mentality these days with with both, um college attendees as well as those of us. We're trying to deliver on that promise. And I think, John, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that, um, whether it be the fail fast mantra or whether it be can we may even make this work right? Doesn't have lakes, is it is even viable. Um, and is it even cost effective? I can tell you that the we do a lot of work in tech. We do a lot of work in other industries as well. And what what the courseware delivery companies and the infrastructure companies are all trying to deal with and as a result of coaches, they've all had to try to innovate. Um, so we're being asked to challenge ourselves in ways we never been asked to challenge ourselves in terms of speed, of execution, speed of deployment, because these folks need answers, you know, tomorrow, Today, yesterday, not not six months from now. So the the I'll use the word legacy way of thinking is really not one that could be sustained or tolerated any longer. And and I want Chad and others to be able to call us and say, Hey, we need help. We need help quickly. How we go work together, side by side and go prove something. It may not be the most elegant. It may not be the most robust, but we need. We need it kind of tomorrow, and that's really the spirit of the whole. The whole notion of transition >>and new expectations means new solutions that will give you the final word going forward. You're on this wave right now. You got new things coming at you. You get in that foundation set. What's your mindset as you ride this wave? >>I'm optimistic it really It's an exciting time to be in this role. The progress we've made in the county or 2020 despite the challenges we've been faced with with, um cove it and budget issues. Um, I'm optimistic. I love what I saw in the in the jam session. It just kind of confirmed my I believe that this is really the future for the University of Pittsburgh in order to fully realize our vision of maximizing the value of data. >>Awesome. Best Edu solution award for AWS Public sector Congratulations and North based solutions. Jim Keller, President and University of Pittsburgh Chadbourne. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Great insights. And again, the wave is here. New expectation, new solutions. Clouds There. You guys got a good approach. Congratulations on the jam session. Thanks. >>Thank you, John. Pleasure. Thank you. Through >>the cube coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(upbeat music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And as you know, I've been running a CxO series in this COVID economy. And as we go into the post-isolation world, really want to focus and expand our scope and really look at startups. And of course, we're going to look at startups, let's follow the money. And I want to start with the investor. Mark Roberge is here. He's the managing director at Stage 2 capital. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School, former CRO over at HubSpot. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, you bet, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> So I love that, you know... looking at your career a little bit, on your LinkedIn and following some of your videos, I love the fact that you did, and now you teach and you're also applying it with Stage 2 Capital. Tell us a little bit more about both of your career and Stage 2. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's a bit serendipitous, especially last 10 years, but I've always had this learn, do, teach framework in my, in mind as I go through the decades of my career, you know, like you're probably like 80% learning in your twenties, early thirties and you know, 20% doing. Then, you know, I think my thirties was like leading the HubSpot sales team, a lot of doing, a little bit of teaching, you know, kind of hopping into different schools, et cetera, and also doing a lot of, some writing. And now like, I'm teaching it. I think investing kind of falls into that too, you know, where you've got this amazing opportunity to meet, the next generation of, of extraordinary entrepreneurs and engage with them. So yeah, that, that has been my career. You know, Dave, I've been a, passionate entrepreneur since 22 and then, the last one I did was HubSpot and that led to just an opportunity to build out one of the first sales teams in a complete inside environment, which opened up the doors for a data driven mindset and all this innovation that led to a book that led to recruitment on HBS's standpoint, to like come and teach that stuff, which was such a humbling honor to pursue. And that led to me a meeting my co-founder, Jay Po, of Stage 2 Capital, who was a customer to essentially start the first VC fund, running back by sales and marketing leaders, which was his vision. But when he proposed it to me, addressed a pretty sizeable void, that I saw, in the entrepreneur ecosystem that I thought could make a substantial impact to the success rate of startups. >> Great, I want to talk a little bit about how you guys compete and what's different there, but you know, I've read some of your work, looked at some of your videos, and we can bring that into the conversation. But I think you've got some real forward-thinking for example, on the, you know, the best path to the upper right. The upper right, being that, that xy-axis on growth and adoption, you know, do you go for hyper-growth or do you go for adoption? How you align sales and marketing, how you compensate salespeople. I think you've got some, some leading-edge thinking on that, that I'd love for you to bring into the conversation, but let's start with Stage 2. I mean, how do you compete with the big guys? What's different about Stage 2 Capital? >> Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, we're a bunch of sales and marketing and execs. I mean, our backing is, a hundred plus CROs, VPs of marketing, CMOs from, from the public companies. I mean, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Asana, I mean, just pick a unicorn, we probably have some representation from it. So that's, a big part of how we compete, is most of the time, when a rocket ship startup is about to build a sales team, one of our LPs gets a call. And because of that, we get a call, right. And, and so there's, we're just deep in, in helping... So first off, assess the potential and risks of a startup in their current, go to market design, and then really, you know, stepping in, not just with capital, but a lot of know-how in terms of, you know, how to best develop this go-to-market for their particular context. So that's a big part of our differentiation. I don't think we've ever lost a deal that we tried to get into, you know, for that reason, just because we come in at the right stage, that's right for our value prop. I'd say Dave, the biggest, sort of difference, in our investing theme. And this really comes out of like, post HubSpot. In addition to teaching the HBS, I did parachute into a different startup every quarter, for one day, where you can kind of like assess their go-to-market, looking for, like, what is the underlying consistency of those series A businesses that become unicorns versus those that flatline. And if I, you know, I've now written like 50 pages on it, which I, you know, we can, we can highlight to the crew, but the underlying cliffnotes is really, the avoidance of a premature focus on top line revenue growth, and an acute focus early on, on customer attention. And, I think like, for those of you, who run in that early stage venture community these days, and especially in Silicon Valley, there's this like, triple, triple, double, double notion of, like year one, triple revenue, year two, triple revenue, year three, double revenue, year four, double revenue, it's kind of evolved to be like the holy grail of what your objectives should be. And I do think like there is a fraction of companies that are ready for that and a large amount of them that, should they pursue that path, will lead to failure. And, and so, we take a heavy lens toward world-class customer retention as a prerequisite, to any sort of triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling type model. >> So, let me ask you a couple of questions there. So it sounds like your LPs are heavily, not only heavily and financially invested, but also are very active. I mean, is that a, is that a fears thing? How active are the LPs in reality? I mean, they're busy people. They're they're software operators. >> Yeah. >> Do they really get involved in businesses? >> Absolutely. I mean, half of our deals that we did in fund one came from the LPs. So we get half of our funnel, comes from LPs. Okay. So it's always like source-pick-win-support. That's like, what basically a VC does. And our LPs are involved in every piece of that. Any deal that we do, we'll bring in four or five of our LPs to help us with diligence, where they have particular expertise in. So we did an insuretech company in Q4, one of our LPs runs insurance practice at Workday. And this particular play he's selling it to big insurance companies. He was extremely helpful, to understand that domain. Post investment, we always bring in four or five LPs to go deeper than I can on a particular topic. So one of our plays is about to stand up in account based marketing, you know, capability. So we brought in the CMO, a former CMO at Rapid7 and the CMO at Unisys, both of which have, stood in, stood up like, account based marketing practices, much more deeply, than I could. You know of course, we take the time to get to know our LPs and understand both their skills, and experiences as well as their willingness to help, We have Jay Simons, who's the President of Atlassian. He doesn't have like hours every quarter, he's running a $50 billion company, right? So we have Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, right? He's running a $10 billion company now. So, we just get deal flow from them and maybe like an event once or twice a year, versus I would say like 10 to 20% of our LPs are like that. I would say 60% of them are active operators who are like, "You know what? I just miss the early days, and if I could be active with one or two companies a quarter, I would love that." And I would say like a quarter of them are like semi-retired and they're like, they're choosing between helping our company and being on the boat or the golf course. >> Is this just kind of a new model? Do you see having a different philosophy where you want to have a higher success rate? I mean, of course everybody wants to have a, you know, bat a thousand. >> Yeah. >> But I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah. I don't think it, I'm not advocating slower growth, but just healthier growth. And it's just like an extra, it's really not different than sort of the blitzscaling oriented San Francisco VC, okay? So, you know, I would say when we were doing startups in the nineties, early 2000s before The Lean Startup, we would have this idea and build it in a room for a year and then sell it in parallel, basically sell it everywhere and Eric Ries and The Lean Startup changed all that. Like he introduced MVPs and pivots and agile development and we quickly moved to, a model of like, yeah, when you have this idea, it's not like... You're really learning, keep the team small, keep the burn low, pivot, pivot, pivot, stay agile and find product-market fit. And once you do that, scale. I would say even like, West Coast blitzscaling oriented VCs, I agree with that. My only take is... We're not being scientifically rigorous, on that transition point. Go ask like 10 VCs or 10 entrepreneurs, what's product-market fit, and you'll get 10 different answers. And you'll get answers like when you have lots of sales, I just, profoundly disagree with that. I think, revenue in sales has very little to do with product-market fit. That's like, that's like message-market fit. Like selling ice to Eskimos. If I can sell ice to Eskimos, it doesn't mean that product-market fit. The Eskimos didn't need the ice. It just means I was good at like pitching, right? You know, other folks talk about like, having a workable product in a big market. It's just too qualitative. Right? So, that's all I'm advocating is, that, I think almost