>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE Conversation. We're talking about the Citrix Workspace Summit. It happened earlier today. And we've got one of the experts in the field, CUBE alumni and always a really fun guest to have on. Let's give a welcome to Tamara McCleary. She's coming to us from Colorado. She's the CEO of Thulium but you know her from social media and seeing her at all the conferences and speaking. And Tamara, it's great to see you again >> Jeff, it's so good to be here. Hey, next best thing to being in person, right? >> Absolutely. I mean, there is some good stuff. Neither of us had to get on an airplane today and we were able just to connect via the magic of the internet, which I think people forget how magic it truly is. So I looked up, we last spoke, it was mid-April. We were about a month into this thing after the kind of shutdown. And really the topic there was about this light switch moment on the work from home front. Now we're seven months into this, eight months into this, and clearly it's not going away anytime soon. And even when it does, it's not going to go back exactly to the way it was. So first off, how are you doing? 'Cause I know you spend a lot of time at conferences and traveling all over the world, so your life's been changed quite a bit. And then two, just your kind of perspective as we've moved from the light switch moment to the, that this is the new normal and will be the new normal going forward. Maybe not exactly how it is today, but we're not going back to the way that it was before. >> You couldn't be more spot on, Jeff. In fact, when you said April, to me, it almost feels like not seven months. It feels much longer ago. And since the last time I got on an airplane was the end of February, and that was a huge disruption to me in my life. I had always been in three, four cities a week, every week, and haven't traveled on an airplane since February. So the world is different, and it has shifted, and there's no going back. We can't step in the river twice and hit that same spot. I totally messed up that quote, but that's me. You're used to that already. >> Jeff: Exactly. >> But some things don't change. But I think when we look at work, and what we were talking about back in April is that now we're looking at the potential for kind of a hybrid approach, whether we're talking about work or even kids, some kids going back to school, there's a hybrid approach. And with that comes its own set of complexities that we have to consider. So not only has the culture shifted into a place where you have your workforce who has gotten used to working remotely, and there's a lot of things with working remotely that we didn't have when office was the centrical focus for the workplace. So there's a lot of flexibility when you work from home. And I think one of the interesting things with the Citrix Workspace Summit was when CEO David Henshall talked about how it's the people, right? So it's our workforce, our employees who are our most valuable, but also our most costly assets. So we have to make sure that the employee experience is one that is pleasing and helps us to have not only talent acquisition, but also talent retention in a really dynamic, competitive atmosphere. And I'm sure I just posed this question so we could go a million different places with this. Where do you want to go with it, Jeff? >> Well, I was going to say, and of course we can go forever, and we don't have forever, so at some point we'll have to stop talking at the end of this interview. But I just love having you on. And what I want to drill in is as we've talked about the new way to work for a very, very long time. This is not a new topic. And we've had remote work tools and we've had VPNs and we've had mobile phones now since 2007, but we didn't have this forcing function, and I think that's what's really different here is that now it wasn't a choice anymore. There was no more planning and talking about it and maybe or maybe not. Work from home was kind of a first-class citizen in terms of priority. COVID changed all that dramatically overnight. And it's driven home this other kind of concept which we talk a lot about generically in terms of the customer experience as they interact with our applications, which is the way that now they actually interact with the company. And we've talked a little bit about new way to work, but now it's really driven to the forefront, because as you said, there's a lot of benefits from working from home. You could eat dinner with your family, maybe can pick up a few more of the kids' activities, whether it's a sports game in the middle of the afternoon or something in the evening, but there's also a lot of stress. There's a lot of kind of this always on and this constant notifications, whether it's coming from email or text or Slack or Teams or Asana or whatever. So refocusing on the employee experience and elevating that up into a much more important thing, as you said, for both wellness and employee satisfaction, but also retention and getting new employees. It's really changed the priority of that whole set of, kind of point of view around the employee experience that wasn't there kind of pre-COVID. >> Absolutely. And I think you just tapped onto something that I think affects all of us who are juggling these multifaceted lives, and that is the constant interruption and distraction, and that costs money. And I think about that as the CEO of our organization is that how many of these distractions could be avoided to create efficiency and productivity. It also creates happiness for the individual. I don't think anybody likes to be constantly distracted, but when you have a bunch of different applications and you don't have them in one accessible place and you're constantly having to flip between these applications, it can cause a lot of friction and frustration. And I think genuinely that was my very first introduction to Citrix was the ability to really streamline and have everything in one place on a beautiful dashboard that was personalized to the individual. Not everybody in the organization needs to have all the applications, right? Some of your employees only need a few, and it just depends on who they are and what they're doing within the organization. And so I think decreasing that friction, making it easier for people, and certainly ensuring not only a frictionless experience at home but also ensuring security is huge. I mean, how many times have we talked about cybersecurity is not a bolt on afterwards. It has to be all the way up through the stack. And certainly we did have an increased threat landscape with work from home situations because there were all these security breaches and issues and vulnerabilities. So I know we're not talking security today, but I'm wild about it. But I think that all of these things, what I like about what Citrix is doing, and I enjoy the Summit, is the fact that they're blending everything into a single solution so that it just gets done. Work gets done from wherever you are, whether you're at home, you're in office, or in your car, work gets done. >> And not only work but I thought the theme that's interesting that came out in David's keynote is our best work. It's good work and high-value work. And there's really kind of two aspects of that. One, as you just said, is please help me with the distractions and use machine learning and artificial intelligence and this unified platform to decide whether I should or should not be distracted. Also help me prioritize what I should be working on kind of right now, which, again, a great opportunity for AI and ML to elevate that which is most important to the top of my inbox. But even more in one of the keynotes was integrating the concept of wellness, and not just wellness in the HR manual at the back after vision and dental and getting your health checks, but wellness even where the application suggests that you take a two-hour window in this particular period of time to be thoughtful and do some deep thinking. And someone mentioned the people we talk about in automation and getting rid of drudgery and errors and all the bad stuff that comes from doing crappy work, not only is it not fun, but super error prone. This is a really different to use technology to help the employee, as you said, not only just get work done, but get good work done, get high-value work done, prioritize good stuff, and not just deal with the incessant henpecking that is the notification world that it's really easy to fall into if you don't turn some of that stuff off or at least tone them down a little bit. >> That's so true. I don't know if you saw this, but there a study by Stanford of, I think it was 16,000 workers, and over a nine-month period, they did this study, and it was a study looking at work from home and whether productivity was increased. And every, 'cause at first you remember what it was, Jeff. I mean, in the old regime, we would thought, oh dear, we don't want a remote workforce because everybody's going to be hanging out in their pajamas and screwing around and not doing work. And that's not true. What ends up happening is that this study showed that productivity increased by 13%. And, I mean, that's huge, right? So there was a huge bump in performance. And in this particular study, the variables that they cited was perhaps that they had a quieter workspace. I mean, you're not getting barraged by all the endless meetings, unless you have endless Zoom meetings, but that's a whole nother conversation. But you're having more time to focus and flexibility on when you work, which also increases focus. But I thought what you mentioned, the wellness piece was important, because then if you look at other studies, there was a Forbes article that cited that the average worker starts at 8:32 a.m. or something like that and works until 5:38 p.m. And I think the days of the week that were the most productive were Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But this was interesting, I thought. Telephone calls were up by 230%, so the calls that employees were making, and CRM activity was up by 176% and email up by 57% and chats up by 9%. So what we're seeing is that people are trying to find creative ways to remain connected and communicate, but in different ways. And I think that's where the wellness piece comes in and kind of what you were saying with that. I think it's a microapp that Citrix has on their Workspace, their workspace dashboard that pops up a reminder and says, hey, you think you should take a break or get up from your desk. But I think that what's nice about that is it's easy to get sucked into your computer all day. I'm guilty. I will definitely say I can start off pretty darn early in the morning or usually around by five and go till late at night. But, and it's all in front of the computer screen. So maybe I need that Citrix workspace solution to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go take a meditation break. >> At least one of those watches that'll tell you to get up and twist around. