(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2. This is Dave Vellante. We're here exploring the intersection of data and analytics in the future of cloud and data. In this segment, we're going to look deeper into the life sciences business with Jesse Cugliotta, who leads the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry practice at Snowflake. And Nicholas Nick Taylor, who's the executive director of Informatics at Ionis Pharmaceuticals. Gentlemen, thanks for coming in theCUBE and participating in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us- >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome, okay, we're go really try to look at data sharing as a use case and try to understand what's happening in the healthcare industry generally and specifically, how Nick thinks about sharing data in a governed fashion whether tapping the capabilities of multiple clouds is advantageous long term or presents more challenges than the effort is worth. And to start, Jesse, you lead this industry practice for Snowflake and it's a challenging and vibrant area. It's one that's hyper-focused on data privacy. So the first question is, you know there was a time when healthcare and other regulated industries wouldn't go near the cloud. What are you seeing today in the industry around cloud adoption and specifically multi-cloud adoption? >> Yeah, for years I've heard that healthcare and life sciences has been cloud diverse, but in spite of all of that if you look at a lot of aspects of this industry today, they've been running in the cloud for over 10 years now. Particularly when you look at CRM technologies or HR or HCM, even clinical technologies like EDC or ETMF. And it's interesting that you mentioned multi-cloud as well because this has always been an underlying reality especially within life sciences. This industry grows through acquisition where companies are looking to boost their future development pipeline either by buying up smaller biotechs, they may have like a late or a mid-stage promising candidate. And what typically happens is the larger pharma could then use their commercial muscle and their regulatory experience to move it to approvals and into the market. And I think the last few decades of cheap capital certainly accelerated that trend over the last couple of years. But this typically means that these new combined institutions may have technologies that are running on multiple clouds or multiple cloud strategies in various different regions to your point. And what we've often found is that they're not planning to standardize everything onto a single cloud provider. They're often looking for technologies that embrace this multi-cloud approach and work seamlessly across them. And I think this is a big reason why we, here at Snowflake, we've seen such strong momentum and growth across this industry because healthcare and life science has actually been one of our fastest growing sectors over the last couple of years. And a big part of that is in fact that we run on not only all three major cloud providers, but individual accounts within each and any one of them, they had the ability to communicate and interoperate with one another, like a globally interconnected database. >> Great, thank you for that setup. And so Nick, tell us more about your role and Ionis Pharma please. >> Sure. So I've been at Ionis for around five years now. You know, when when I joined it was, the IT department was pretty small. There wasn't a lot of warehousing, there wasn't a lot of kind of big data there. We saw an opportunity with Snowflake pretty early on as a provider that would be a lot of benefit for us, you know, 'cause we're small, wanted something that was fairly hands off. You know, I remember the days where you had to get a lot of DBAs in to fine tune your databases, make sure everything was running really, really well. The notion that there's, you know, no indexes to tune, right? There's very few knobs and dials, you can turn on Snowflake. That was appealing that, you know, it just kind of worked. So we found a use case to bring the platform in. We basically used it as a logging replacement as a Splunk kind of replacement with a platform called Elysium Analytics as a way to just get it in the door and give us the opportunity to solve a real world use case, but also to help us start to experiment using Snowflake as a platform. It took us a while to A, get the funding to bring it in, but B, build the momentum behind it. But, you know, as we experimented we added more data in there, we ran a few more experiments, we piloted in few more applications, we really saw the power of the platform and now, we are becoming a commercial organization. And with that comes a lot of major datasets. And so, you know, we really see Snowflake as being a very important part of our ecology going forward to help us build out our infrastructure. >> Okay, and you are running, your group runs on Azure, it's kind of mono cloud, single cloud, but others within Ionis are using other clouds, but you're not currently, you know, collaborating in terms of data sharing. And I wonder if you could talk about how your data needs have evolved over the past decade. I know you came from another highly regulated industry in financial services. So what's changed? You sort of touched on this before, you had these, you know, very specialized individuals who were, you know, DBAs, and, you know, could tune databases and the like, so that's evolved, but how has generally your needs evolved? Just kind of make an observation over the last, you know, five or seven years. What have you seen? >> Well, we, I wasn't in a group that did a lot of warehousing. It was more like online trade capture, but, you know, it was very much on-prem. You know, being in the cloud is very much a dirty word back then. I know that's changed since I've left. But in, you know, we had major, major teams of everyone who could do everything, right. As I mentioned in the pharma organization, there's a lot fewer of us. So the data needs there are very different, right? It's, we have a lot of SaaS applications. One of the difficulties with bringing a lot of SaaS applications on board is obviously data integration. So making sure the data is the same between them. But one of the big problems is joining the data across those SaaS applications. So one of the benefits, one of the things that we use Snowflake for is to basically take data out of these SaaS applications and load them into a warehouse so we can do those joins. So we use technologies like Boomi, we use technologies like Fivetran, like DBT to bring this data all into one place and start to kind of join that basically, allow us to do, run experiments, do analysis, basically take better, find better use for our data that was siloed in the past. You mentioned- >> Yeah. And just to add on to Nick's point there. >> Go ahead. >> That's actually something very common that we're seeing across the industry is because a lot of these SaaS applications that you mentioned, Nick, they're with from vendors that are trying to build their own ecosystem in walled garden. And by definition, many of them do not want to integrate with one another. So from a, you know, from a data platform vendor's perspective, we