all entrepreneurs and investors agree, there's this incubation, rapid learning stage. And then there's this thing called product-market fit, where we switch to rapid scale. And all I'm advocating is like more scientist science and rigor, to understanding some sequences that need to be checked off. And a little bit more science and rigor on what is the optimal pace of scale. Because when it comes to scale, like pretty much 50 out of 50 times, when I talk to a series A company, they have like 15 employees, two sales reps, they got to like 2 million in revenue. They raise an 8 million-dollar round in series A, and they hired 12 salespeople the next month. You know, and Dave, you and your brother, who runs a large sales team, can really understand how that's going to failure almost all the time. (Dave mumbles) >> Like it's just... >> Yeah it's a killer. >> To be able to like absorb 10 reps in a month, being a 50, it's just like... Who even does all those interviews? Who onboards them? Who manages them? How do we feed them with demand? Like these are some of the things I just think, warrant more data and science to drive the decisions on when and how fast to scale. >> Mark, what is the key indicator then, of product-market fit? Is it adoption? Is it renewal rates? >> Yeah. It's retention in my opinion. Right? So, so the, the very simple framework that I require is you're ready to scale when you have product-market and go to market-fit. And let's be, extremely precise, and rigorous on the definitions. So, product-market fit for me, the best metric is retention. You know, that essentially means someone not only purchased your offering, but experienced your offering. And, after that experience decided to repurchase. Whether they buy more from you or they renew or whatever it is. Now, the problem with it is, in many, like in the world we live inside's, it's like, the retention rate of the customers we acquire this quarter is not evident for a year. Right, and we don't have a year to learn. We don't have a year to wait and see. So what we have to do is come up with a leading indicator to customer retention. And that's something that I just hope we see more entrepreneurs talking about, in their product market fit journey. And more investors asking about, is what is your lead indicator to customer retention? Cause when that gets checked off, then I believe you have product-market fit, okay? So, there's some documentation on some unicorns that have flirted with this. I think Silicon Valley calls it the aha moment. That's great. Just like what. So like Slack, an example, like, the format I like to use for the lead indicator of customer retention is P percent of customers, do E event, in T time, okay? So, it basically boils it down to those three variables, P E T. So if we bring that to life and humanize it, 70% of the customers, we sign up, this is Slack, 70% of the customers who sign up, send 2000 team messages in 30 days, if that happens, we have product-market fit. I like that a lot more, than getting to a million in revenue or like having a workable product in a big market. Dropbox, 85% of customers, share one file in one hour. HubSpot, I know this was the case, 75% of customers, use five or more of the 25 features in the platform, within 60 days. Okay? P percent, do E event, in T time. So, if we can just format that, and look at that through customer cohorts, we often get visibility into, into true product market-fit within weeks, if not like a month or two. And it's scientifically, data-driven in terms of his foundation. >> Love it. And then of course, you can align sales compensation, you know, with that retention. You've talked a lot about that, in some of your work. I want to get into some of the things that stage two is doing. You invest in SaaS companies. If I understand it correctly, it's not necessarily early stage. You're looking for companies that have sort of achieved some degree of revenue and now need help. It needs some operational help and scaling. Is that correct? >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's a little bit broader in size, as any sort of like B2B software, any software company that's scaling through a sales team. I mean, look at our backers and look at my background. That's, that's what we have experience in. So not really any consumer plays. And yeah, I mean, we're not, we have a couple product LPs. We have a couple of CFO type LPs. We have a couple like talent HR LPs, but most of us are go-to-market. So we don't, you know, there's awesome seed funds out there that help people set up their product and engineering team and go from zero to one in terms of the MVP and find product-market fit. Right? We like to come in right after that. So it's usually like between the seed and the A, usually the revenue is between half a million and 1.5 million. And of course we put an extraordinary premium on customer retention, okay? Whereas I think most of our peers put an extraordinary premium on top line revenue growth. We put an extraordinary premium on retention. So if I find a $700,000 business that, you know, has whatever 50, 70 customers, you know, depending on their ticket size, it has like North of 90% local retention. That's super exciting. Even if they're only growing like 60%, it's super exciting. >> What's a typical size of investments. Do you typically take board seats or not? >> Yeah. We typically put in like between like seven hundred K, one and a half million, in the first check and then have, larger amounts for follow on. So on the A and the B. We try not to take board's seats to be honest with you, but instead the board observers. It's a little bit selfish in terms of our funds scale. Like the general counsel from other venture capitalists is of course, like, the board seat is there for proper governance in terms of like, having some control over expenditures and acquisition conversations, et cetera, or decisions. But a lot of people who have had experience with boards know that they're very like easy and time efficient when the company is going well. And there are a ton of work when the company is not going well. And it really hurts the scale, especially on a smaller fund like us. So we do like to have board observers seats, and we go to most of the board meetings so that our voice is heard. But as long as there's another fund in there that, has, world-class track record in terms of, holding proper governance at the board level, we prefer to defer to them on that. >> All right, so the COVID lock down, hit really in earnest in March, of course, we all saw the Sequoia memo, The Black Swan memo. You were, I think it HubSpot, when, you remember the Rest In Peace Good Times memo, came out very sort of negative, put up all over the industry, you know, stop spending. But there was some other good advice in there. I don't mean to sort of, go too hard on that, but, it was generally a negative sentiment. What was your advice to your portfolio companies, when COVID hit, what were you telling them? >> Yeah, I summarized this in our lead a blog article. We kicked off our blog, which is partially related to COVID in April, which has kind of summarize these tips. So yes, you are correct, Dave. I was running sales at HubSpot in '08 when we had last sort of major economic, destabilization. And I was freaking out, you know (laughs briefly) at the time we were still young, like 20, 30 reps and numbers to chase. And... I was, actually, after that year, looking back, we are very fortunate that we had a value prop that was very recession-proof. We were selling to the small business community, who at the time was cutting everything except new ways to generate sales. And we happen to have the answer to that and it happened to work, right? So it showed me that, there's different levels of being recession proof. And we accelerated the raise of our second fund for stage two with the anticipation that there would be a recession, which, you know, in the venture world, some of the best things you could do is close a fund and then go into a recession, because, there's more deals out there. The valuations are lower and it's much easier to understand, nice to have versus must have value props. So, the common theme I saw in talking to my peers who looked back in the '01 crisis, as well as the '08 crisis, a year later was not making a bolder decision to reorient their company in the current times. And usually on the go-to-market, that's two factors, the ICP who you're selling to, ideal customer profile and the CVP, what your message is, what's your customer value prop. And that was really, in addition to just stabilizing cash positions and putting some plans in there. That was the biggest thing we pushed our portfolio on was, almost like going through the exercise, like it's so hard as a human, to have put like nine months into a significant investment leading up to COVID and now the outcome of that investment is no longer relevant. And it's so hard to let that go. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. >> But you have to, you have to. And now it's everything from like, you spent two years learning how to sell to this one persona. And now that persona is like, gyms, retail and travel companies. Like you've got to let that go. (chuckle simultaneously) You know what I mean? Like, and, you know, it's just like... So that's really what we had to push folks on was just, you know, talking to founders and basically saying this weekend, get into a great headspace and like, pretend like you were parachuted into your company as a fresh CEO today. And look around and appreciate the world and what it is. What is this world? What are the buyers talking about? Which markets are hot, which markets are not, look at the assets that you have, look at your product, look at your staff, look at your partners, look at your customer base, and come up with a strategy from the ground up based on that. And forget about everything you've done in the last year. Right? And so, that's really what we pushed hard on. And in some cases, people just like jumped right on it. It was awesome. We had a residential real estate company that within two weeks, stood up a virtual open house module that sold like hotcakes. >> Yeah. >> That was fantastic execution. And we had other folks that we had to have like three meetings with to push them deep enough, to go more boldly. But that, was really the underlying pattern that I saw in past, recessions and something I pushed the portfolio on, is just being very bold on your pivots. >> Right? So I wanted to ask you how your portfolio companies are doing. I'm imagining you saw some looked at this opportunity as a tailwind. >> Yeah. >> You mentioned the virtual, open house, a saw that maybe were exposed, had, revenue exposure to hard-hit industries and others kind of in the middle. How are your portfolio companies doing? >> Yes, strong. I'm trying to figure out, like, of course I'm going to say that, but I'm trying to figure out like how to provide quant, to just demonstrate that. We were fortunate that we had no one, and this was just dumb luck. I mean, we had no one exclusively selling to like travel, or, restaurants or something. That's just bad luck if you were, and we're fortunate that we got a little lucky there, We put a big premium, obviously we had put a big premium on customer retention. And that, we always looked at that through our recession proof lens at all our investments. So I think that helped, but yeah, I mean, we've had, first off, we made one investment post COVID. That was the last investment on our first fund and that particular company, March, April, May, their results were 20% higher than any month in history. Those are the types of deals we're seeing now is like, you literally find some deals that are accelerating since COVID and you really just have to assess if it's permanent or temporary, but that one was exciting. We have a telemedicine company that's just like, really accelerating post COVID, again, luck, you know, in terms of just their alignment with the new world we're living in. And then, jeez! I mean, we've had, I think four term sheets, for markups in our portfolio since March. So I think that's a good sign. You know, we only made 11 investments and four of them, either have verbal or submitted term sheets on markups. So