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. They had Satya Nadella on, and Satya is a phenomenal executive, been super successful turning that big, very large boat, Microsoft, into really a cloud company and a SaaS company, and nothing but great success. Always happy to hear him. He had some interesting comments I want to run by you. One of them he said is we were dogmatic about work before, but don't replace what we were with just a new dogma. And what he really highlighted, A, obviously without the technology platform and cloud and all these tools that we have in place, this couldn't have happened. But more importantly, he said it really highlights the need for flexibility and resiliency, and to really, again, kind of elevate those as the first class citizens as to what you should be optimizing for. And really the highlight within this sudden shift with COVID that if you've got those capabilities, you're going to be successful, and if you don't, you're in real trouble >> I'm glad you brought Satya up, because he also said something really cool that I think is true, and that is we are running right now, currently we are running a global scale experiment. Do you remember him saying that? >> Yeah. >> And it's so true. I think right now the social scientists are going wild because finally they've got their captive collection of their study, their guinea pigs. But the other thing he was saying, too, is that we're going to be harnessing all these technologies to be able to re-skill and up-skill. And how long have we been talking about this, Jeff, with the future of work, that it will be a re-skilling and up-skilling of the workforce. He even mentioned holographic technology. He didn't go into it, but just the mention of it got me thinking about how we are currently using some of those nascent technologies to be able to up-skill and re-skill our workforces and also protect a workforce that doesn't necessarily need to be on scene on the edge of it all. And then he gave an example of an engineer being able to communicate with a first-line worker without having to be actually in the physical presence. And so I think this crucible that we're in called a global pandemic, forcing our hand, really, to do all the things that we've been talking about at all these conferences that we've been to, for me, maybe the past two decades, is that it's show, don't tell. So we're not talking about it anymore. We actually have to do it. And another thing that Satya said was that nine to five is definitely not true anymore with work. It's flexibility. And it's really... He also mentioned this EEG study into meeting fatigue. >> Jeff: Yes. >> I thought it was pretty wild. An EEG study into meeting fatigue. And I bet even without reading that study, all of us who are on video conferencing systems can probably tell what the outcome of that was. But concentration wanes very quickly. In fact, I think in that study it was after 20 minutes. But, so kudos to Citrix for putting on their summits, because did you notice for once we had the enjoyment of all these just really contents, deliciously packed segments that were short. >> Jeff: Right. >> Whereas at live events, they went on way too long. I mean, even customer stories went on way too long. And I really love the staccato nature of these customer stories and partnerships and what was working, and I just thought that they did a really nice job, and it was interesting because it met perfectly with staying underneath that 20-minute window before attention wanes. >> Right, right. And they even broke it up into three conferences, right? It was Citrix Synergy before. >> Right. >> Now it's workspaces, it's cloud, and then the third one will be security. But I want to double down on another concept. We talked about it last time with you and with Amy about measuring work and about kind of old work paradigms in terms of measuring performance that were really based more on activity than output. And this concept that work is an output, not a place. And it kind of makes you think of talking about cloud and a cloud-centric way of thinking about things. It's not necessarily the delivery method. It's about adopting quick change and rapid pace and having everything available that you need anywhere you are at the same time. So it seems strange to me that it took this to drive people to figure out that they should be measuring output and not activity. And were some early applications that came out when this all went down that are going to report back as to how often are you looking at your Zoom calls and how often are you sitting in front of your desk and all this silly stuff that just, again, misses the point. And I think this whole employee experience is, as you said, make 'em happy, make 'em feel fulfilled. They want to do meaningful work. They want to do high-value work. They just don't want to be an integration machine between the email system and the accounts receivable system and the accounts payable system. There's so much of an opportunity to get more value from the people, which, oh, by the way, makes for happier people. So do you think finally we're at a point where we can start getting away from just measuring activity unless that's your job to put a widget on a screw and really focus on output and high-value output and innovative output and deep thinking output versus just checking another box and passing the paper down the line? >> You know, Jeff, that reminds me of what Erica Volini, I think she's global human capital practice at Deloitte. I really loved her presentation. I also like the fact that I felt like she was speaking from her home, and she mentioned she's a new mom, and so there was this warmth and connection there which also I think is something really that we don't think about being, but it is a gift since we've all had to work from home is being able to see kind of executive individuals in a regular environment, and it humanizes it all, right? She said something really interesting in her talk. She was talking about rearchitecting the future of work, and she was talking about essentially, the premise was that human beings need, crave, have to have work that's meaningful and real. And part of this whole experience piece, part of this removing the friction from the experience of the employee and providing opportunities, stimulating growth opportunities for employees to give them that sense of meaning. But also she talked about the relationships. I mean, work is a huge part of the relationships in our life. And so this meaningful relationships and connections and in her architecting the work of the future, it's harnessing technology in service to humans to do a better job. And I think the word she used was augmentation, right? So the augmentation piece would be as we think about reinventing or re-imagining or re-architecting, we look at what's going to happen when we have the human working with the machine, but the machine in service to augmenting that human being to do, potential is what she was talking about, to really reach their potential. And so it's not about being replaced by technology. It's not being replaced by artificial intelligence, with machine learning algorithms. It's actually working in tandem so that technology potentiates the human that is using the technology. And I think that was a really good way of putting it. >> Right, right. I mean, we talk, it's one of our taglines, right? To separate the signal from the noise. And the problem is with so many systems now, and I forget, you may know off the top of your head, the average number of applications that people have to interact with every day to get their job done. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> It's a lot. So, so there is a lot of noise, but there's also some signal. And so if you're not paying attention, you can miss the signal that might be super, super important because you're overwhelmed by the noise. And so I think it is a real interesting challenge. It's a technology challenge to apply the machine learning and artificial intelligence, to sort through the total flow, to be able to prioritize and separate the signal from the noise to make sure we're working on the stuff that we should be working on. And I think it's a growing challenge as we just seem to always be adding new applications and adding new notifications and adding new systems that we have to interact with versus taking them away. So Citrix has this approach where we're just going to bring it all in together under one place. And so whether it's your Salesforce notification or your Slack notification or Zoom meeting, whatever, to have it orchestrated as a single place so I don't have 18 tabs, 14 browsers, and two laptops running just to get my day job done. >> You're going to make me self-conscious of all the tabs I have right now. Thanks a lot, Jeff. But, it's kind of, I like hearing stories, right? I think stories communicate to me kind of these practical applications. And I think Citrix did a brilliant job in the Workspace Summit of highlighting some of these customer stories that were really inspiring during the pandemic. One of 'em was City National Bank and Ariel Carrion? This is a test of my memory. He's the CTO, right, of City National Bank. And he's talking about that they had already had a partial migration to the cloud prior to the pandemic. So obviously there was an advantage for those organizations that already had their toe in the water. So, but when the pandemic hit, then it really catalyzed that movement all the way into the cloud and essentially creating a digital bank. And what was really interesting to me is that they funded 9600 loans and taking on new clients during that time of transformation to a digital bank. And one of the coolest things that he said to me was that in a regular program, it would've taken, mind you, get this. It would've taken 14 years, 14 years to accomplish what they did in three months. >> That's a long time. >> I was blown away, right? Just