see this as a huge opportunity to help organizations like Ionis and others kind of deal with the challenges that Nick is speaking about because if the individual platform vendors are never going to make that part of their strategy, we see it as a great way to add additional value to these customers. >> Well, this data sharing thing is interesting. There's a lot of walled gardens out there. Oracle is a walled garden, AWS in many ways is a walled garden. You know, Microsoft has its walled garden. You could argue Snowflake is a walled garden. But the, what we're seeing and the whole reason behind the notion of super-cloud is we're creating an abstraction layer where you actually, in this case for this use case, can share data in a governed manner. Let's forget about the cross-cloud for a moment. I'll come back to that, but I wonder, Nick, if you could talk about how you are sharing data, again, Snowflake sort of, it's, I look at Snowflake like the app store, Apple, we're going to control everything, we're going to guarantee with data clean rooms and governance and the standards that we've created within that platform, we're going to make sure that it's safe for you to share data in this highly regulated industry. Are you doing that today? And take us through, you know, the considerations that you have in that regard. >> So it's kind of early days for us in Snowflake in general, but certainly in data sharing, we have a couple of examples. So data marketplace, you know, that's a great invention. It's, I've been a small IT shop again, right? The fact that we are able to just bring down terabyte size datasets straight into our Snowflake and run analytics directly on that is huge, right? The fact that we don't have to FTP these massive files around run jobs that may break, being able to just have that on tap is huge for us. We've recently been talking to one of our CRO feeds- CRO organizations about getting their data feeds in. Historically, this clinical trial data that comes in on an FTP file, we have to process it, take it through the platforms, put it into the warehouse. But one of the CROs that we talked to recently when we were reinvestigate in what data opportunities they have, they were a Snowflake customer and we are, I think, the first production customer they have, have taken that feed. So they're basically exposing their tables of data that historically came in these FTP files directly into our Snowflake instance now. We haven't taken advantage of that. It only actually flipped the switch about three or four weeks ago. But that's pretty big for us again, right? We don't have to worry about maintaining those jobs that take those files in. We don't have to worry about the jobs that take those and shove them on the warehouse. We now have a feed that's directly there that we can use a tool like DBT to push through directly into our model. And then the third avenue that's came up, actually fairly recently as well was genetics data. So genetics data that's highly, highly regulated. We had to be very careful with that. And we had a conversation with Snowflake about the data white rooms practice, and we see that as a pretty interesting opportunity. We are having one organization run genetic analysis being able to send us those genetic datasets, but then there's another organization that's actually has the in quotes "metadata" around that, so age, ethnicity, location, et cetera. And being able to join those two datasets through some kind of mechanism would be really beneficial to the organization. Being able to build a data white room so we can put that genetic data in a secure place, anonymize it, and then share the amalgamated data back out in a way that's able to be joined to the anonymized metadata, that could be pretty huge for us as well. >> Okay, so this is interesting. So you talk about FTP, which was the common way to share data. And so you basically, it's so, I got it now you take it and do whatever you want with it. Now we're talking, Jesse, about sharing the same copy of live data. How common is that use case in your industry? >> It's become very common over the last couple of years. And I think a big part of it is having the right technology to do it effectively. You know, as Nick mentioned, historically, this was done by people sending files around. And the challenge with that approach, of course, while there are multiple challenges, one, every time you send a file around your, by definition creating a copy of the data because you have to pull it out of your system of record, put it into a file, put it on some server where somebody else picks it up. And by definition at that point you've lost governance. So this creates challenges in general hesitation to doing so. It's not that it hasn't happened, but the other challenge with it is that the data's no longer real time. You know, you're working with a copy of data that was as fresh as at the time at that when that was actually extracted. And that creates limitations in terms of how effective this can be. What we're starting to see now with some of our customers is live sharing of information. And there's two aspects of that that are important. One is that you're not actually physically creating the copy and sending it to someone else, you're actually exposing it from where it exists and allowing another consumer to interact with it from their own account that could be in another region, some are running in another cloud. So this concept of super-cloud or cross-cloud could becoming realized here. But the other important aspect of it is that when that other- when that other entity is querying your data, they're seeing it in a real time state. And this is particularly important when you think about use cases like supply chain planning, where you're leveraging data across various different enterprises. If I'm a manufacturer or if I'm a contract manufacturer and I can see the actual inventory positions of my clients, of my distributors, of the levels of consumption at the pharmacy or the hospital that gives me a lot of indication as to how my demand profile is changing over time versus working with a static picture that may have been from three weeks ago. And this has become incredibly important as supply chains are becoming more constrained and the ability to plan accurately has never been more important. >> Yeah. So the race is on to solve these problems. So it start, we started with, hey, okay, cloud, Dave, we're going to simplify database, we're going to put it in the cloud, give virtually infinite resources, separate compute from storage. Okay, check, we got that. Now we've moved into sort of data clean rooms and governance and you've got an ecosystem that's forming around this to make it safer to share data. And then, you know, nirvana, at least near term nirvana is we're going to build data applications and we're going to be able to share live data and then you start to get into monetization. Do you see, Nick, in the near future where I know you've got relationships with, for instance, big pharma like AstraZeneca, do you see a situation where you start sharing data with them? Is that in the near term? Is that more long term? What are the considerations in that regard? >> I mean, it's something we've been thinking