again, I feel like the portfolio is doing quite well, and I'm just trying to provide some quantitative measures. So it doesn't feel like a political answer. (Mark chuckles) >> Well, thank you for that, but now, how have you, or have you changed your sort of your thesis post COVID? Do you feel like your... >> Sure. >> Your approach was sort of geared towards, you know, this... >> Yeah. >> Post COVID environment? But what changes have you made. >> A little bit, like, I think in any bull market, generally speaking, there's just going to be a lot of like triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling, huge focus on top-line revenue growth. And in any down market, there's going to be a lot of focus on customer retention unit economics. Now we've always invested in the latter, so that doesn't change much. There's a couple of things that have changed. Number one, we do look for acceleration post COVID. Now, that obviously we were not, we weren't... That lens didn't exist pre-COVID, So in addition to like great retention, selling through a sales team, around the half million to a million revenue, we want to see acceleration since COVID and we'll do diligence to understand if that's a permanent, or a temporary advantage. I would say like... Markets like San Francisco, I think become more attractive in post COVID. There's just like, San Francisco has some magic happening there's some VC funds that avoid it, cause it's too expensive. There's some VC funds that only invest in San Francisco, because there's magic happening. We've always just been, you know... we have two portfolio companies there that have done well. Like we look at it and if it's too expensive, we have to avoid it. But we do agree that there's magic happening. I did look at a company last week. (chuckles inaudibly) So Dave, there are 300K in revenue, and their last valuation is 300 million. (both chuckle) >> Okay, so why is San Francisco more attractive, Mark? >> Well, I mean and those happened in Boston too. >> We looked at... (Mark speaks inaudibly) >> I thought you were going to tell me the valuations were down. (Dave speaks inaudibly) >> Here's the deal all right, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't and this is one, but in general, I think like they have come down. And honestly, the other thing that's happened is good entrepreneurs that weren't raising are now raising. Okay? So, a market like that I think becomes more attractive. The other thing that I think that happens is your sort of following strategies different. Okay so, there is some statistical evidence that, you know, obviously we're coming out of a bear market, a bullish market in, in both the public and the private equities. And there's been a lot of talk about valuations in the private sector is just outrageous. And so, you know, we're fortunate that we come in at this like post seed, pre-A, where it's not as impacted. It is, but not as or hasn't been, but because there's so many more multibillion-dollar funds that have to deploy 30 to 50 million per investment, there's a lot of heating up that's happened at that stage. Okay? And so pre COVID, we would have taken advantage of that by taking either all or some of our money off the table, in these following growth rounds. You know, as an example, we had a company that we made an investment with around 30 million evaluation and 18 months later, they had a term sheet for 500. So that's a pretty good return in 18 months. And you know, that's an expensive, you know, so that that's like, wow, you know, we probably, even though we're super bullish on the company, we may want to take off a 2X exposition... >> Yeah. >> And take advantage of the secondaries. And the other thing that happens here, as you pointed out, Dave is like, risk is not, it doesn't become de-risk with later rounds. Like these big billion dollar funds come in, they put pressure on very aggressive strategic moves that sometimes kills companies and completely outside of our control. So it's not that we're not bullish on the company, it's just that there's new sets of risks that are outside of the scope of our work. And so, so that that's probably like a less, a lesser opportunity post COVID and we have to think longer term and have more patient capital, as we navigate the next year or so of the economy. >> Yeah, so we've got to wrap, but I want to better understand the relationship between the public markets and you've seen the NASDAQ up, which is just unbelievable when you look at what's happening in main street, and the relationship between the public markets and the private markets, are you saying, they're sort of tracking, but not really identical. I mean, what's the relationship. >> Okay, there's a hundred, there's thousands of people that are better at that than me. Like the kind of like anecdotal thoughts that I, or the anecdotal narrative that I've heard in past recessions and actually saw too, was the private market, when the public market dropped, it took nine months roughly for the private market to correct. Okay, so there was a lag. And so there's, some arguments that, that would happen here, but this is just a weird situation, right? Of like the market, even though we're going through societal crazy uncertainty, turmoil and, and tremendous tragedy, the markets did drop, but they're pretty hot right now, specifically in tech. And so there's a number of schools of thoughts there that like some people claim that tech is like the utilities companies of the eighties, where it's just a necessity and it's always going to be there regardless of the economy. Some people argue that what's happened with COVID and the remote workplace have made, you know, accelerated the adoption of tech, the inevitable adoption, and others could argue that like, you know, the worst is still the come. >> Yeah. And of course, you've got The Fed injecting so much liquidity into the system, low interest rates, Mark, last question. Give me a pro tip for entrepreneurs. (Mark Sighs) >> I would say, like, we've talked a lot about, this methodology with, you know, customer retention, really focusing there, align everything there as opposed to top line revenue growth initially. I think that the extension I do at this point is, do your diligence on your investors, and what their thoughts are on your future growth plans to see if they're aligned. Cause that, that becomes like, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when they dig into this work, they do want to operate around it. But that becomes that much harder when you have investors that think a different way. So I would just, you know, just always keep in mind that, you know, I know it's so hard to raise money, but you know, do the diligence on your investors to understand, what they'd like to see in the next two years and how it's aligned with your own vision. >> Mark is really great having you on. I'd love to have you back and as this thing progresses, and see how it all shakes out. It really a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. We'll see you next time. (music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and I'm talking to you out of our Boston area studio, and we have been doing a CXO leadership series, talking with leaders across the IT industry about how they're managing during this global pandemic. I'm really happy to welcome back to the program, he's a Cube alumni. He was a Racker, and he is now with Stacker. We'll get into the company in a bit, but Prashanth Chandrasekar, the CEO of Stack Overflows, thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you for having me again Stu. Really a pleasure, and always a fan of the Cube, so great to be here. >> Alright, and we note that you sporting the quarantine, you know beard, you know, grown since the last time we had you on the program. Prasthanth, you were named CEO of Stack Overflow at the end of 2019. Obviously, certain plans that you have you're a Harvard Business School alum, you've worked in, you know, the enterprise and cloud communities for a while. Take us back to, you know, what your team has been doing, really to react and lead in this global pandemic. >> Ya, no happy to, Stu, and obviously this is a very, you know, trying time for, you know, just the world in general right. So, companies small and large are having to kind of grapple with the reality, but I would say in general, I started October 1st, 2019 at, you know, at this amazing company, and it's just, been a real joy to see us really adapt very quickly based on just you know, just kind of challenging environment that we're in, and primarily if you think about Stack Overflow, you know, we were blessed that our, you know, our company has an ethos, an ethos perspective. We've been you know, highly remote in nature for years, for over a decade so you know, 80% of our team, product engineering team has been remote. 60% of our marketing team was remote, and then 40% of our company was remote all around the world. So, moving from that 40% to 100%, which we did very proactively in March, early March of 2020, has been a huge boon for our company in just our Stackers as you pointed out, they've just been very, I would say grateful that we've done that very, very quickly. Secondly, I would say the just the notion of, you know, being able to think about our business, and you know, our community, and how do we help each other. We've done a lot, you know, we meet with you know, we come together as a team, you know, three times a week, and we've already had sort of this Covid stand up as a leadership team, as a newly formed leadership team mind you, which I've just helped form over the past six months, and we've all really gone, you know, really to the extremes to make sure that our Stackers are their health and safety are taken care of. How do we serve our community in this environment? How do we make sure our customers are being, you know, really are getting the maximum value of our products, which are all focused on collaboration, so very relevant in this remote world. So, it's really been, I would say, all around, people have really rallied we had sort of a, I would say, somewhat of an advantage just having you know, adopting remote work at this point. >> But Prasthanth, maybe it makes sense if actually step back for a second. I'm sure most people are familiar with Stack Overflow, but give us, the kind of, the high level view of, you know, what the company is, and what drew you into the leadership role there. >> Yeah, no absolutely. You know I think Stack Overflow extremely well known obviously, with every developer and technologist in the world. So, in a nutshell, you know, we are the world's most trusted and largest community for developers and technologists. We have something like 120 million unique visitors that come to our websites every month, and talking 180,000 sign ups on a monthly basis. So, just say we do say a dramatic amount of impact to help ultimately, these folks solve their most complex problems on a variety of topics, whether that is cloud related topics, security related topics, full stack engineering related topics like Python or Rust, or you name it. All those, you know, those areas are covered in very much and very a lot of detail for our community we effectively share. Solutions to common questions, and code, and really be able to accelerate the development of software around the world. So, ultimately, it comes down to our mission, which our mission what we like to say is we help write the script of the future by serving developers and technologists, and so, that's our company in a nutshell. On top of that, ecosystem of communities that we've built. We have a great set of products, SaaS products that we've also built to help with real time collaboration within companies in a very, very similar format to our public community format. So, that's been very compelling. So, the two reasons why I joined the company beyond obviously the mission, number 1 is just the global impact, you know, there are only a few companies that have the level of impact that this company has around the world and helping everybody sort of accelerate their software development. Whatever apps you're building, and obviously we know, that we're sort of in this beautiful, Goldilocks zone of digital transformation, where everything is