to me, that speaks a lot, because what we're talking about here is their clients are small business, and who do you think was impacted most during the pandemic? Small business. So the ability to get loans was critically important to the survival of a lot of companies. And the same story they had with eBay and David Lessor was talking, he's a senior manager in the office of the CIO, I think I remember. And he was talking about how obviously eBay is a digital platform, right? But if you think about the pandemic when we were all had these shelter in place orders, lots of people were able to still make money and earn a living because they were able to do business on eBay. And both eBay and City National Bank are obviously customers of Citrix. But I just found this to be really inspiring, because for eBay pre-pandemic, it was like, I don't know. I think they said they had 11,000 connected users prior to the pandemic, and a lot of those were in physical call centers. >> Jeff: Right. >> And then post-pandemic, I think he was reaching, saying end of Q4 was going to be something like 14,000 connected users. That's huge from 11 to 14. >> Yeah. >> And again, to your point, it's kind of forcing our hand into really not only pivoting, but increasing our speed in this ever-changing dynamic environment. >> Right. >> You know, one of the other things that came up, before I let you go, that it's always nice to have frameworks. Sometimes it just helps us organize our thoughts and it's kind of a mental cheat sheet. And they talked about the four Cs, connectivity, content, collaboration, and culture. And I would have to say they're in inverse order of how I would potentially have prioritized them. But I just wanted to zero in on the culture piece, 'cause I don't think people focus enough on culture. And one of the things I think we talked about in April, and I've certainly talked about a number of times going through this thing in leadership in these crazy times is that the frequency and the type and the topics in communication within your internal world have gone up dramatically. I think we had the, we had a CMO on the other day, and she said internal comms, this is a big company, prior to COVID was important, but not that important within the list of the CMO's activity. But then once this thing hit, right, suddenly internal communications, again, in terms of frequency and the types of topics you're talking about and the forums that you talk about and the actual vehicles in which you talk about, whether it's a all hands Zoom call or it's more frequent one-on-ones with your manager, really, really increase the importance of culture, and then I think probably is going to show over time the people that have it right, getting some separation distance from the people that got it wrong. I wonder if you could just talk about, 'cause you're a big culture person and you know how important the people part of the whole thing is. >> Yeah, culture drives everything. You're right. And that was Citrix's CIO who gave those four Cs, I think, Meerah Rajavel. >> Yeah, yeah. >> She gave those four Cs. And you couldn't be, you couldn't have tapped into something that I think is the soft underbelly of the organization, which is what is the culture. And anyone who's worked in an organization with a sick culture knows that it's just, it's cancerous, right? It grows and it causes decay. And I don't care how much innovation you have. If the culture is sick, you just, you're going to lose your best people. It's hard to work in a sick culture. And so I think what we had to do is when we all started working remotely, that was a culture shift, because we were siloed off of it. We weren't actually hanging out in physical space. Some of the things that we enjoyed about meeting with other human beings physically changed. And so it really behooved organizations to take a look at how they were going to foster culture digitally, how they were going to create that sense of bonding between not only those within your departmental area, but cross over into other areas. And I think that creating that culture that says I don't have to be in the exact same physical space, but we can still connect. I mean, you and I are doing this. We're not in the same physical space. >> Jeff: Right. >> But I'm still going to feel like we met today. >> Jeff: Right. >> You can create that for your employees. And it also means that we learned that we don't have to be in that same physical space, right? And I thought that was a really interesting position when Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, was talking at the summit and saying that even when we look at creating culture with employees who aren't necessarily, maybe it's a workforce from all over the world that you're using, a remote workforce. And when you're using things like employees, if you've got work to do and you can find a really good talent and you can grab them for what it is that you need, you're actually increasing your ability to be able to deliver on things versus having to worry about whether you have that person in house, but you still can create that culture where everyone is inclusive, where someone can be in Australia and someone's in San Francisco and someone's in the UK, and you still have to create a cohesive, inclusive culture. And it matters not anymore whether or not you are a full-time employee or if you're a contract worker. I think in today's space, and certainly in those future of work conversations, it's more about, to the very first thing you said at the beginning, it's more about output. How's that for tying it back up again? >> Jeff: Yeah, very good. >> And that was totally unplanned. But it is about output, and that's going to be the future of work culture. It's not going to be the title that you have, whether or not you're a full-time employee or a part-time employee or a contract worker. It's going to be who are you meeting with? Who are you having these digital interfaces with and Slacking with or using any sort of platform application that you want to use. It's remaining in touch and in communication, and no longer is it about a physical space. It's a digital space. >> Right, right. All right, well, I'm going to give you the last word. You are a super positive person, and there's reasons, and for people that haven't watched your TED Talk, they should. I think it's super impactful and it really changed the way I look at you. So of all the negatives, wrap us up with some positives that you see as we come out of COVID that going through this experience will make in our lives, both our work lives as well as our personal lives. >> Well, since you're going to allow me to go deep here, I would say one of the things that COVID has brought us is pause. It caused us to go in. And with any dark night of the soul, we have to wrestle with the things that are real for us, and the things that fall away are those that were false, false perceptions, false ideas, illusions of even thinking who we are, what we're doing. And we had to come home to ourselves. And I think one of the things that COVID gave us through uncertainty was finding a center in that uncertainty. And maybe we got to know our beloveds a bit more. Maybe we got to know our kids a bit more, even if they drive us crazy sometimes. But in the end, I think maybe we all got to know ourselves a little bit more. And for that, I think we can harness those seeds of wisdom and make better choices in the future to co-create together a future that we are all pleased to wake up in, one that is fair, one that is equal, one that is inclusive, and one that we can be proud to have contributed to. And that's what I hope we've taken from this extremely hard time. >> Well, Tamara, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. Really appreciate it. And great to see ya. >> Good to see you, too, thank you. >> All right, she's Tamara, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Narrator: New York City, it's the Cube covering CyberConnect 2017 brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's live coverage in New York City's Grand Hyatt Ballroom for CyberConnect 2017 presented by Centrify. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube with my co-host this week is Dave Vellante, my partner and co-founder and co-CEO with me in SiliconAngle Media in the Cube. Our next guest is James Scott who is the co-founder and senior fellow at ICIT. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> You guys are putting on this event, really putting the content together. Centrify, just so everyone knows, is underwriting the event but this is not a Centrify event. You guys are the key content partner, developing the content agenda. It's been phenomenal. It's an inaugural event so it's the first of its kind bringing in industry, government, and practitioners all together, kind of up leveling from the normal and good events like Black Hat and other events like RSA which go into deep dives. Here it's a little bit different. Explain. >> Yeah, it is. We're growing. We're a newer think tank. We're less than five years old. The objective is to stay smaller. We have organizations, like Centrify, that came out of nowhere in D.C. so we deal, most of what we've done up until now has been purely federal and on the Hill so what I do, I work in the intelligence community. I specialize in social engineering and then I advise in the Senate for the most part, some in the House. We're able to take these organizations into the Pentagon or wherever and when we get a good read on them and when senators are like, "hey, can you bring them back in to brief us?" That's when we know we have a winner so we started really creating a relationship with Tom Kemp, who's the CEO and founder over there, and Greg Cranley, who heads the federal division. They're aggressively trying to be different as opposed to trying to be like everyone else, which makes it easy. If someone wants to do something, they have to be a fellow for us to do it, but if they want to do it, just like if they want to commission a paper, we just basically say, "okay, you can pay for it but we run it." Centrify has just been excellent. >> They get the community model. They get the relationship that you have with your constituents in the community. Trust matters, so you guys are happy to do this but more importantly, the content. You're held to a standard in your community. This is new, not to go in a different direction for a second but this is what the community marketing model is. Stay true