about. We haven't actually addressed that yet. Yeah, I could see situations where, you know, some of these big relationships where we do need to share a lot of data, it would be very nice to be able to just flick a switch and share our data assets across to those organizations. But, you know, that's a ways off for us now. We're mainly looking at bringing data in at the moment. >> One of the things that we've seen in financial services in particular, and Jesse, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is companies like Goldman or Capital One or Nasdaq taking their stack, their software, their tooling actually putting it on the cloud and facing it to their customers and selling that as a new monetization vector as part of their digital or business transformation. Are you seeing that Jesse at all in healthcare or is it happening today or do you see a day when that happens or is healthier or just too scary to do that? >> No, we're seeing the early stages of this as well. And I think it's for some of the reasons we talked about earlier. You know, it's a much more secure way to work with a colleague if you don't have to copy your data and potentially expose it. And some of the reasons that people have historically copied that data is that they needed to leverage some sort of algorithm or application that a third party was providing. So maybe someone was predicting the ideal location and run a clinical trial for this particular rare disease category where there are only so many patients around the world that may actually be candidates for this disease. So you have to pick the ideal location. Well, sending the dataset to do so, you know, would involve a fairly complicated process similar to what Nick was mentioning earlier. If the company who was providing the logic or the algorithm to determine that location could bring that algorithm to you and you run it against your own data, that's a much more ideal and a much safer and more secure way for this industry to actually start to work with some of these partners and vendors. And that's one of the things that we're looking to enable going into this year is that, you know, the whole concept should be bring the logic to your data versus your data to the logic and the underlying sharing mechanisms that we've spoken about are actually what are powering that today. >> And so thank you for that, Jesse. >> Yes, Dave. >> And so Nick- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, if I could add, yeah, if I could add to that, that's something certainly we've been thinking about. In fact, we'd started talking to Snowflake about that a couple of years ago. We saw the power there again of the platform to be able to say, well, could we, we were thinking in more of a data share, but could we share our data out to say an AI/ML vendor, have them do the analytics and then share the data, the results back to us. Now, you know, there's more powerful mechanisms to do that within the Snowflake ecosystem now, but you know, we probably wouldn't need to have onsite AI/ML people, right? Some of that stuff's very sophisticated, expensive resources, hard to find, you know, it's much better for us to find a company that would be able to build those analytics, maintain those analytics for us. And you know, we saw an opportunity to do that a couple years ago and we're kind of excited about the opportunity there that we can just basically do it with a no op, right? We share the data route, we have the analytics done, we get the result back and it's just fairly seamless. >> I mean, I could have a whole another Cube session on this, guys, but I mean, I just did a a session with Andy Thurai, a Constellation research about how difficult it's been for organization to get ROI because they don't have the expertise in house so they want to either outsource it or rely on vendor R&D companies to inject that AI and machine intelligence directly into applications. My follow-up question to you Nick is, when you think about, 'cause Jesse was talking about, you know, let the data basically stay where it is and you know bring the compute to that data. If that data lives on different clouds, and maybe it's not your group, but maybe it's other parts of Ionis or maybe it's your partners like AstraZeneca, or you know, the AI/ML partners and they're potentially on other clouds or that data is on other clouds. Do you see that, again, coming back to super-cloud, do you see it as an advantage to be able to have a consistent experience across those clouds? Or is that just kind of get in the way and make things more complex? What's your take on that, Nick? >> Well, from the vendors, so from the client side, it's kind of seamless with Snowflake for us. So we know for a fact that one of the datasets we have at the moment, Compile, which is a, the large multi terabyte dataset I was talking about. They're on AWS on the East Coast and we are on Azure on the West Coast. And they had to do a few tweaks in the background to make sure the data was pushed over from, but from my point of view, the data just exists, right? So for me, I think it's hugely beneficial that Snowflake supports this kind of infrastructure, right? We don't have to jump through hoops to like, okay, well, we'll download it here and then re-upload it here. They already have the mechanism in the background to do these multi-cloud shares. So it's not important for us internally at the moment. I could see potentially at some point where we start linking across different groups in the organization that do have maybe Amazon or Google Cloud, but certainly within our providers. We know for a fact that they're on different services at the moment and it just works. >> Yeah, and we learned from Benoit Dageville, who came into the studio on August 9th with first Supercloud in 2022 that Snowflake uses a single global instance across regions and across clouds, yeah, whether or not you can query across you know, big regions, it just depends, right? It depends on latency. You might have to make a copy or maybe do some tweaks in the background. But guys, we got to jump, I really appreciate your time. Really thoughtful discussion on the future of data and cloud, specifically within healthcare and pharma. Thank you for your time. >> Thanks- >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE team and my co-host, John Furrier. Keep it right there for more action at Supercloud 2. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this session. I feel honored to be invited to speak here today. And I also appreciate entity research Summit members for organ organizing and giving this great opportunity. Please let me give a quick introduction. First, I'm a Takashi from Marvin American population, and I'm leading technology scouting and global ation with digital health companies such as Business Alliance and Strategically Investment in North America. And since we started to focus on this space in 2016 our team is growing. And in order to bring more new technologies and services to Japan market Thesis year, we founded the new service theories for digital health business, especially, uh, in medical diagnosis space in Japan. And today I would like to talk how health care has been transformed for my micro perspective, and I hope you enjoy reasoning it. So what's happened since the US identify the first case in the middle of January, As everyone knows, unfortunately, is the damaged by this pandemic was unequal amongst the people in us. It had more determined tal impact on those who are socially and economically vulnerable because of the long, long lasting structural program off the U. S. Society and the Light Charity about daily case rating elevator country shows. Even in the community, the infection rate off the low income were 4.5 times higher than, uh, those of the high income and due to czar straight off the Corvette, about 14 million people are unemployed. The unique point off the U. S. Is that more than 60% of insurance is tied with employment, so losing a job can mean losing access to health care. And the point point here is that the Corvette did not create healthcare disparity but, uh nearly highlighted the underlying program and necessity off affordable care for all. And when the country had a need to increase the testing capacity and geographic out, treat the pharmacies and retails joined forces with existing stakeholders more than 90% off the U. S Corporation live within five miles off a community pharmacy such as CVS and Walgreen, so they can technically provide the test to everyone in all the community. And they also have a huge workforce memory pharmacist who are eligible to perform the testing scale, and this very made their potential in community based health care. Stand out and about your health has provided on alternative way for people to access to health care. At affordable applies under the unusual setting where social distancing, which required required mhm and people have a fear of infection. So they are afraid to take a public transportacion and visit >>the doctor the same thing supplied to doctor and the chart. Here is a number of total visit cranes by service type after stay at home order was issued across the U. S. By Ali April patient physical visits to doctor's offices or clinics declined by ALAN 70%. On the other hand, that share, or telehealth, accounted for 25% of the total total. Doctor's visit in April, while many states studied to re opening face to face visit is gradually recovering. And overall Tele Health Service did not offset the crime. Physician Physical doctor's visit and telehealth John never fully replace in person care. However, Telehealth has established a new way to provide affordable care, especially to vulnerable people, and I don't explain each player's today. But as an example, the chart shows the significant growth of the tell a dog who is one of the largest badger care and tell his provider, I believe there are three factors off paradox. Success under the pandemic. First, obviously tell Doc could reach >>the job between those patients and doctors. Majority of the patients who needed to see doctors who are those who have underlying health conditions and are high risk for Kelowna, Bilis and Secondary. They showed their business model is highly scalable. In the first quarter of this year, they moved quickly to expand their physical physicians network to increase their capacity and catch up growing demand. To some extent, they also contributed to create flexible job for the doctors who suffered from Lydia's appointment and surgery. They utilized. There are legalism to maximize the efficiency for doctors and doing so, uh, they have university maintained high quality care at affordable applies Yeah, and at the same time, the government recognize the body of about your care and de regulated traditional rules to sum up she m s temporary automated to pay a wide range of tell Her services, including hospital visit and HHS temporarily waived hip hop minorities for telehealth cases and they're changed allowed provider to use communication tools such as facetime and the messenger. During their appointment on August start, the government issued a new executive order to expand tell his services beyond the pandemic. So the government is also moving to support about your health care. So it was a quick review of the health care challenges and somewhat advancement in the pandemic. But as you understand, since those challenges are not caused by the pandemic, problems will stay remain and events off this year will continuously catalyze the transformation. So how was his cherished reshaped and where will we go? The topic from here can be also applied to Japan market. Okay, I believe democratization and decentralization healthcare more important than ever. So what does A. The traditional healthcare was defined in a framework over patient and a doctor. But in the new normal, the range of beneficiaries will be expanded from patient to all citizens, including the country uninsured people. Thanks to the technology evolution, as you can download health management off for free on iTunes stores while the range of the digital health services unable everyone to participate in new health system system. And in this slide, I put three essential element to fully realize democratization and decentralization off health care, health, literacy, data sharing and security, privacy and safety in addition, taken. In addition, technology is put at the bottom as a foundation off three point first. Health stimulus is obviously important because if people don't understand how the system works, what options are available to them or what are the pros and cons of each options? They can not navigate themselves and utilize the service. It can even cause a different disparity. Issue and secondary data must be technically flee to transfer. While it keeps interoperability ease. More options are becoming available to patient. But if data cannot be shared among stakeholders, including patient hospitals in strollers and budget your providers, patient data will be fragmented and people cannot yet continue to care which they benefited under current centralized care system. And this is most challenging part. But the last one is that the security aspect more players will involving decentralized health care outside of conventional healthcare system. So obviously, both the number of healthcare channels and our frequency of data sharing will increase more. It's create ah, higher data about no beauty, and so, under the new health care framework, we needed to ensure patient privacy and safety and also re examine a Scott write lines for sharing patient data and off course. Corbett Wasa Stone Catalyst off this you saved. But what folly. Our drivers in Macro and Micro Perspective from Mark Lowe. The challenges in healthcare system have been widely recognized for decades, and now he's a big pain. The pandemic reminded us all the key values. Misha, our current pain point as I left the church shores. Those are increasing the population, health sustainability for doctors and other social system and value based care for better and more affordable care. And all the elements are co dependent on each other. The light chart explained that providing preventive care and Alan Dimension is the best way threes to meet the key values here. Similarly, the direction of community based care and about your care is in line with thes three values, and they are acting to maximize the number of beneficiaries form. A micro uh, initiative by