accelerating, even given the current environment. That's the first reason, just given the vast reach of this company, and then secondly, you know, is the fact that we are really trying to transform the company and accelerate the transformation into a SaaS company. So, our Stack Overflow for teams product, which is again the knowledge sharing SaaS squad that we have internally, is really a phenomenal way to share evergreen knowledge, and non-ephemeral type information within companies so that your most important questions are answered. They're answered once, and your not, you know, constantly having to, you know, tap people on the shoulder to answer a common question. So, those are the two primary reasons. One is the impact to the community, and secondly acceleration of our SaaS business. >> Excellent, Prasthanth. So wonder if you could help us drill in, and understand the business little bit. There's private repository, there's teams there. You know, it's interesting, if you look on the outside you say wait, is this kind of like a Reddit? Or when I hear you describe it, sure reminds me a little bit of say GitHub, who obviously got taken off the table for a rather large number so, I'll let you bring us inside a little bit of you know, how does the company you know, make money, and what are the plans that both, you know, support, you know, those broad communities and diverse things, but also, you know built that business. >> Ya, no absolutely, you know I think for us you know, we really believe it's a common, our mission statement like I mentioned is really our core driver for us, and so the ecosystem of communities that we've built for developers, as well as technologists, again just a very, very vast number, and we create developers right, on a daily basis through our community. So, it's very powerful in that people are learning about new technologies, or frameworks, or you know, cloud technologies through our websites, and so they are you know, that's a bit of a huge accelerant to this creation of jobs, and you know, people's capabilities. On the foundation of that, which is obviously, you know, accessible to everybody, and you know, it's free in fact, we had this ecosystem of products, and the first one in the primary Saas product is Stack Overflow for teams, which is this knowledge sharing and collaboration product that allows companies within, or teams within companies to use the same format that they absolutely love in the public community that they use to, you know, learn up on those subjects that I mentioned, but now share internal priority information to accelerate their development internally. To breakdown walls between teams, like product, and engineering, and developers, and operations, and also go to market teams, like product marketing teams, and sales teams, and so we have you know, a tremendous number of enterprises that have joined our program, over the past several quarters including Microsoft, who is a very happy customer that uses, you know, they have something like 70,000 developers and technologists, and go to market folks within Microsoft that are using our product platform to breakdown walls, and to be able to move very quickly with launching their products, and staying collaborative internally. In addition to that, we have what we call our Reach and Relevance business which is all around helping, just based on the fact that we have such massive reach in 120 million people from around the world showing up on our websites. Being able to help companies you know, showcase their capabilities and products in our platform, and also engage with the community, and for obviously the community to then learn about many of the latest and greatest of what's being launched by these phenomenal companies that are innovating very rapidly. >> Ya, so Prasthanth, we started off the conversation, you talked a little bit about the impact of the global pandemic. I'm curious, are you seeing any, you know, changes in trends? Are there new things that are trending on your site? Are there things that are either on the website, or they're coming to your team to learn more about? >> Ya, no definitely I think there are two places that I can point to. One would be on the community side we've definitely seen a spike in traffic in places like our meta-academia website, you know, as an example. Online learning became a huge topic of interest when people went remote, and obviously, you have families around the world that are trying to figure out not only how to school their kids but we have teachers all around in schools trying to figure out what are the best set of resources. So, we have, you know, all sorts of, like I said, about 40 million questions and answers across all sorts of topics, including you know, next generation E-learning sort of capabilities in our communities, and so, we've seen a spike in traffic in places like that. We've seen a spike in our medical communities, and our biology communities obviously, because of you know, people's curiosity, and these are, you know fairly advanced, you know academics, and people who are in the scientific community that spend a lot of time thinking about, you know the what's really behind Covid-19. What are the details of, you know, if you think about all sorts of topics around genetics, and obviously, the pharmaceutical implications so, we've seen a tremendous uptake in those sites, and in addition of course, overall to our overall websites, because people are spending time, you know, just at home. In addition, we've seen a very material uptake in our Stack Overflow for teams product where we know we just closed, you know our company's like largest deal in our company's history this past week for about 30,000 seats, you know, at a very large financial services institution, a global services financial institution. There's more and more companies that are thinking about business continuity. They're thinking about how do they stay, how do they collaborate across their distributed teams, their remote teams, and we have, obviously a very significant solution in that space. >> Excellent, well congratulations on that deal. It brings up, I guess, what are some of the key KPI's that you're tracking for to really assure the growth and the health of your business. >> Ya, I think both in terms of, you know , if you think about two sides of the coin right. From the community standpoint, obviously we care about our active users, and our engaged users, and the number of sign-ups, and on that front, that first part of that, you know, we've seen just a dramatic increase, you know, in all those stats, including, you know this year, just as a result of Covid, on average last year, in 2019, you know, the number of sign-ups per month was something like, 150,000 sign-ups per month, unique sign ups from around the world. People signing up for Stack Overflow accounts. This year, on average, it's gone up, and March was our highest sign-up month ever with 180,000 sign-ups for the month. So, we're seeing so that's important. In addition to sign-ups of course, when they come on to our websites we want them to get the answers to their most pressing questions, to be able to engage them with content that is useful to them. So, engagement, you know in terms of monthly engaged users very important, monthly active users is very important for us, and obviously our sign-up numbers. So, those are kind of the community oriented stats that we'd, and KPI's that we'd really track, and those look, you know look very promising, and then, finally on the business side, which is the other side of the coin, in our teams business primarily, and our Reach and Relevance business. Our teams business is all about our customers getting value from the collaboration SaaS platform that we have that they've signed up for right. So, are they using the various features? We've integrated that teams product with all the other popular tools that people use for things like real time collaborations. We integrate with Slack. We integrate with Microsoft Teams. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated even with Enterprise, because really the idea is to be a part of that developer and technologist workflow so, folks can really look to Stackflow for Teams as the place where they get common answers, get great answers to their common questions that are constantly being asked within companies, but it's not very effective to ask the same questions again and again. So, the idea is to integrate with these tools to make sure that you are able to have an evergreen place where you can keep that knowledge. So, that's, you know we track usage of those integrations. We talk about how many of those questions and answers are being, you know, being exchanged within companies, and how much ultimately the outcome of saving time and money for our clients so that they are being very effective in their product development cycles, and people are not being tapped on the shoulder for every single item that might comes across for an individual company. So, that's really, there's an economic study that we performed with Forrester that captures a lot of this. So that's, you know, that's and then region relevance is all around engagement on our websites. Some people already looking and seeing, finding value in the content that our companies are posting, and force companies to be effectively translating their knowledge to the audience. >> Awesome. Well, Prasthanth congratulations on the progress, and definitely look forward to cracking the how the Stack Overflow Team is doing going forward. >> Thanks so much Stu, really appreciate the chat, and great to see you again as usual. >> Alright, make sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back all righty Jeff Rick here with the cube we are in our Palo Alto studios today and as we continue to go through week after week after week of the kovat crisis the kovat situation you know we've been focusing on leadership and we've been reaching out to the community to get their take on you know what's happening best practices things that they can share to help and to share knowledge with the rest of the community and we're really excited to have our next guest Rebecca Knight you know her as a guest host on the cube she's actually been a freelance journalist for decades and writes for all the top pubs it's how we met her in the first first place doing some working at mighty so Rebecca first off great to see you it's been too long we were supposed to be together this week but situation kind of changed the schedule a little bit indeed it's so it's so good to see your face Jeff and it's so fun to be working with the cube gang again even though we are we are many miles apart right now we should all be together but but I'm really happy to be you're happy to be talking to you great well I am too and let's let's jump into it because you know you've been writing about leadership but really why I wanted to reach out with you is instead of you kind of co-hosting our guests really get get your perspective on things because you've been writing about leadership for a very long time so now that we're I don't know six weeks into this thing what are you writing about what you know it has it has the the topics kind of shifted you know over the last several weeks what's kind of top of mind what do you publish in this week absolutely the topics have shifted in the sense that there is only one topic and that is hope at 19 and that is how our managers coping with this with this health crisis this pandemic that is all over the world of course and a huge part of our workplace right now managers are just dealing with this unprecedented event industry and trying to be a sense of strength for their colleagues and for their direct report at a time where they themselves don't really know what the future holds none of us know what the future holds and so this is a very our managers right now and so that's that's a lot of what I'm doing for her for Harvard Business trivia now there's so many pieces to that one you know we've been talking a lot about it as being kind of this light switch digital transformation moment because even if you had planned and people have been planning and things have been slowly moving whether it be working from home for jobs or remote education in higher education or