to your audience and trust. You're relied upon so that's some balance that you guys have to do. >> The thing is we deal with cylance and others. Cylance, for example, was the first to introduce machine learning artificial intelligence to get passed that mutating hash for endpoint security. They fit in really well in the intelligence community. The great thing about working with Centrify is they let us take the lead and they're very flexible and we just make sure they come out on top each time. The content, it's very content driven. In D.C., we have at our cocktail receptions, they're CIA, NSA, DARPA, NASA. >> You guys are the poster child of be big, think small. >> Exactly. Intimate. >> You say Centrify is doing things differently. They're not falling in line like a lemming. What do you mean by that? What is everybody doing that these guys are doing differently? >> I think in the federal space, I think commercial too, but you have to be willing to take a big risk to be different so you have to be willing to pay a premium. If people work with us, they know they're going to pay a premium but we make sure they come out on top. What they do is, they'll tell us, Centrify will be like, "look, we're going to put x amount of dollars into a lunch. "Here are the types of pedigree individuals "that we need there." Maybe they're not executives. Maybe they're the actual practitioners at DHS or whatever. The one thing that they do different is they're aggressively trying to deviate from the prototype. That's what I mean. >> Like a vendor trying to sell stuff. >> Yeah and the thing is, that's why when someone goes to a Centrify event, I don't work for Centrify (mumbles). That's how they're able to attract. If you see, we have General Alexander. We've got major players here because of the content, because it's been different and then the other players want to be on the stage with other players, you know what I mean. It almost becomes a competition for "hey, I was asked to come to an ICIT thing" you know, that sort of thing. That's what I mean. >> It's reputation. You guys have a reputation and you stay true to that. That's what I was saying. To me, I think this is the future of how things get done. When you have a community model, you're held to a standard with your community. If you cross the line on that standard, you head fake your community, that's the algorithm that brings you a balance so you bring good stuff to the table and you vet everyone else on the other side so it's just more of a collaboration, if you will. >> The themes here, what you'll see is within critical infrastructure, we try to gear this a little more towards the financial sector. We brought, from Aetna, he set up the FS ISAC. Now he's with the health sector ISAC. For this particular geography in New York, we're trying to have it focus more around health sector and financial critical infrastructure. You'll see that. >> Alright, James, I've got to ask you. You're a senior fellow. You're on the front lines with a great Rolodex, great relationships in D.C., and you're adivising and leaned upon by people making policy, looking at the world and the general layout in which, the reality is shit's happening differently now so the world's got to change. Take us through a day in the life of some of the things you guys are seeing and what's the outlook? I mean, it's like a perfect storm of chaos, yet opportunity. >> It really depends. Each federal agency, we look at it from a Hill perspective, it comes down to really educating them. When I'm in advising in the House, I know I'm going to be working with a different policy pedigree than a Senate committee policy expert, you know what I mean. You have to gauge the conversation depending on how new the office is, House, Senate, are they minority side, and then what we try to do is bring the issues that the private sector is having while simultaneously hitting the issues that the federal agency space is. Usually, we'll have a needs list from the CSWEP at the different federal agencies for a particular topic like the Chinese APTs or the Russian APT. What we'll do is, we'll break down what the issue is. With Russia, for example, it's a combination of two types of exploits that are happening. You have the technical exploit, the malicious payload and vulnerability in a critical infrastructure network and then profiling those actors. We also have another problem, the influence operations, which is why we started the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. We've been asked repeatedly since the elections last year by the intelligence community to tell us, explain this new propaganda. The interesting thing is the synergies between the two sides are exploiting and weaponizing the same vectors. While on the technical side, you're exploiting a vulnerability in a network with a technical exploit, with a payload, a compiled payload with a bunch of tools. On the influence operations side, they're weaponizing the same social media platforms that you would use to distribute a payload here but only the... >> Contest payload. Either way you have critical infrastructure. The payload being content, fake content or whatever content, has an underpinning that gamification call it virality, network effect and user psychology around they don't really open up the Facebook post, they just read the headline and picture. There's a dissonance campaign, or whatever they're running, that might not be critical to national security at that time but it's also a post. >> It shifts the conversation in a way where they can use, for example, right now all the rage with nation states is to use metadata, put it into big data analytics, come up with a psychographic algorithm, and go after critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. You can do anything with those guys. You can spearfish them. The Russian modus operandi is to call and act like a recruiter, have that first touch of contact be the phone call, which they're not expecting. "Hey, I got this job. "Keep it on the down low. Don't tell anybody. "I'm going to send you the job description. "Here's the PDF." Take it from there. >> How should we think about the different nation state actors? You mentioned Russia, China, there's Iran, North Korea. Lay it out for us. >> Each geography has a different vibe to their hacking. With Russia you have this stealth and sophistication and their hacking is just like their espionage. It's like playing chess. They're really good at making pawns feel like they're kings on the chessboard so they're really good at recruiting insider threats. Bill Evanina is the head of counterintel. He's a bulldog. I know him personally. He's exactly what we need in that position. The Chinese hacking style is more smash and grab, very unsophisticated. They'll use a payload over and over again so forensically, it's easy to... >> Dave: Signatures. >> Yeah, it is. >> More shearing on the tooling or whatever. >> They'll use code to the point of redundancy so it's like alright, the only reason they got in... Chinese get into a network, not because of sophistication, but because the network is not protected. Then you have the mercenary element which is where China really thrives. Chinese PLA will hack for the nation state during the day, but they'll moonlight at night to North Korea so North Korea, they have people who may consider themselves hackers but they're not code writers. They outsource. >> They're brokers, like general contractors. >> They're not sophisticated enough to carry out a real nation state attack. What they'll do is outsource to Chinese PLA members. Chinese PLA members will be like, "okay well, here's what I need for this job." Typically, what the Chinese will do, their loyalties are different than in the west, during the day they'll discover a vulnerability or an O day. They won't tell their boss right away. They'll capitalize off of it for a week. You do that, you go to jail over here. Russia, they'll kill you. China, somehow this is an accepted thing. They don't like it but it just happens. Then you have the eastern European nations and Russia still uses mercenary elements out of Moscow and St. Petersburg so what they'll do is they will freelance, as well. That's when you get the sophisticated, carbonic style hack where they'll go into the financial sector. They'll monitor the situation. Learn the ins and outs of everything having to do with that particular swift or bank or whatever. They go in and those are the guys that are making millions of dollars on a breach. Hacking in general is a grind. It's a lot of vulnerabilities work, but few work for long. Everybody is always thinking there's this omega code that they have. >> It's just brute force. You just pound it all day long. >> That's it and it's a grind. You might have something that you worked on for six months. You're ready to monetize. >> What about South America? What's the vibe down there? Anything happening in there? >> Not really. There is nothing of substance that really affects us here. Again, if an organization is completely unprotected. >> John: Russia? China? >> Russia and China. >> What about our allies? >> GCHQ. >> Israel? What's the collaboration, coordination, snooping? What's the dynamic like there? >> We deal, mostly, with NATO and Five Eyes. I actually had dinner with NATO last night. Five Eyes is important because we share signals intelligence and most of the communications will go through Five Eyes which is California, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Those are our five most important allies and then NATO after that, as far as I'm concerned, for cyber. You have the whole weaponization of space going on with SATCOM interception. We're dealing with that with NASA, DARPA. Not a lot is happening down in South America. The next big thing that we have to look at is the cyber caliphate. You have the Muslim brotherhood that funds it. Their influence operations domestically are extremely strong. They have a lot of contacts on the Hill which is a problem. You have ANTIFA. So there's two sides to this. You have the technical exploit but then the information warfare exploit. >> What about the bitcoin underbelly that started with the silk roads and you've seen a lot of bitcoin. Money laundering is a big deal, know your customer. Now regulation is part of big ICOs going on. Are you seeing any activity from those? Are they pulling from previous mercenary groups or are they arbitraging just more free? >> For updating bitcoin? >> The whole bitcoin networks. There's