nonconventional players is a big driver, and both CBS and Walmart are being actively engaged in healthcare healthcare businesses for many years. And CBS has the largest walking clinic called MinuteClinic, Ottawa 1100 locations, and Walmart also has 20 primary clinics. I didn't talk to them. But the most interesting things off their recent innovation, I believe, is that they are adjusted and expanded their focus, from primary care to community health Center to out less to every every customer's needs. And CBS Front to provide affordable preventive health and chronic health monitoring services at 1500 CBS Health have, which they are now setting up and along a similar line would Mark is deploying Walmart Health Center, where, utilizing tech driven solutions, they provide affordable one stop service for core healthcare. They got less, uh, insurance status. For example, more than 40% of the people in U. S visit will not every big, so liberating the huge customer base and physical locations. Both companies being reading decentralization off health care and consumer device company such as Apple and Fitbit also have helped in transform forming healthcare in two ways. First, they are growing the boundaries between traditional healthcare and consumer product after their long development airport available, getting healthcare device and secondary. They acted as the best healthcare educators to consumers and increase people's healthcare awareness because they're taking an important role in the enhancement, health, literacy and healthcare democratization. And based on the story so far, I'd like to touch to business concept which can be applied to both Japan and the US and one expected change. It will be the emergence of data integration plot home while the telehealth. While the healthcare data data volume has increased 15 times for the last seven years and will continuously increase, we have a chance to improve the health care by harnessing the data. So meaning the new system, which unify the each patient data from multiple data sources and create 360 degrees longitudinal view each individual and then it sensitized the unified data to gain additional insights seen from structure data and unable to provide personal lives care. Finally, it's aggregate each individual data and reanalyzed to provide inside for population health. This is one specific model I envision. And, uh, health care will be provided slew online or offline and at the hospital or detail store. In order to amplify the impact of health care. The law off the mediator between health care between hospital and citizen will become more important. They can be a pharmacy toe health stand out about your care providers. They provide wide range of fundamental care and medication instruction and management. They also help individuals to manage their health care data. I will not explain the details today, but Japan has similar challenges in health care, such as increasing healthcare expenditure and lack of doctors and care givers. For example, they people in Japan have physical physician visit more than 20 times a year on average, while those in the U. S. On >>the do full times it sounds a joke, but people say because the artery are healthy, say visit hospitals to see friends. So we need to utilize thes mediators to reduce cost while they maintained social place for citizens in Japan, the government has promoted, uh, usual family, pharmacist and primary doctors and views the community based medical system as a policy. There was division of dispensing fees in Japan this year to ship the core load or pharmacist to the new role as a health management service providers. And so >>I believe we will see the change in those spaces not only in the U. S, but also in Japan, and we went through so unprecedented times. But I believe it's been resulting accelerating our healthcare transformation and creating a new business innovation. And this brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention and hope you could find something somehow useful for your business. And if you have any questions >>or comments, please for you feel free to contact me.

>>Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this session. I feel honored to be invited to speak here today. And I also appreciate entity research Summit members for organ organizing and giving this great opportunity. Please let me give a quick introduction. First, I'm a Takashi from Marvin American population, and I'm leading technology scouting and global ation with digital health companies such as Business Alliance and Strategically Investment in North America. And since we started to focus on this space in 2016 our team is growing. And in order to bring more new technologies and services to Japan market Thesis year, we founded the new service theories for digital health business, especially, uh, in medical diagnosis space in Japan. And today I would like to talk how health care has been transformed for my micro perspective, and I hope you enjoy reasoning it. So what's happened since the US identify the first case in the middle of January, As everyone knows, unfortunately, is the damaged by this pandemic was unequal amongst the people in us. It had more determined tal impact on those who are socially and economically vulnerable because of the long, long lasting structural program off the U. S. Society and the Light Charity about daily case rating elevator country shows. Even in the community, the infection rate off the low income were 4.5 times higher than, uh, those of the high income and due to czar straight off the Corvette, about 14 million people are unemployed. The unique point off the U. S. Is that more than 60% of insurance is tied with employment, so losing a job can mean losing access to health care. And the point point here is that the Corvette did not create healthcare disparity but, uh nearly highlighted the underlying program and necessity off affordable care for all. And when the country had a need to increase the testing capacity and geographic out, treat the pharmacies and retails joined forces with existing stakeholders more than 90% off the U. S Corporation live within five miles off a community pharmacy such as CVS and Walgreen, so they can technically provide the test to everyone in all the community. And they also have a huge workforce memory pharmacist who are eligible to perform the testing scale, and this very made their potential in community based health care. Stand out and about your health has provided on alternative way for people to access to health care. At affordable applies under the unusual setting where social distancing, which required required mhm and people have a fear of infection. So they are afraid to take a public transportacion and visit >>the doctor the same thing supplied to doctor and the chart. Here is a number of total visit cranes by service type after stay at home order was issued across the U. S. By Ali April patient physical visits to doctor's offices or clinics declined by ALAN 70%. On the other hand, that share, or telehealth, accounted for 25% of the total total. Doctor's >>visit in April, while many states studied to re opening face to face visit is gradually recovering. And overall Tele Health Service did not offset the crime. Physician