a lot of these things they were kind of you know moving along and all sudden boom full stop ready set go everyone has to stay home so that there wasn't really a plan a rollout plan and it's quite a challenge and the other thing is not only for you the individual who's going through this but their significant other or spouses also home the kids are also home and again nobody really got an opportunity to plan and try to think some of these things through so it's it's it's not only just working from home but now it says pandemic that adds all these extra layers of complexity and to you to your point uncertainty which is always the hardest thing to deal with you know Jeff I've actually been working from home for over a decade now I work for the Financial Times for about four ten years and that and I even and then I was Boston corresponding for the FT working from home I was following a bunch of writers on trip Twitter people are writing and saying working from home is the worst and I'm constantly please like concentrate this I will never want to work from home and then all these writers were chiming if they hold up theirs working from home and then there's working from home during a global pandemic two totally different things um but you're absolutely right this is a time where our families are underfoot we're trying to homeschool our children we are quarantined with our spouse trying to make our marriages work and also trying to do the job that we're being paid to do if we're lucky enough they'll be employed or still have assignment I in the hoppers though you're right this is this is a very this is not necessarily the test of remote work and remote learning that I think we all deserve and we will some day have and we're showing this is obviously an experiment and in some ways that's showing that it can work in ways but there is also this is this isn't exact this is more oh hey you have eight days to get all your employees online right now or eight days to roll out your curriculum so this is not quite exactly what we'd all had in my remember talking about the future of online education or the digital organization but but it certainly interested the watch all happen so it's funny as part of this we had Martin make us on and he has been running distributed teams for decades and it was really funny his take on it which was that it's so much easier to fake it at the office right and and to many people we had Amy Hayworth on from Citrix and in a blog that she referenced you know eventually people will start judging people based on outcome versus behavior and activities and it just it strikes me that in 2020 you know is this what it's taken to get people to actually judge people by their output and I think you know Martin's other take was that when you work from home all you have is your output you know you don't have kind of looking busy or saying hi to the boss or the car looks really great today you know you only have your output in his take was it's actually a much easier way to decide who's doing the job and who's not doing the job yeah you know I'm of two minds with that because I think that there is so much to be said for the teamwork there so I mean you may not be the person who is definitely always pedal to the metal getting every single thing done checking all the boxes you you know I mean obviously you have to be sort of have a baseline of productivity and engagement but there's also just you're someone that other people like to work with you're someone who offers good ideas who can be a really good sounding board who just will have those moments of creativity that are really important for a theme to be to succeed and to get to get to the finish line and I can get again I'm not saying the people who are just have just been coasting oh yeah this is it for you but I'm just saying that there's a lot of different personalities and a lot of skills that then go into making a great high-functioning team it takes all type and so and so I think that we are missing that we are missing the camaraderie the collegiality of the watercooler chat and and that where teams do a lot of problem solving is is sort of that informal conversation that right now a lot of us are missing because we've all had way too much zoom and no one wants to just sort of shoot the breeze on zoom with anyone so what so what are you telling people so unfortunately you know this is not how we would have planned it and we would have probably transitioned it a little bit smoother matter but here we are and were actually now five six weeks into it and the I think the the Monday was I think March 16th was the big day here in the Bay Area when it all kind of got got official so what are some things that you're sharing with with leaders and managers you know some specific things they can do some specific tasks that they can do to help get through this better the first thing I would say and this is what I'm hearing from the experts that I'm talking to the people who really study crisis management is first of all it's deal yourself this is this is a challenge of a lifetime and you are leading through something that is hard and you need to understand that and and first of all don't be too hard on yourself because this is this is this is really difficult this is what they're going to be writing case studies about in business schools for decades for to come these are really big management challenges steal yourself be ready for the challenge make sure you are taking care of yourself getting enough sleep getting rest on the weekends time with your family and friends do exercise eat right don't just snack on Cheetos all day long make sure you are taking care of yourself in terms of interacting with your employees and your team obviously like I just said everyone everyone cannot everyone's zum fatigue is real um but at the same time you do need to make time to talk to your team and say hey how are you how are things make sure that people are you wait no baby we need to make sure that you have your your finger on the pulse of your team and make sure everyone's mental health it is they okay so yeah empathy humility it share with your team problems that your the your face singing yourself I mean obviously they should not be the repository for all of your fears and insecurities and worries about whoa I don't know if I got a turn am I gonna have a job next week but um but at the same time II talked about the challenges you're facing too your team needs to know that you aren't a superhuman you know you you're a human too you're going through this just like they are right that's what's such a weird thing about it - you know having been through a couple of events like the earthquake or Mount st. Helens blowing up you know the people that were into that area when something like that goes down have a common story right where were you in the earthquake where are you and mount st. Helens blew up but now this is a global thing where everyone will have a story where are you in March 20 20 so the fact that we're all going through it together and there's so many stories and impacts you know the more people you talk to you know the layers of The Onion's just keep on peeling - more and more and more impact but I'm curious to get your take on kind of how you see once we do get out of this because whether it's 12 months or 18 months or 24 months to get to a vaccine you know now it seems like forever and the grand scheme of things it's going to be a relatively short period of window but but over that time you know behaviors become habits and I'm just curious to get your take as to when it's okay to go back to work whenever that is I don't see it going back the way that it was because who's gonna want to sit on highway 101 for two hours every morning once you've figured out a pretty good routine and a pretty good workflow without doing that how do you see it kind of shaken out so I couldn't agree more and this is a night like I said I've worked from home for many many years and so I do think that people this is dispelling the myth that you need to work where you live you have a lot more agency and a lot more freedom to get your job done anywhere you want to live and if that's in a city because I mean God willing sports will come back and pewter will come back music and all the reasons we love living in cities but will one day be able to do that again but if you like living near the mountains or near the ocean you can do that and get your job done so I think we're I think you're absolutely right about that we're going to see many more people making a decision about you know this is the life I want to live and I can still might do my job and yet people still like being around other people I mean I think that's why we're all going a little stir-crazy right now is because we just we missed other people we miss interacting and so I think that we will have to think about some ways to create different kinds of offices and crap we work type things but I think they could just be different offices all over and they can be in the suburbs they can be in the mountains and it could just be a place where people come together and sometimes they're in the same industry field sometimes may be the same company but I think that they don't even necessarily need to be that way I think that some people will want to work from home and I think other people will want to go someplace even if it's not what we think of as the typical American office right but I even think in and I used to think this before right as you know I ride my bikes and do all my little eToys but you know even if people didn't commute one day a week or didn't commute one day every two weeks or two days a week you know the impact on the infrastructure to me some of these second-order effects is you know looking at empty freeways and empty streets demonstrate that we actually have a lot of infrastructure it just gets overwhelmed when everybody's on it at the same time so just the whole concept of going in the same time every day of course if you're in construction or you're in trades and you got a truck full of gear that you have to take that's one thing but for so many people now that our informational workers and they're just working on a laptop whether it be home that we work or we're at the office you know even shifting a couple of days a week I think has just a huge impact on infrastructure or quality of life you know the environment in terms of pollution gas consumption and on and on and on so yeah I don't think it will go a hundred percent one way or the other but I certainly don't think it'll go 100 percent back to you know going in the office every day from 8:00 to 5:00 I I couldn't agree more and just be the idea of the quality of life I mean you know I'm I have two children 9 and 12 and they are doing their school work from home and they're they're doing all right they're hanging in my older one in particular I say that she's sort of this mix between a graduate student and a young MBA because she's got her little devices already zooming with her science teacher than play rehearsal there but but um you know why I think that the slowing down has actually been kind of good for them too because they're busy kids and they have a lot going on and actually having family dinners having board games watching family movies going for family hikes in the weekends that has been really good but in her forever I mean obviously we're also indebted and grateful to the frontline workers and and we we also see there is a lot of loss around us people losing loved ones to this horrible disease and then losing livelihood but I think and then we are seeing a few silver linings than this too so I think sometimes our quality of life it has for some people this has been quarantines getting a little old but at the same time I think that there has been some bright for a lot of for a lot of people yeah I think I think you're right in again it's a horrible human toll people getting sick and dying and in the economic toll is gargantuan especially for people with no safety net and are in industries it's just don't exist in right now like travel and leisure and and and and things that are in the business of bringing people together when you can't bring people together but just final question before I let you go is is really