been an effort to commercialize (mumbles) so there's been a legitimate track to bring that on but yet there's still a lot of actors. >> I think bitcoin is important to keep and if you look at the more black ops type hacking or payment stuff, bitcoin is an important element just as tor is an important element, just as encryption is an important element. >> John: It's fundamental, actually. >> It's a necessity so when I hear people on the Hill, I have my researcher, I'm like, "any time you hear somebody trying to have "weakened encryption, back door encryption" the first thing, we add them to the briefing schedule and I'm like, "look, here's what you're proposing. "You're proposing that you outlaw math. "So what? Two plus two doesn't equal four. "What is it? Three and a half? "Where's the logic?" When you break it down for them like that, on the Hill in particular, they begin to get it. They're like, "well how do we get the intelligence community "or the FBI, for example, to get into this iphone?" Civil liberties, you've got to take that into consideration. >> I got to ask you a question. I interviewed a guy, I won't say his name. He actually commented off the record, but he said to me, "you won't believe how dumb some of these state actors are "when it comes to cyber. "There's some super smart ones. "Specifically Iran and the Middle East, "they're really not that bright." He used an example, I don't know if it's true or not, that stuxnet, I forget which one it was, there was a test and it got out of control and they couldn't pull it back and it revealed their hand but it could've been something worse. His point was they actually screwed up their entire operation because they're doing some QA on their thing. >> I can't talk about stuxnet but it's easy to get... >> In terms of how you test them, how do you QA your work? >> James: How do you review malware? (mumbles) >> You can't comment on the accuracy of Zero Days, the documentary? >> Next question. Here's what you find. Some of these nation state actors, they saw what happened with our elections so they're like, "we have a really crappy offensive cyber program "but maybe we can thrive in influence operations "in propaganda and whatever." We're getting hit by everybody and 2020 is going to be, I don't even want to imagine. >> John: You think it's going to be out of control? >> It's going to be. >> I've got to ask this question, this came up. You're bringing up a really good point I think a lot of people aren't talking about but we've brought up a few times. I want to keep on getting it out there. In the old days, state on state actors used to do things, espionage, and everyone knew who they were and it was very important not to bring their queen out, if you will, too early, or reveal their moves. Now with Wikileaks and public domain, a lot of these tools are being democratized so that they can covertly put stuff out in the open for enemies of our country to just attack us at will. Is that happening? I hear about it, meaning that I might be Russia or I might be someone else. I don't want to reveal my hand but hey, you ISIS guys out there, all you guys in the Middle East might want to use this great hack and put it out in the open. >> I think yeah. The new world order, I guess. The order of things, the power positions are completely flipped, B side, counter, whatever. It's completely not what the establishment was thinking it would be. What's happening is Facebook is no more relevant, I mean Facebook is more relevant than the UN. Wikileaks has more information pulsating out of it than a CIA analyst, whatever. >> John: There's a democratization of the information? >> The thing is we're no longer a world that's divided by geographic lines in the sand that were drawn by these two guys that fought and lost a war 50 years ago. We're now in a tribal chieftain digital society and we're separated by ideological variation and so you have tribe members here in the US who have fellow tribe members in Israel, Russia, whatever. Look at Anonymous. Anonymous, I think everyone understands that's the biggest law enforcement honeypot there is, but you look at the ideological variation and it's hashtags and it's keywords and it's forums. That's the Senate. That's congress. >> John: This is a new reality. >> This is reality. >> How do you explain that to senators? I was watching that on TV where they're trying to grasp what Facebook is and Twitter. (mumbles) Certainly Facebook knew what was going on. They're trying to play policy and they're new. They're newbies when it comes to policy. They don't have any experience on the Hill, now it's ramping up and they've had some help but tech has never been an actor on the stage of policy formulation. >> We have a real problem. We're looking at outside threats as our national security threats, which is incorrect. You have dragnet surveillance capitalists. Here's the biggest threats we have. The weaponization of Facebook, twitter, youtube, google, and search engines like comcast. They all have a censorship algorithm, which is how they monetize your traffic. It's censorship. You're signing your rights away and your free will when you use google. You're not getting the right answer, you're getting the answer that coincides with an algorithm that they're meant to monetize and capitalize on. It's complete censorship. What's happening is, we had something that just passed SJ res 34 which no resistance whatsoever, blew my mind. What that allows is for a new actor, the ISPs to curate metadata on their users and charge them their monthly fee as well. It's completely corrupt. These dragnet surveillance capitalists have become dragnet surveillance censorists. Is that a word? Censorists? I'll make it one. Now they've become dragnet surveillance propagandists. That's why 2020 is up for grabs. >> (mumbles) We come from the same school here on this one, but here's the question. The younger generation, I asked a gentleman in the hallway on his way out, I said, "where's the cyber west point? "We're the Navy SEALS in this new digital culture." He said, "oh yeah, some things." We're talking about the younger generation, the kids playing Call of Duty Destiny. These are the guys out there, young kids coming up that will probably end up having multiple disciplinary skills. Where are they going to come from? So the question is, are we going to have a counterculture? We're almost feeling like what the 60s were to the 50s. Vietnam. I kind of feel like maybe the security stuff doesn't get taken care of, a revolt is coming. You talk about dragnet censorship. You're talking about the lack of control and privacy. I don't mind giving Facebook my data to connect with my friends and see my thanksgiving photos or whatever but now I don't want fake news jammed down my throat. Anti-Trump and Anti-Hillary spew. I didn't buy into that. I don't want that anymore. >> I think millennials, I have a 19 year old son, my researchers, they're right out of grad school. >> John: What's the profile like? >> They have no trust whatsoever in the government and they laugh at legislation. They don't care any more about having their face on their Facebook page and all their most intimate details of last night's date and tomorrow's date with two different, whatever. They just don't... They loathe the traditional way of things. You got to talk to General Alexander today. We have a really good relationship with him, Hayden, Mike Rogers. There is a counterculture in the works but it's not going to happen overnight because we have a tech deficit here where we need foreign tech people just to make up for the deficit. >> Bill Mann and I were talking, I heard the general basically, this is my interpretation, "if we don't get our shit together, "this is going to be an f'd up situation." That's what I heard him basically say. You guys don't come together so what Bill talked about was two scenarios. If industry and government don't share and come together, they're going to have stuff mandated on them by the government. Do you agree? >> I do. >> What's going to happen? >> The argument for regulation on the Hill is they don't want to stifle innovation, which makes sense but then ISPs don't innovate at all. They're using 1980s technology, so why did you pass SJ res 34? >> John: For access? >> I don't know because nation states just look at that as, "oh wow another treasure trove of metadata "that we can weaponize. "Let's start psychographically charging alt-left "and alt-right, you know what I mean?" >> Hacks are inevitable. That seems to be the trend. >> You talked before, James, about threats. You mentioned weaponization of social. >> James: Social media. >> You mentioned another in terms of ISPs I think. >> James: Dragnet. >> What are the big threats? Weaponization of social. ISP metadata, obviously. >> Metadata, it really depends and that's the thing. That's what makes the advisory so difficult because you have to go between influence operations and the exploit because the vectors are used for different things in different variations. >> John: Integrated model. >> It really is and so with a question like that I'm like okay so my biggest concern is the propaganda, political warfare, the information warfare. >> People are underestimating the value of how big that is, aren't they? They're oversimplifying the impact of info campaigns. >> Yeah because your reality is based off of... It's like this, influence operations. Traditional media, everybody is all about the narrative and controlling the narrative. What Russia understands is to control the narrative, the most embryo state of the narrative is the meme. Control the meme, control the idea. If you control the idea, you control the belief system. Control the belief system, you control the narrative. Control the narrative, you control the population. No guns were fired, see what I'm saying? >> I was explaining to a friend on Facebook, I was getting into a rant on this. I used a very simple example. In the advertising world, they run millions of dollars of ad campaigns on car companies for post car purchase cognitive dissonance campaigns. Just to make you feel good about your purchase. In a way, that's what's going on and explains what's going on on Facebook. This constant reinforcement of these beliefs whether its for Trump or Hillary, all this stuff was happening. I saw it firsthand. That's just one small nuance but it's across a spectrum of memes. >> You have all these people, you have nation states, you have mercenaries, but the most potent force in this space, the most hyperevolving in influence operations, is the special interest group. The well-funded special interests. That's going to be a problem. 