Physical doctor's visit and telehealth John never fully replace in person care. However, Telehealth has established a new way to provide affordable care, especially to vulnerable people, and I don't explain each player's today. But as an example, the chart shows the significant growth of >>the tell a dog who is one of the largest badger care and tell his provider, I believe there are three factors off paradox. Success under the pandemic. First, obviously tell Doc could reach >>the job between those patients and doctors. Majority of the patients who needed to see doctors who are those who have underlying health conditions and are high risk for Kelowna, Bilis and Secondary. They showed their business model is highly scalable. In the first quarter of this year, they moved quickly to expand their physical physicians network to increase their capacity and catch up growing demand. To some extent, they also contributed to create flexible job for the doctors who suffered from Lydia's appointment and surgery. They utilized. There are legalism to maximize the efficiency for doctors and doing so, uh, they have university maintained high quality care at affordable applies Yeah, and at the same time, the government recognize the body of about your care and de regulated traditional rules to sum up she m s temporary automated to pay a wide range of tell Her services, including hospital visit and HHS temporarily waived hip hop minorities for telehealth cases and they're changed allowed provider to use communication tools such as facetime and the messenger. During their appointment on August start, the government issued a new executive order to expand tell his services beyond the pandemic. So the government is also moving to support about your health care. So it was a quick review of the health care challenges and somewhat advancement in the pandemic. But as you understand, since those challenges are not caused by the pandemic, problems will stay remain and events off this year will continuously catalyze the transformation. So how was his cherished reshaped and where will we go? The topic from here can be also applied to Japan market. Okay, I believe democratization and decentralization healthcare more important than ever. So what does A. The traditional healthcare was defined in a framework over patient and a doctor. But in the new normal, the range of beneficiaries will be expanded from patient to all citizens, including the country uninsured people. Thanks to the technology evolution, as you can download health management off for free on iTunes stores while the range of the digital health services unable everyone to participate in new health system system. And in this slide, I put three essential element to fully realize democratization and decentralization off health care, health, literacy, data sharing and security, privacy and safety in addition, taken. In addition, technology is put at the bottom as a foundation off three point first. Health stimulus is obviously important because if people don't understand how the system works, what options are available to them or what are the pros and cons of each options? They can not navigate themselves and utilize the service. It can even cause a different disparity. Issue and secondary data must be technically flee to transfer. While it keeps interoperability ease. More options are becoming available to patient. But if data cannot be shared among stakeholders, including patient hospitals in strollers and budget your providers, patient data will be fragmented and people cannot yet continue to care which they benefited under current centralized care system. And this is most challenging part. But the last one is that the security aspect more players will involving decentralized health care outside of conventional healthcare system. So obviously, both the number of healthcare channels and our frequency of data sharing will increase more. It's create ah, higher data about no beauty, and so, under the new health care framework, we needed to ensure patient privacy and safety and also re examine a Scott write lines for sharing patient data and off course. Corbett Wasa Stone Catalyst off this you saved. But what folly. Our drivers in Macro and Micro Perspective from Mark Lowe. The challenges in healthcare system have been widely recognized for decades, and now he's a big pain. The pandemic reminded us all the key values. Misha, our current pain point as I left the church shores. Those are increasing the population, health sustainability for doctors and other social system and value based care for better and more affordable care. And all the elements are co dependent on each other. The light chart explained that providing preventive care and Alan Dimension is the best way threes to meet the key values here. Similarly, the direction of community based care and about your care is in line with thes three values, and they are acting to maximize the number of beneficiaries form. A micro uh, initiative by nonconventional players is a big driver, and both CBS and Walmart are being actively engaged in healthcare healthcare businesses for many years. And CBS has the largest walking clinic called MinuteClinic, Ottawa 1100 locations, and Walmart also has 20 primary clinics. I didn't talk to them. But the most interesting things off their recent innovation, I believe, is that they are adjusted and expanded their focus, from primary care to community health Center to out less to every every customer's needs. And CBS Front to provide affordable preventive health and chronic health monitoring services at 1500 CBS Health have, which they are now setting up and along a similar line would Mark is deploying Walmart Health Center, where, utilizing tech driven solutions, they provide affordable one stop service for core healthcare. They got less, uh, insurance status. For example, more than 40% of the people in U. S visit will not every big, so liberating the huge customer base and physical locations. Both companies being reading decentralization off health care and consumer device company such as Apple and Fitbit also have helped in transform forming healthcare in two ways. First, they are growing the boundaries between traditional healthcare and consumer product after their long development airport available, getting healthcare device and secondary. They acted as the best healthcare educators to consumers and increase people's healthcare awareness because they're taking an important role in the enhancement, health, literacy and healthcare democratization. And based on the story so far, I'd like to touch to business concept which can be applied to both Japan and the US and one expected change. It will be the emergence of data integration plot home while the telehealth. While the healthcare data data volume has increased 15 times for the last seven years and will continuously increase, we have a chance to improve the health care by harnessing the data. So meaning the new system, which unify the each patient data from multiple data sources and create 360 degrees longitudinal view each individual and then it sensitized the unified data to gain additional insights seen from structure data and unable to provide personal lives care. Finally, it's aggregate each individual data