on higher education so it's one thing with the kids and in k-12 and you know how sophisticated are an ability to learn online but I'm I'm really more interested to get your take on higher education because you know you've already got to kind of this scale back in terms of the number of physical classes that people attend when they're and when they're an undergrad and the actual amount of time that they spend you know in an lecture I mean this is this now knocking that right off of the table and I'm just really curious to get your take on higher education with distributed learning because it's it's something that's been talked about for a long time I think there's been a lot of resistance but again this light switch moment and if it goes on for into the next school year what's what what's that going to do to the kind in higher education and the stance of of how much infrastructure they actually need to support educating these kids well I am a Wesleyan grad and the president of Wesleyan was quoted in the New York Times this weekend talking about that this very topic thing that this has really shown us the value of a residential or not necessarily for year but residential education where people are together and they are able to Bure be creative have fierce debate in the classroom that is just frankly not possible with remote learning or at least not to the same degree since the same extent and the kind of accessibility you have with professors particularly at a small liberal arts school like the one that I went through I think that Jeff a lot of a lot of colleges are not going to be able to survive this because they're just they are so different tuition dependent and a lot of kids are going to defer if they if they say you know if I can't be at college in the fall I'm gonna take a year off and go to Community College or I'm going to you know do something else take a gap year and then reassess my options once this health crisis passes and I think that for a lot of colleges that's just that's just not tenable for them and for their for their operations so I'm afraid that a lot of businesses and a lot of colleges their point of closed yeah it's just it's just crazy the the impact and just showing you know as you said we are social beings we like to be together and when you when you stop people from being together it makes you really realize how often we are together whether it's you know weddings and funerals and and bar mitzvahs and and those kind of things in church and family stuff or whether it's business things conventions concerts sporting events means so many things street fairs you know are really about bringing people together and we do like to be together so this too will pass and and and hopefully you know the Warriors in this battle thankfully are super smart you know we're hopefully using a lot of modern compute that we didn't have in the past thankfully we have things like like the Internet and zoom that you and I can talk from 3,000 miles away so I'm glad you're hopeful I'm hopeful we'll get through it and and then we can get together on a set and do some interviews together I can't wait exactly all right Rebecca well thanks for checking in be safe look forward to seeing you in person and and until then have a great I guess May we're into May Mother's Day coming up so happy Mother's Day a few days early thank you very much Jeff it was a pleasure working with you again all right we'll take care she's Rebecca I'm Jeff you are watching the cube thanks for checking in wolf see you next time [Music]

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World Here at the Sands Expo at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have Sean Kinney joining the program. He is a senior director primary storage marketing at Delhi emcee Thank you so much. Thrilled to redirect from Boston, >> the home of the universe, >> it's indeed well, we would say so so and so lots of news coming out this morning yesterday. Talk about some of the mean. If you want to start with talking about the storage platform, the mid range storage market in general sort of lay the foundation What you're seeing, what you're hearing, and then how the new the new products fit in with what with what customers air needing. We'LL >> break that a couple pieces. I believe that the mid range of the storage market is the most competitive. They're the most players. There are different architectures and implementations, and it's the biggest part of the market. About fifty eight percent or so so that attracts a lot of investments in competition. So what we announced today, it was the deli emcee Unity X t Siri's and that built on all the momentous on the success we had with Unity, which we actually announce basically the same conference three years ago. So we've sold forty thousand systems Good nowhere market leader, and the first part is the external storage market. It's declined, continues to be exaggerated. One of the Ellis firms predicted it wasn't gonna grow it all last year. Well, crew sixteen percent actually grew three billion dollars. It's with unity. Its original design points like the sort of Day one engineering principles were really around a couple of things. One was a true, unified architecture being told to do. Block storage, file storage and VM. Where've evils that was built in, not bolted on like no gateways, no extra window licensing, no limitations on file system size. The second was around operational simplicity and making it easy for a customer to install easier for custom manage. He was a customer of use remotely manage, and then we took that forward by adding all inclusive software, making it easy to own like not him to worry about software contracts. So all of that goodness is rolling forward in the engineering challenge that we took on with E x t wass. You know, a lot of mid range systems switch of those that have an active, passive architectural design. It's hard to do everything at once. Process, application data run, data reduction, run data services like snapshots of replications, all without significantly impacting performance. And a lot of cases, our competitors and other platforms have to make compromises. They say. Okay, if you want performance turned this function off. What was that challenge that our engineers took on? And that's what we came up with. No compromise for midrange storage. That's unity. Extinct. >> Yeah, Shawn, it's it's really interesting you could I could probably do a history lesson on some of the space thing back to, you know, early days when you know we were first to DMC. It was like, Oh, the data general product line. You know, getting merged in very competitive landscape is, as you said, most companies had multiple solutions, you know, unity in the name of it was to talk about Dell and AMC coming together, but what I want you coming on is there was often, you know, okay, somebody came out with, like, a new a new idea, and they sold that as a product. And then it got baked into a feature, and we saw that happened again and again and again. And the storage market, what are some of those key drivers is toe. You know what customers look for? How you differentiate yourself. Are we past that? You know, product feature churn way in the platform phase. Now, you know, we always say it would be great if software was just independent of some of these. But there's a reason why we still have storage raise. Despite the fact that, you know, it's been, you know, it's been nibbled at by some of the other, you know, cloud and hyper converge. You know, talk applications. >> Yeah. Uh, let's say that a couple ways in that, especially in the mid range. Our customers expect the system to do everything you know. It has to do everything Well, it doesn't get to be specialized for a lot of our customers. It is thie infrastructure. It is that data capital, which is the lifeblood of their business. So the first thing is it has to do everything. The second thing I would say is that because it has to do everything and one feature isn't really gonna break through anymore. The architecture's the intelligence, the reliability, the resiliency that takes years of hardening. Okay, the new competitors has to start a ground zero all over again. So I would say that that's part of the second thing I would say is, it's about the experience inside the box from the feature function and outside the box. How do we get a better experience? And for us, that starts with Cloud I. Q. It's a storage, monitoring and analytics platform that you can really you have infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand. You're not tied to a terminal, and if you want to be, of course you can. But you can now remotely monitor your entire storage environment. Unity, Power Max SC Extreme Io. Today we announce connect trick support for sandwiches in VM support. So we're going broader and deeper, you know, as well as making its water. So it's hard to have one feature breakthrough when you need the first ten to even get in the game. >> Well, as you said, for for these customers, this infrastructure has to do it all. And and so how do you manage expectations? And how do you How do you work with your customers? Maybe who have unrealistic expectations about what it can do. >> Our customers are the best. I mean, everybody says it, but because they push us and they push the product and they want to see how far it can go and they want to test it. So I love them. I love because they push us to be better. They push us to think in new ways. Uh, but yeah, there are different architectures. Have differences. Thumbs Power Max is an enterprise. High end, resilient architecture. It's never going to hit a ten thousand dollar price point like the architecture wasn't designed. And so for our customers that wants all these high end features like an end to end envy me implementation. Well, that's actually why we have power, Max. So you don't want to build another Power Macs with unity. So while the new unit e x t, it is envy Emmy ready and that'LL give us a performance boost We're balancing the benefits of envy. Emmy with the economics, the price point that come with it. >> All right, So, Sean, talk about Get front from the user standpoint, you know, we've We've talked about simplicity for a long time. I remember used to be contest. It's like All right, well, you know, bring in the kids and has he how fast they can go through the wizard Or, you know, he had a hyper converts infrastructure. It should just be a button you press and I mean had clouded. Just kind of does it. When we look at the mid range, you know, where are we in that? You know, management. You talked about Cloud like you, you know, how do we measure and how to customers look at you know how invisible their infrastructure is? >> I think every I don't think any marketing person worth his salt would say, My product is hard to use. It's easy to use the word simplicity, but I think it's we're evolving. And again, it's that outside the box experience now, the element manager Unisphere for um, for unity is very easy to use with tons of tests and research. But it's going beyond that is how do we plug into the VM? Where tools. How do we plug? How do we support containers? How do we support playbooks with Ansel? Forget it. It's moving the storage. Management's out of storage. Still remember, twenty years ago, we helped create the concept of a storage admin. You know, things that coming full circle. And except for the biggest companies, you know that it's becoming of'em where admin that wants to manage the whole environment. >> Okay, I wonder if you could walk us up the stack a little bit. You know, when you talk about these environments at the keynote this morning, we're talking about a lot of new application. You're talking about a I and M l. What's the applications, Stace? That's the sweet spot for unity. And, you know, you know, you mentioned kind of container ization in there, you know, Cloud native. How much does that tie into the mid range today? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to that. All of the above. Its some database, some file sharing, some management and movement of work loads to the cloud. Whether be cloud tearing. What? Running disaster recovery As a service where you know you need the replication You just don't want to pay for and manage and owned that second sight in the cloud. We'Ll do that as a service. So I, uh I think it's again. It goes back to that being able to do everything and with the rise of the Internet of things with the rise of new workloads, new workload types, they're just more uses for data and data continues to be the light flooding of business. But it you need the foundation. You need the performance. And with X t now twice as fast as the previous generation, you need the data reduction with compression. Indeed, implication with extra that's now up to five to one. You need the overall system efficiency so the system doesn't have a ton of overhead, and you need multiple paths to the cloud For those customers that already ofwork loads in the cloud. No, they're going to go there in the next twelve months or know that they have to at least think about it and so that we future proof them across all boys. So you need those sort of foundational aspects and we believe we're basically best in class across all of them. But then you get more >> advanced. I want to get your thoughts on where this market is going. As you said that analysts that the news of its demise has been greatly exaggerated, analysts are just not getting it right. I mean, they said it wasn't gonna grow a gross. Sixty grew sixteen percent. Why are they getting it wrong? Are there and also do? What do you see as sort of the growth trajectory of this market? I'm not >> sure they're getting it wrong. And they may be underestimating the new use cases and the new ways customers using data What I think we should probably do a better job of as an industry is realize that there is a lot of space for both best of breed infrastructure and converged infrastructure and things like Piper converge. It's not an or conversation, it's an and conversation, and no one thinks that I love working about Del Technologies is we have the aunt, you know, for us, it's not one or the other, and that's all we could sell. We have the aunt, and that allows us to really better serve our customers because over eighty percent of our customers have both. >> So, Sean, you mentioned working for Del Technologies. There are a couple people that have been at this show for a while there. Like boy, they didn't spend a lot of time in the keynotes talking about storage. Bring us in a little bit. And inside there, you know, still a deli emcee. You got still a storage company. >> Still, you've seen the name isn't there very much. So you know that we wouldn't be spending all this time and R and D and you've heard about the investments we've made in our stores sales organization and our partner organization. You don't do those investments. If you're not committed to storage it, you know, way struggled for a while. We're losing share for awhile, but that ship has turned for the last four quarters. We've grown market share in revenue, but we're pretty good trajectory. I like our chances. >> I want to ask you about something else that was brought up in the keynote. And that is this idea of a very changing workforce. The workforce is now has five generations in it. Uh, it is a much younger workforce in a in a work first that wants to work in different ways. Collaborate in different ways. Uh, how are you personally dealing with that with your team, Maybe a dispersed team. How are you managing new forms of creativity and collaboration and innovation in the workforce? And then how are you helping your customers think about these challenges? >> You know, I, uh, maybe I can't write for the Harvard Business Review. For me personally, this is my approach that is one guy's opinion for me. It's about people like you want to manage the project, not the people I expected. I trust my staff, and they range from twenty two to sixty two to be adults in to get the job done and whether they do it in the office or at home, whether they do it Tuesday at two o'Clock or Tuesday at nine o'Clock. If it's due Wednesday, I'm gonna trust them to get it done. So it's, uh, there's a little of professionals. It does require sometimes more empathy and some understanding of flexibility. But I participate in that change to I don't want to miss my kid's game, and I wanna make sure I bring my daughter to the dentist, So I, uh, I think it's for the best, because we're blurring the lines of on and off. I could see again. I don't write for our business, really a time in the next few years where vacation time is no longer tracked. I don't think that far away >> a lot of companies don't even have it at all. I mean, it's >> just you >> get your work done, do what you need to do. >> So I love it because then we come back to being more of it. It's even more about, um, a meritocracy and performance and delivery and execution. So, uh, I think it's only the better and more productive employees, happier employees. It's actually reinforcing cycle. What I found, >> and that's good for business. That's a bottom line. >> Employees. You good >> for Harvard Business Review. >> So, Sean, last thing I wanted to get is for people that didn't make it to show. Give them a beginning of flavor about what's happening from a mid range to orange around the environment here and tell us, how much time have you been spending at the Fenway and, you know, pro Basketball Hall of Fame sex mons you know, in the Expo Hall there because I know what a big sports got. You >> are not enough is the first question, quite simply, the best mid range storage just got better now the market leader, when all the advantages, we have immunity. We just rolled them forward to a new, more efficient, better performing platform. So it's, ah, our customers are gonna love over bringing forward, and I think it's our sales. Guys will find it much easier to sell. So we're, uh, we're thrilled with today's announcements. Were thrilled with where the marketplaces were thrilled with our market position and best is yet to come. >> Well, we were thrilled to have you on the cute. So thank you so much for coming on. >> It's always a pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stew Minutemen. We will have much more of the cubes Live coverage from Del Technologies World coming up in just a little bit

>> Live, from Las Vegas! It's theCube! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, it's theCube's live coverage in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018, it's theCube. We got two sets, 24 interviews per day, 94 interviews total. Next three days, we're in day two of three days coverage. It's our ninth year of covering VMworld. It's been great. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, next guest, Cube alumni, number one in the leading boards right now, Sanjay Poonen did a great job today on stage, keynote COO for VMware. Great to have you back. Thanks for coming on. >> John and Dave, you're always so kind to me, but I didn't realize you've been doing this nine years. >> This is our ninth year. >> That's half the life of VMware, awesome. Unreal. Congratulations. >> We know all the stories, all the hidden, nevermind, let's talk about your special day today. You had a really, so far, an amazing day, you were headlining the key note with a very special guest, and you did a great job. I want you to tell the story, who was on, what was the story about, how did this come about? Tech for good, a big theme in this conference has really been getting a lot of praise and a lot of great feedback. Take us through what happened today. >> Well listen, I think what we've been trying to do at VMware is really elevate our story and our vision. Elevate our partnerships, you've covered a lot of the narrative of what we've done with Andy Jessie. We felt this year, we usually have two 90 minute sessions, Day One, Day Two, and it's filled with content. We're technical company, product. We figured why don't we take 45 minutes out of the 180 minutes total and inspire people. With somebody who's had an impact on the world. And when we brainstormed, we had a lot of names suggested, I think there was a list of 10 or 15 and Malala stood out, she never spoke at a tech conference before. I loved her story, and we're all about education. The roots of VMware were at Stamford Campus. Diane Greene, and all of that story. You think about 130 million girls who don't go to school. We want to see more diversity in inclusion, and she'd never spoken so I was like, you know what, usually you go to these tech conferences and you've heard somebody who's spoken before. I'm like, lets invite her and see if she would come for the first time, and we didn't think she would. And we were able to score that, and I was still a little skeptical 'cause you never know is it going to work out or not. So thank you for saying it worked, I think we got a lot of good feedback. >> Well, in your first line, she was so endearing. You asked her what you thought a tech conference, you said too many acronyms. She just cracked the place up immediately. >> And then you heard my response, right? If somebody tells me like that, you tell VMotion wrong she looked at me what? >> Tell them about our story, real quick, our story I want to ask you a point in question. Her story, why her, and what motivated you to get her? >> Those stories, for any of you viewers, you should read the book "I'm Malala" but I'll give you the short version of the story. She was a nine year old in the Pashtun Area of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, and the Taliban setted a edict that girls could not go to school. Your rightful place was whatever, stay at home and become a mom with babies or whatever have you. You cannot go to school. And her father ran a school, Moster Yousafzai, wonderful man himself, an educator, a grandfather, and says know what, we're going to send you to school. Violating this order, and they gave a warning after warning and finally someone shot her in 2012, almost killed her. The bullet kind of came to her head, went down, and miraculously she escaped. Got on a sort of a hospital on a plane, was flown to London, and the world if you remember 2012, the world was following the story. She comes out of this and she's unscathed. She looks normal, she has a little bit of a thing on the right side of her face but her brains normal, everything's normal. Two years later she wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Has started the Malala Fund, and she is a force of nature, an amazing person. Tim Cook has been doing a lot with her in the Malala Fund. I think that actually caught my attention when Tim Cook was working with her, and you know whatever Apple does often gets a little bit of attention. >> Well great job selecting her. How's that relevant to what you guys are doing now, because you guys had a main theme Tech for Good? Why now, why VMware? A lot of people are looking at this, inspired by it. >> There are milestones in companies histories. We're at our 20 year birthday, and I'm sure at people's birthday they want to do big things, right? 