2020, I keep hitting that because I was doing an interview earlier. 2020 is going to be a tug of war for the psychological core of the population and it's free game. Dragnet surveillance capitalists will absolutely be dragnet surveillance propagandists. They will have the candidates that they're going to push. Now that can also work against them because mainstream media, twitter, Facebook were completely against trump, for example, and that worked in his advantage. >> We've seen this before. I'm a little bit older, but we are the same generation. Remember when they were going to open up sealex? Remember the last mile for connectivity? That battle was won before it was even fought. What you're saying, if I get this right, the war and tug of war going on now is a big game. If it's not played in one now, this jerry rigging, gerrymandering of stuff could happen so when people wake up and realize what's happened the game has already been won. >> Yeah, your universe as you know it, your belief systems, what you hold to be true and self evident. Again, the embryo. If you look back to the embryo introduction of that concept, whatever concept it is, to your mind it came from somewhere else. There are very few things that you believe that you came up with yourself. The digital space expedites that process and that's dangerous because now it's being weaponized. >> Back to the, who fixes this. Who's the watchdog on this? These ideas you're talking about, some of them, you're like, "man that guy has lost it, he's crazy." Actually, I don't think you're crazy at all. I think it's right on. Is there a media outlet watching it? Who's reporting on it? What even can grasp what you're saying? What's going on in D.C.? Can you share that perspective? >> Yeah, the people that get this are the intelligence community, okay? The problem is the way we advise is I will go in with one of the silos in the NSA and explain what's happening and how to do it. They'll turn around their computer and say, "show me how to do it. "How do you do a multi vector campaign "with this meme and make it viral in 30 minutes." You have to be able to show them how to do it. >> John: We can do that. Actually we can't. >> That sort of thing, you have to be able to show them because there's not enough practitioners, we call them operators. When you're going in here, you're teaching them. >> The thing is if they have the metadata to your treasure trove, this is how they do it. I'll explain here. If they have the metadata, they know where the touch points are. It's a network effect mole, just distributive mole. They can put content in certain subnetworks that they know have a reaction to the metadata so they have the knowledge going in. It's not like they're scanning the whole world. They're monitoring pockets like a drone, right? Once they get over the territory, then they do the acquired deeper targets and then go viral. That's basically how fake news works. >> See the problem is, you look at something like alt-right and ANTIFA. ANTIFA, just like Black Lives Matter, the initiatives may have started out with righteous intentions just like take a knee. These initiatives, first stage is if it causes chaos, chaos is the op for a nation state in the US. That's the op. Chaos. That's the beginning and the end of an op. What happens is they will say, "oh okay look, this is ticking off all these other people "so let's fan the flame of this take a knee thing "hurt the NFL." Who cares? I don't watch football anyway but you know, take a knee. It's causing all this chaos. >> John: It's called trolling. >> What will happen is Russia and China, China has got their 13 five year plan, Russia has their foreign influence operations. They will fan that flame to exhaustion. Now what happens to the ANTIFA guy when he's a self-radicalized wound collector with a mental disorder? Maybe he's bipolar. Now with ANTIFA, he's experienced a heightened more extreme variation of that particular ideology so who steps in next? Cyber caliphate and Muslim brotherhood. That's why we're going to have an epidemic. I can't believe, you know, ANTIFA is a domestic terrorist organization. It's shocking that the FBI is not taking this more serious. What's happening now is Muslim brotherhood funds basically the cyber caliphate. The whole point of cyber caliphate is to create awareness, instill the illusion of rampant xenophobia for recruiting. They have self-radicalized wound collectors with ANTIFA that are already extremists anyway. They're just looking for a reason to take that up a notch. That's when, cyber caliphate, they hook up with them with a hashtag. They respond and they create a relationship. >> John: They get the fly wheel going. >> They take them to a deep web forum, dark web forum, and start showing them how it works. You can do this. You can be part of something. This guy who was never even muslim now is going under the ISIS moniker and he acts. He drives people over in New York. >> They fossilized their belief system. >> The whole point to the cyber caliphate is to find actors that are already in the self-radicalization phase but what does it take psychologically and from a mentoring perspective, to get them to act? That's the cyber caliphate. >> This is the value of data and context in real time using the current events to use that data, refuel their operation. It's data driven terrorism. >> What's the prescription that you're advising? >> I'm not a regulations kind of guy, but any time you're curating metadata like we're just talking about right now. Any time you have organizations like google, like Facebook, that have become so big, they are like their own nation state. That's a dangerous thing. The metadata curation. >> John: The value of the data is very big. That's the point. >> It is because what's happening... >> John: There's always a vulnerability. >> There's always a vulnerability and it will be exploited and all that metadata, it's unscrubbed. I'm not worried about them selling metadata that's scrubbed. I'm worried about the nation state or the sophisticated actor that already has a remote access Trojan on the network and is exfiltrating in real time. That's the guy that I'm worried about because he can just say, "forget it, I'm going to target people that are at this phase." He knows how to write algorithms, comes up with a good psychographic algorithm, puts the data in there, and now he's like, "look I'm only going to promote this concept, "two people at this particular stage of self-radicalization "or sympathetic to the kremlin." We have a big problem on the college campuses with IP theft because of the Chinese Students Scholar Associations which are directly run by the Chinese communist party. >> I heard a rumor that Equifax's franchising strategy had partners on the VPN that were state sponsored. They weren't even hacking, they had full access. >> There's a reason that the Chinese are buying hotels. They bought the Waldorf Astoria. We do stuff with the UN and NATO, you can't even stay there anymore. I think it's still under construction but it's a no-no to stay there anymore. I mean western nations and allies because they'll have bugs in the rooms. The WiFi that you use... >> Has fake certificates. >> Or there's a vulnerability that's left in that network so the information for executives who have IP or PII or electronic health records, you know what I mean? You go to these places to stay overnight, as an executive, and you're compromised. >> Look what happened with Eugene Kaspersky. I don't know the real story. I don't know if you can comment, but someone sees that and says, "this guy used to have high level meetings "at the Pentagon weekly, monthly." Now he's persona non grata. >> He fell out of favor, I guess, right? It happens. >> James, great conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Congratulations on the great work you guys are doing here at the event. I know the content has been well received. Certainly the key notes we saw were awesome. CSOs, view from the government, from industry, congratulations. James Scott who is the co founder and senior fellow of ICIT, Internet Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> James: Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> T is for tech. >> And the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. >> Good stuff. A lot of stuff going on (mumbles), exploits, infrastructure, it's all mainstream. It's the crisis of our generation. There's a radical shift happening and the answers are all going to come from industry and government coming together. This is the Cube bringing the data, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break. (music)

from galvanized San Francisco extraction signal from the noise it's the kue cover the apache spark community event brought you IBM now your host John free George okay welcome back everyone we are live in San Francisco for this special q presentation with the IBM sparkman the event here live at galvanized in San Francisco workspace incubator great place for developer education IBM's big announcement today their commitment to spark they didn't see any numbers but I'm counting in the hundreds of millions of years to quote Papa Chiana on my call with him on Friday with rod $17 fuck yeah holler last for hundreds of millions yeah hundred millions of dollars getting late in the day going to be your coming rod Smith's our next guest rod welcome to the cube thank you very much with a catalyst behind spark at IBM worked hard on it yeah you guys tell a story what's the story well we worked on big data and I have a group of folks that go out and work with customers all the time and what we were doing Hadoop we would do these cool applications that sometimes you know small clusters 20 minutes you get a result and a customer would say can you do that in a couple seconds kind of look around and go what changed it means it did the business problem and they couldn't tell us but it's one of those data points in your head that go something's not quite right you know what's what's changing or what are they trying to tell me that they can't and that's when we started learning you know customers were looking for technology that they could iterate on quickly you know open-ended questions it wasn't the give me a problem do the game pew pew output I'm done this was oh gee there's the journey I now see some interesting