and reanalyzed to provide inside for population health. This is one specific model I envision. And, uh, health care will be provided slew online or offline and at the hospital or detail store. In order to amplify the impact of health care. The law off the mediator between health care between hospital and citizen will become more important. They can be a pharmacy toe health stand out about your care providers. They provide wide range of fundamental care and medication instruction and management. They also help individuals to manage their health care data. I will not explain the details today, but Japan has similar challenges in health care, such as increasing healthcare expenditure and lack of doctors and care givers. For example, they people in Japan have physical physician visit more than 20 times a year on average, while those in the U. S. On the do full times it sounds a joke, but people say because the artery are healthy, say visit hospitals to see friends. So we need to utilize thes mediators to reduce cost while they maintained social place for citizens in Japan, the government has promoted, uh, usual family, pharmacist and primary doctors and views the community based medical system as a policy. There was division of dispensing fees in Japan this year to ship the core load or pharmacist to the new role as a health management service providers. And so I believe we will see the change in those spaces not only in the U. S, but also in Japan, and we went through so unprecedented times. But I believe it's been resulting accelerating our healthcare transformation and creating a new business innovation. And this brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention and hope you could find something somehow useful for your business. And if you have any questions >>or comments, please for you feel free to contact me. Thank you.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with Steven and Amanda. We are covering combo go 19 in Colorado day two of our coverage and we're excited to welcome a successful comm vault customer to the cube. We have from the main stage this morning, Matthew mag meet data center, director of Sonic healthcare. Matthew, welcome. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. Oh good. We're excited to have you. So you got to, you are, you're, as your pen says, a combo customer champion. >>I am a customer champion a, I've kind of prided myself on that for the last few years. Uh, I like to get involved in the community and kind of help the other newcomers to come volt as well. As better my understanding and try to give the guys on the other end of the support line and break. >>So before we dig into Sonic and what you guys are doing and how you're working with combo, give our audience an overview of Sonic healthcare, what you guys do, where you're based, all that good background stuff. Okay. >>So I worked for a Sonic healthcare USA, so that's obviously in the United States. Uh, we are an anatomical and clinical pathology laboratory company. Um, we are based, uh, West coast central and East coast of the United States and we work with hospitals, doctor's office to provide, you know, quick and reliable laboratory results. >>So this is patient data. Yes. We think of, we think of data as I'm sure you do as well. It's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It's all the things, right? That you hear the new bacon. It's the new bacon is that was like your quote? I saw that combo last year. >>Yeah, they had, they had teachers last year with that data. Yeah. Data is the new bacon. >>Well it's, it's critical, you know, regardless of if you're for Kim comparing it to bacon, I do like that. But it's also, there's the proliferation of it is hard to manage. Tell us a little bit about the it environment at Sonic. You guys have been using combo for about four years, but give us an overview of what you were working with before and how, what may be some of the compelling events were. >>So coming on board with Sonic, uh, the combo rollout was relatively new. We didn't, I didn't really come into a preexisting environment. It was like, okay, this is, this is what we're going to use. I need you to learn it and run with it, make sure that it works. Right. And um, you know, coming from other companies that had different software applications, I was always in charge of the disaster recovery. That's always been kind of like a, a beating heart for me. >>You're the Dr. Guy. It is apparently, >>it's really hard to find someone who's excited about backups. So I've put, it's like, yes, please take it. So I'm coming in and being able to mold this application to kind of how I wanted it was a little like touch and go at first because we had people out of our, um, overseas office that were, uh, handling already and is, they kind of set the stage of how they wanted it to go. But, you know, things change. We've got to kind of move things as we go, but I kind of owe a lot to them to kind of really introducing me to combo. >> So Matthew, one of the things that we've really enjoyed talking about at this show is everybody's ready. They're born ready, they know what they're doing, what it's preparing for when things do fail. So you talked a little bit on stage about some of those times when things fail and how today you're able to be here and you're, the other person in the D R group is here and you don't have to worry about walking away from the office and you know, having, you know, I guess not a Pedro anymore, but getting that call. >>Yeah, they need to be there. So my cell phone. But yeah, so bring us through some of those, you know, failure scenarios. We are always trying different things. You know, combo does offer a wide array of different solutions they have for plans and one of them is their active directory plan. And I'm leaning towards this cause this is my most recent failure is, you know, we were just, I've always had issues with active directory testing. The fail over and my first attempt at it was a failure. But I learned so much off the bat that I'm actually comfortable now that there might be a few tweaks that we have to do. By worst case scenario, we'd definitely be able to get it back online without any issue. But if we would've gone into it without testing, without that failure, who knows what could have happened. It could've been just a resume generating event, you know? >>Well, so you, you Stu alluded to it and what you mentioned in the keynote was, Hey, my other only other Dr. Guy is here in the audience. So I actually, I have >>team a data center team and we're all in charge. It's eight, eight people and we're, we're in charge of the disaster recovery. But, uh, the old gentleman who's with me is the only other one who's, uh, uh, done a lot of the combo training. He comes to Kai, he's been to all three combos, goes with me and uh, he's, he's probably the, if I'm not around, he's the next in line to take that. So if there's a major issue it would be one of us that they would contact by. We're both here >> and you're both here. Well that actually speaks volumes. It does. And we're comfortable and you know, we've been checking email for things but you know, everything's smooth sailing so far. >>I think I saw a quote from you, I think it was in a video