20, 30, 40, 50, these decades are big ones and we thought, lets make this year a year to remember in various things we do. We had a 20 year anniversary celebration on campus, we invited Diane Greene back. It was a beautiful moment internally at Vmware during one of our employee meetings. It was a private moment, but just with her to thank her. And man, there were people emotional almost in tears saying thank you for starting this company. A way to give back to us, same way here. What better way to talk about the impact we're having in the community than have someone who is of this reputation. >> Well we're behind your mission 100%, anything you need. We loved the message, Tech for Good, people want to work for a mission driven company. People want to buy >> We hope so. >> from mission driven companies, that stated clear and the leadership you guys are providing is phenomenal. >> We had some rankings that came out around the same time. Fortune ranked companies who are changing the world, and VMware was ranked 17th overall, of all companies in the world and number one in the software category. So when you're trying to change the world, hopefully as you pointed out it's also an attractor of talent. You want to come here, and maybe even attractor of customers and partners. >> You know the other take-away was from the key note was how many Cricket fans there are in the VMworld Community. Of course we have a lot of folks from India, in our world but who's your favorite Cricketer? Was it Sachin Tendulkar? (laughs) >> Clearly you're reading off your notes Dave! >> Our Sonya's like our, >> Dead giveaway! >> Our Sonya's like our Cricket Geek and she's like, ask him about Sachin, no who's your favorite Cricketer, she wants to know. >> Sachin Tendulkar's way up there, Shayuda Free, the person she likes from Pakistan. I grew up playing cricket, listen I love all sports now that I'm here in this country I love football, I love basketball, I like baseball. So I'll watch all of them, but you know you kind of have those childhood memories. >> Sure >> And the childhood memories were like she talk about, India, Pakistan games. I mean this was like, L.A. Dodgers playing Giants or Red Socks, Yankee's, or Dallas Cowboys and the 49ers, or in Germany playing England or Brazil in the World Cup. Whatever your favorite country or team rivalry is, India Pakistan was all there more, but imagine like a billion people watching it. >> Yeah, well it was a nice touch on stage, and I'd say Ted Williams is my favorite cricketer, oh he plays baseball, he's a Red Sock's Player. Alright Sanjay, just cause your in the hot seat, lets get down to business here. Great moment on stage, congratulation. Okay Pat Gelsinger yesterday on the key note talked about the bridges, VMware bridging, connecting computers. One of the highlights is kind of in your wheelhouse, it's in your wheelhouse, the BYOD, Bring Your Own Device bridge. You're a big part of that. Making that work on on the mobile side. Now with Cloud this new bridge, how is that go forward because you still got to have all those table stakes, so with this new bridge of VMware's in this modern era, cloud and multicloud. Cluely validated, Andy Jassy, on stage. Doing something that Amazon's never done before, doing something on premise with VMware, is a huge deal. I mean we think it's a massive deal, we think it's super important, you guys are super committed to the relationship on premises hybrid cloud, multicloud, is validated as far as we're concerned. It's a done deal. Now ball's in your court, how are you going to bring all that mobile together, security, work space one, what's your plan? >> I would say that, listen on as I described in my story today there's two parts to the VMware story. There's a cloud foundation part which is the move the data center to the cloud in that bridge, and then there's the desk job move it to the mobile. Very briefly, yes three years of my five years were in that business, I'm deeply passionate about it. Much of my team now that I put in place there, Noah and Shankar are doing incredible jobs. We're very excited, and the opportunity's huge. I said at my key note of the seven billion people that live in the world, a billion I estimate, work for some company small or big and all of them have a phone. Likely many of those billion have a phone and a laptop, like you guys have here, right? That real estate of a billion in a half, maybe two billion devices, laptops and phones, maybe in some cases laptop, phone, and tablets. Someone's going to manage and secure, and their diverse across Apple, Google, big option for us. We're just getting started, and we're already the leader. In the data center, the cloud world, Pat, myself, Raghu, really as we sat three years ago felt like we shouldn't be a public cloud ourselves. We divested vCloud Air, as I've talked to you on your show before, Andy Jassy is a friend, dear friend and a classmate of mine from Harvard Business School. We began those discussions the three of us. Pat, Raghu, and myself with Andy and his team and as every quarter and year has gone on they become deeper and deep partnerships. Andy has told other companies that VMware Amazon is the model partnership Amazon has, as they describe who they would like to do business more with. So we're proud when they do that, when we see that happen. And we want to continue that. So when Amazon came to us and said listen I think there's an opportunity to take some of our stack and put it on premise. We kept that confidential cause we didn't want it to leak out to the world, and we said we're going to try'n annouce it at either VMworld or re:Invent. And we were successful. A part with these projects is they inevitably leak. We're really glad no press person sniffed it out. There was a lot of speculation. >> Couldn't get confirmation. >> There was a lot of speculation but no one sniffed it out and wrote a story about it, we were able to have that iPhone moment today, I'm sorry, yesterday when we unveiled it. And it's a big deal because RDS is a fast growing business for them. RDS landing on premise, they could try to do on their own but what better infrastructure to land it on than VMware. In some cases would be VMware running on VxRail which benefits Dell, our hardware partners. And we'll continue doing more, and more, and more as customers desire, so I'm excited about it. >> Andy doesn't do deals, as you know Andy well as we do. He's customer driven. Tell me about the customer demand on this because it's something we're trying to get reporting on. Obviously it makes sense, technically the way it's working. You guys and Andy, they just don't do deals out of the blue. There's customer drivers here, what are those drivers? >> Yeah, we're both listening to our customers and perhaps three, four, five years ago they were very focused on student body left, everybody goes public cloud. Like forget your on premise, evaporate, obliterate your data centers and just go completely public. That was their message. >> True, sweep the floor. >> Right, if you went to first re:Invent I was there on stage with them as an SAP employee, that's what I heard. I think you fast forward to 2014, 2015 they're beginning to realize, hey listen it's not as easy. Refactoring your apps, migrating those apps, what if we could bring the best of private cloud and public cloud together enter VMware and Amazon. He may have felt it was harder to have those cultivations of VMware or for all kinds of reasons, like we had vCloud Air and so on and so forth but once we divested that decision culminations had matured between us that door opened. And as that door opened, more culminations began. Jointly between us and with customers. We feel that there are customers who want many of those past type of services of premise. Cause you're building great things, relational database technology, AI, VI maybe. IoT type of technologies if they are landing on premise in an edge-computing kind of world, why not land on VMware because we're the king of the private cloud. We're very happy to those, we progress those discussion. I think in infrastructure software VMware and Amazon have some of the best engineers on the planet. Sometimes we've engineers who've gone between both companies. So we were able to put our engineering team's together. This is a joint engineering effort. Andy and us often talk about the fact that great innovation's built when it's not just Barny go to Marketing and Marketing press releases this. The true joint engineering at a deep level. That's what happened the last several months. >> Well I can tell you right now the commitment I've seen from an executive level and deep technology, both sides are deep and committed to this. It's go big or go home, at least from our perspective. Question I want to ask you Sanjay is you're close to the customer's of VMware. What's the growth strategy? If you zoom out, look down on stage and you got vSAN, NSX at the core, >> vSANjay (laughs) >> How can you not like a product that has my name on it? >> So you got all these things, where's the growth going to come from, the merging side, is the v going to be the stable crown jewels at NSX? How do you guys see the growth, where's it going to come from? >> Just kind of look at our last quarter. I mean if you peel back the narrative, John and Dave, two years ago we were growing single digits. Like low single digits. Two, three percent. That was, maybe the legacy loser description of VMware was the narrative everyone was talking about >> License revenue was flattish right? >> And then now all of sudden we're double digits. 12, 15 sort of in that range for both product revenue. It's harder to grow faster when you're bigger, and what's happened is that we stabilize compute with vSphere in that part and it's actually been growing a little bit because I think people in the VMware cloud provider part of our business, and the halo effect of the cloud meant that as they refresh the servers they were buying more research. That's good. The management business has started to grow again. Some cases double digits, but at least sort of single digits. NSX, the last few order grew like 30, 40%. vSAN last year was growing 100% off a smaller base, this year going 60, 70%. EUC has been growing double digits, taking a lot of share from company's like Citrix and MobileIron and others. And now, also still growing double digits at much bigger paces, and some of those businesses are well over a billion. Compute, management, end-user computing. We talked about NSX on our queue forming called being a 1.4 billion. So when you get businesses to scale, about a billion dollar type businesses and their sort of four, training five that are in that area, and they all get to grow faster than the market. That's the key, you got to get them going fast. That's how you get growth. So we focus on those on those top five businesses and then add a few more. Like VMware Cloud on AWS, right now our goal is customer logo count. Revenue will come but we talked on our earnings call about a few hundred customers of VMware Cloud and AWS. As that gets into the thousands, and there's absolutely that option, why? Because there's 500,000 customers of VMware and two million customers of Amazon, so there's got to be a lot of commonality between those two to get a few thousand. Then we'll start caring about revenue there too, but once you have logos, you have references. Containers, I'd like to see PKS have a few hundred customers and then, we put one on stage today. National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. Fantastic story of PKS. I even got my PKS socks for this interview. (John laughs) >> So that give you a sense as to how we think, there will be four, five that our businesses had scale and then a few are starting to get there, and they become business to scale. The nature of software is we'll always be doing this show because there will be new businesses to talk about. >> Yeah, hardware is easy. Software is hard, as Andy Patchenstien said on theCUBE yesterday. Congratulations Sanjay and all the success, you guys are doing great financially. Products looking really good coming out, the bloom is rising from the fruit you guys have harvested, coming together. >> John if I can say one last thing, I shared a picture of a plane today and I put two engines behind it. There's something I've learned over the last years about focus of a company, and I joked about different ways that my name's are pronounced but at the core of me there's a DNA. I said on stage I'd rather not be known as smart or stupid but having a big heart. VMware, I hope is known by our customers as having these two engines. An engine of innovation, innovating product and a variety of other things. And focused on customer obsession. We do those, the plane will go a long way. >> And it's looking good you guys, we can say we've been to Radio Event, we've been doing a lot of great stuff. Congratulations on the initiative, and a great interview with you today on doing Tech for Good and sharing your story. Getting more exposure to the kind of narratives people want to hear. More women in tech, more girls in tech, more democratization. Congratulations and thanks so much for sharing. >> Thank you John and Dave. >> Appreciate you being here. >> Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware. Friend of theCUBE, Cube Alumni, overall great guy. Big heart and competitive too, we know that from his Twitter stream. Follow Sanjay on Twitter. You'll have a great time. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more coverage from day two live, here in Las Vegas for VMware 2018. Stay with us. (tech music)