insights I have other questions was it was something not right the data that they got didn't match their hypothesis or was it the expectation that if I can do it fast on google and find a Thai restaurant down the block well so I can it went that way something doesn't right what was with me that said why can't you tell me what you're really trying to accomplish what I learned is that as we go through these kind of digital transfer mation real real time they were thinking about how their business is going to change so fast and so the problems always been for technologists and vendors like IBM tell us the problem we pick out the technology and you're pretty well stuck with it it stays that way and they wanted more flexibility open-ended questions lots of different data sources on demand when they had to have it on this they wanted to see results along the way and they would rather have analytics be approximation that they could use quickly rather than after the fact and more accurate okay so you know when you went through that it wasn't they couldn't find a bi person to talk bad about and I couldn't find a data person so you know it was fun to try to put piece puzzles together and that's where spark came into this so I see a lot of other trends are kind of vectoring into that convergence which is in-memory databases you know the community flash for persistence store on the storage side so this you as a close to all that action what was the aha moment for for within IBM is han hey you know what this spark thing is the next Linux me we got to get out in front of this and help the community go faster and then kind of rising tide floats elbows what was that flash point flow we we had two of them one was that in our commerce group there's ways that they work on online pricing and there's a vendor stander which takes about a week when you get data off of a site or retail site they analyze that they correct the analytics they put it back up again takes about a week but we showed them a spark we could do it in about four hours a week down to four hours and now they started to think oh you know what do we offer customers now we have ways to have not just one product many products let's bring in other data location data traffic data weather data social data so that kind of exploded internally on this is a big change this is something that we can relate to cus of multiple data source of the need for unification and speed and and speed speed first because be first that's a heck all the speed i want to bring other data sets and it's time to value i mean if you're going to be a digital business and look at real time where it's going Netflix others have really set the standard on ok so then i'm a so let's take a next level so rod you're crazy we can't do that it would disrupt all these other businesses we have so how does that conversation happen within IBM the way that happens in IBM is rod you are crazy and you're going to cause me odds it up so please go away and I don't go away easily but you keep pushing on this and part of my job is to work with customers can I show value so I can take the product team saying you need to take this more seriously I've got currency now and then as you just said the marketplace starts to light up spark is on the front page as people are talking about how they're using it well Hadoop is growing too at the same time so it loop does it seeds the market seats the Mars you see you're playing ahead do but if you see the customer challenges and you're like you guys just connect the dots and and then it's back to the customer is talking about what their problems they want to use or the solutions are looking for so yeah it takes time because it's it's risky meaning that all of us have quarterly is what we're doing but how do we now make it safer for people in IBM jump in the water so that eventually they don't hate me so what's your what's your comment when a friend says hey rod you know linux was great but it's a different era oh you know here with cloud and mobile open source with the patch he's evolved to the point where it's very manageable for vendors to be contributed as well with with non company contributors how do you guys see the difference between those two worlds because really this is a Linux moment but there's no big bad main many many computer companies name frames out there but their specialized for like the Z systems are great but like this is scale out commodity hardware a dupe now that's growing how do you how do you describe that because there is a Linux correlation what linux was for open source then operating systems now this is kind of distributed analytics I think you're you're you know the the part of this is kind of real-time digital business transformations and while there is not a you know bad company out there you know amazon and others have shown how they can be online businesses and use analytics and be very effective but i'm a brick and mortar company and an online business how do i do the same thing and spark starts to really show that no they don't have a corner on the market we can compete so that's the big factor on this is well it's not one company doing this it's I need to be able to compete at the speed the businesses that didn't have to see that Amazon started kind of post recession or you know Dom bubble bursting you know web services was just kind of kicking through if we remember our history lessons and what happened was they really had no traction they built some building blocks right they made a good decision to integrate to core building blocks compute and storage and they built from there so in a way you guys can enable companies to have their own amazon like extensive experience because it's a fresh clean cute paper right it is and I think we're spark it's interesting is like you said in two verticals what do i do to retail what do I do in health care what are we doing finance right very specialized I we've shown in Watson you can do Watson for cancer research you can do Watson for cooking right but they're very vertical now so specialized domain expertise becomes really interesting right that's the big part and that's the part I really liked about spark they were the community really thought about solution developers you know they stayed away kind of middle ground I you don't have to be a deep dated person or a deep analytics API person what's the problem you want to solve how can I help you do that I think that's a you know that's interesting is that that's because most people go Jay this is speeds and feeds software we look at the solutions more holistic but then you're really talk about customer problems right the so-called outcomes that go on well that's what and I think that's the part that I've enjoyed is I want to talk to you you know about what your problem is I don't want to talk technology I you know I don't want to have to make a technology choice from stay one spark helps me with that I don't notify programming while all those things come together so I can concentrate we can concentrate on talking to the customer but you know learn from them what are you trying to accomplish so you watch the next things on your list good I just gonna say you know looking at your LinkedIn page i love this at BP emerging technologies for 20 some odd years so you see here you've seen a lot of technology's come a lot of emerging technologies and the acceleration of these technologies is only going more right you have a whole lot more in your portfolio you have to look at today then then you did yesterday or five years ago yeah why is sparks a special in the cornucopia of technologies that you've seen coming over the years it's a good question and and as I've done merging technologies I've learned that I have to you know listen to customers very carefully on it and when I hear those kind of repeatable business patterns do I see an economic change a transformation that really sticks with me and sometimes the old things have start really big you know they start out good and then they fade away but I always look for technologies that seem to have lots of dimensions to them from a business value standpoint that's what attracted me to spark and my team working with some customers on pocs we could do them quickly you know I really like to get to the point where you know we an industry we with notebooks and others we can do solutions in less than four hours for a customer what better thing to take your you know employee to lunch and spat them on the back for you know something that you didn't expect for weeks well one of the exciting things that you guys have done is you shine the spotlight on spark and you opened up the conversation globally around IBM is making a big move spark was a little bit of an outlier and the mainstream press I mean the press we're picking up spark oh yeah berkeley some credibility of great people behind it but now it's like wow it's going to get the attention of CX cxos out there and they're going to be like hmm if ibm's looking at it must be relevant because of the history you guys have with innovation but they're going to ask you the question I'm going to ask you which is it's not baked out yet where are we with this what are you guys going to do how does IBM work with the community to continue to bake out spark because a lot of people are using it bringing it in but it's evolving super fast and that's going to be the question is it baked and how does it get baked faster so I think there is lots of areas that if we just talked about if I'm doing retail or health care or fine it's going to be lots of specialized analytics because that's what spark for me is is enabling custom analytics on this second part is as you think about how you want to look at bigger problems I think that many times are learning is to try to you know once we got a technology lets make everything fit it rather than starting to separate it by business problems and I think we can do that now or we can bring to the table technology learning best practices around this and solutions I think you know at the end of the day it's house part can be integrated into a business solution and our customers very quickly and hopefully those customers see it broadly from interoperability standpoint of what they're going to do so the final question I have for you is what was the biggest learning that you've taken away from this process that was magnified through this whole journey of a taking IBM from being a participant in the as a citizen in the community early on as a founding member of spark this is back in two thousand nine so it wasn't like no one knew he was going on and you know we bird cover on Hadoop from the beginning so we'd love to watch these ecosystems grow but from from the early days to now today mmm what was the biggest thing that you learned that was magnified out of all the reactions all the feedback all the customers what can you share I I think for me when we did a spark hack you know our hackathon piece when 28,000 IBM ER showed up with ideas that told us twenty eight thousand 28,000 so now you stopped and 28,000 people who were focused on the customer so they had a thought of how this could be relevant this is great I mean this isn't like back talking for this isn't one little vein with a little stream it's big and it big was what we can do for our customer when was that um about two months ago how did you pull that off just out an email blast all the IBM's put on the message board to a crowd chat what did you do well when you put out an email blast the second one is you put on a webcam to explain to people what you're going to do with it what you'd like them to do and I'll we're setting it up and and then you step back and you know kind of cross your fingers hope people show up and then when you know you invite ten thousand and twenty eight thousand show up you kind of know that we're turning a corner as a company on understanding how we can use that for this this also highlights this whole connectedness apps internet of things and people are things to so their mobile device when you have that kind of people close to the action the creativity is there right there on the front lines and they don't feel like that the work they do is going to be taken by the machinery in the old days I got to go back all these hurdles I gotta jump now they could instantly be there with some solutions so that's that's super compelling the next question is security and how does how do you see that leaving in because now one of the things that came up will first meeting let me back up but I get this you think about security question for a second last week ahead dupe summit we were talking with the Hadoop ecosystem Hortonworks ODP conversations etc but when you looked at kind of like reading the tea leaves it was sparked that was kind of stealing the show the subtext was smart all the spark sessions were packed the developers had was salivating over sparks like to hear that I did why why is that why are the Hadoop developers salivating over spark is it because they wanted to go faster do they see extensions any thoughts I think that I've say it two ways one is I think there was and since I did who do for quite a while I think people thought for a while Hadoop was going to be an analytics platform and it it kind of went down the path of being immoral generalized platform so you can do more than MapReduce jobs so there's been this pent-up demand for really analytics focus and spark offered that focus and the performance side I think that's the parts in Hadoop sold kind of a false dream or it didn't materialize fast but I don't think of material out of false treaty I'm saying if they promise them around yeah it well and people set those you know well the fresh maybe yeah I don't think the vendors all I think was more than well vendors you know it did to unstructured data does that unstructured data does that storing data and I didn't be able to act on it creates some interesting dynamics I mean I've worked with customers who you know started to put data in Hadoop but to have put data dupe you know we're only going to do a year's worth of data and then putting three years of data because they want to do monte pucker up my Carlo simulations against a Monty Python it's time you threw water on us and we love yours we on the cube but the problem says we're talking about before like you know our internal use we can produce you know interesting innovations in days that's going to attract audiences because now they can show their you know business people what they can do for them that's what's really driving this I mean if you gotta see XO you know CMO says you know show me what you can do you know do segmentation on my population for these products they want it in in minutes not so you know going to run it in different jobs and the over a certain period of time I was just talking with the CEOs of docusign box 18 1018 Syrian kinky was executive director and then EVP a platform that Salesforce the common thread amongst those executives was the new digital transformation has such a dynamic or impactful economic impact yes I mean dr. Sanyal using examples how literally Deutsche Telekom saved 230 million dollars on one process yes one process yes with analytics and yeah process improvements extreme it sounds funny but it's extremely low hanging fruit they haven't had technology and the economics and be able support it now we do and now you're seeing the solution developer go I think I can make a business result faster yeah and if they can show it then businesses react and I think that's the beautiful thing about what Hadoop is done I mean I brought that up earlier trying to tease that out with reality we're seeing is that that mark is continuing to grow but there's a world beyond Hadoop yep I mean Hortonworks this public company I mean IBM is massive so you got Hadoop and then sparks a beautiful extension to that that enables so much more well I think spark will go further because it's more to me is another dimension it's an integration technology so i can have sparked up to legacy systems without hadoop you know in there doing analytics in there being an avenue for doing joins on data doing analytics on unstructured and transactional data whether data pulling it all together and I think that's the again talking about multi-dimensional that's what that was hard even five years ago so any relational database that's a nightmare yeah and you're asked about security so you want to touch on yeah okay go ahead so part of the things that I like about spark is the technology is called resilient distributed data sets r dds so I read data from a source and I make it into this r DD I can work on it that gives me a great data point or a great interaction with a Cassandra datastax did a really great job of a spark driver so you think about this in businesses for a db2 or something now I know where I can put my security and my governance I can put those at certain endpoints now as i'm reading in my application writing these things out so again back to my point of an integration it's not something that i'm trying to get around a business i'm at integrating extending their life and/or capabilities that's right so I got to ask you the internal IBM question my last question is it what's the vibe like at IBM because you know I've been you know I worked at IBM way back in the day back in the 80s and the cultures changed right so much mm-hmm but there's still a huge technical group of people at IBM so I got to ask you the question with all this new cloud innovation all this new capabilities to do stuff differently what's it like for all the technical guys at IBM right now because they got to be like Hayden we can now do this we can so new capabilities are emerging what's the what's the vibe like and what are some of the things that that are low-hanging fruit that are that our game change because low-hanging fruit is game-changing today oh yes I what's the vibe eternally at idea I've internally is very hot I mean the guys and gals at this you look at cloud computing look we've done with bluemix it got is getting you know great recent press it's getting great results with customers back to this time to value piece it's new to us I mean there's only a small group that started that so now the rest of the IBM arts are going this is really cool how do we do it now you've got analytics that you know we're starting you've been you know competencies are on this now you can take the real-time aspect so yeah the five is really all those little silos you know identity system here I got to build all the software now you can gotta go horizontal yeah so you know that's kind of a new thing that's kind of exciting it's gonna be fun to watch my final question I guess is my final final question is have you been keeping track this is the sixth and final time analytics well rods great to have you on the cube you're awesome great great commentary great great insight spark in the cloud is what data bricks announce what about an on-premise i'm a customer i want i want on prem I don't necessarily want to do what's next I 40 s or other stuff oh I think you're going to see you know like hybrid models for cloud where spark as a service is there on prem i think one of the really exciting parts to me is that one the unified program model to the portability of the analytic models so let's say I start on prom because I'm worried about security and other things and then I want to move it to a cloud service well I don't have to go rewrite it I can just move the analytics over from a model standpoint so I think you're going to see this evolved very fast as people want to do either on prem or hybrid or you know dedicated cuz of the integration capabilities and the distributed nature of it that's the point yep awesome well I'll let you get the last word on the segment share what the folks who's not or aren't watching what is this all about today why is in San Francisco today IBM's announcement what's so groundbreaking about it I know you're part of it a little bit biased but share the folks why what why now what's this all about what's what's what's going on here well we think that the kind of epicenter for spark innovation is here in San Francisco amp lab with data bricks and others are doing here and we want to be a part of that and I think spark technology senator setting up is about how we can contribute and learn and you know help the community grow we think this is gonna you brought some food to the party I mean you are I said earlier beer right you bring a you know the ml yeah you got them back other wine napa valley of course you got to go to wine well craft beers good north north bay thanks so much for coming on the cube really appreciate the insight because it is a great color from an expert IBM here we're on the ground this is the cube special presentation live in San Ruby back with more with live coverage of the breakouts in the event tonight IBM spark community event here in san fran at the galvanized workspace education center we write back