where you said before it was like having a newborn. >>Absolutely, absolutely. I used to check like sign in. It's like 10 o'clock every single night for the first year that I worked for sign cause I was petrified cause you know, I knew that I was backing stuff up but I don't know, was it still running with it still being backed up? Did it pause? Was it causing performance issues on the other end? There were so many what ifs and I just, I was, I was a mess. I was a nervous wreck constantly, you know, working till one or two in the morning and then go to bed and then eagerly get up and start checking stuff even before I left the house, you know? And I'm like, Oh, okay, that's finished. But now it's like, yeah, I know I finished not worried about Matthew. I think back to early in my career it was the dreaded backup window is, you know, when am I going to be able to get that in there? >>Can I finish the backup in the window that I have? And we've mostly gotten beyond that. But you know, there's so many new now we were just talking with Sandy Hamilton who was on stage before you about some of that automation. Really great automation sounds good, but there's gotta be a little bit of fear. It's like shit, you know, talking about like texting, I said like we've all texted the wrong thing or the wrong person or you had the wrong person. So tell us your thoughts about how automation is impacting your world and how calm voltage. >> I actually have very little automation workflow running through comm vault right now. A lot of the stuff that we do automation wise lies on the VMware side. Um, so that's, that's been good. I haven't really implemented a lot just because I personally am not comfortable with it yet. >>I'm not against it. It's just something that I haven't really trained myself enough to say I'm going to leave and let this run by itself. I'm still like, Oh no, this could be better. This could be better. This can be better. So until I'm 100% comfortable with that, I think we'll just leave it at a semiautomated task of just, sorry, you said something down the road that you're absolutely even even sitting in keynote yesterday and listening about the Alexa automation and SMS tax, I like writing in a piece of paper to test that because it's something that I've always wanted and ever since combo go last year when they were using Alexa to check SLA and RPO and RTO, I'm like, I want to be able to do that. So that's definitely down the road, but it's on the back burner right now. >>So give us a landscape view distributed organization. You talked about your base in the U S but all of the different clinics and organizations that you work with, are you living in this multi-cloud world? >>So, uh, we are pretty much zero cloud initiative company. Yeah. I'm actually trying to work on a slogan, Oh no, cloud zero cloud and proud or something like that. But I'm not 100% sure. It's definitely not out of the question. But with FedRAMP co compliancy and HIPAA, there's just a lot of regulation between the data that we have for the U S that transmits back and forth, let's say Australia or Ireland or something like that. There's certain regulations that we have to deal with and uh, in the cloud there's, there's very few options of where you can actually have those servers. So it's right now, you know, on prem is kind of, it's kind of our jam. >>So as a lot of organizations are going through FedRAMP certification, I was just at one of Dell's events the other week. They're going through it. I know some other like e-signature companies are doing, a lot of companies are, are you paying attention to that? Is that something that you think in the future might provide more confidence? >>Completely transparent. It's something I should be paying more attention to that I'm, I've just, I really haven't really done as much research as I should have and you know, I take full responsibility for that. But at the same time, you know, there's, there's a lot of other things going on in the U S that until we implement something of that nature, I don't really think that I'm really too concerned about it. So Matthew, you've been to a few of these events. Last one, last year there was a lot of talk about the coming change in this year. Lot of new faces, new Hedvig metallic. Yeah. So what we'll want to get your impression on the executive changes, some of the, you know, are you seeing any indications of organizational changes and the products? What I'm seeing is I'm seeing new life to a product that I've always been told is a dinosaur, which I kind of laugh cause I'm like, well if this dinosaur is doing things that, you know, the greatest and latest and greatest things aren't or aren't really doing. So to see this new life, the new rebranding of the logo, the new leadership, the new acquisitions and everything is just like feeding fuel to the fire. That is combo. And, and I'm, I'm pretty excited. I will say that I'm a little bit more excited about the new additions to like orchestrate and activate since stuff like metallic. I won't really be implementing just because of our business practices. But yeah. >>Let's talk about in our last few minutes here, cause they actually talked about some of the new technologies with orchestrate activate yesterday and today, but in terms of support we just had as to mention, we just interviewed Sandy Hamilton and she's come on board in the last, I think she said four and a half months. Owning professional services systems, engineering support, customer success throughout the entire life cycle. Tell us a little bit in, in our closing minute or so about the support and training that you've gotten from combat that give you the confidence for you and one of your other guys to be here and not tied to your phone. >>I don't think I'd still be with combo if it wasn't for their support. I, I owe so much to their support. They've brought me through some pretty dark times with deployment, with troubleshooting, with failures where I thought that I had things right and it just didn't work. I've called in at one in the morning, got great support, I've caught any 10 in the morning and got great support, phenomenal follow up. Um, their, their community impact, like their forums and their customer champion. So much. Just additional information that helps you not have to call in and not make you feel like that, Oh, that failure. So I owe a lot to their support and their training because without a, like I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be on stage. I'm, I'm wonder if you could put a point on that, the, the forums in your participation as a customer champion, you're spending your own time, you're working with your PBM. >>Why is that so important and how is this the vibrancy of this community, you know, it belongs to the worlds, you know, naming the things that you learn. Somebody taught me, so why shouldn't I teach somebody else? And if that makes someone else be able to go out and ride mountain bikes or cook with their daughter or do anything like that, then I'm all for it because it got me, it got me through all that. So I mean I have 10 15 minutes on the customer forum to answer you. Oh yeah, I know that. I've seen that. I had a gentleman the first morning at breakfast, like I've had a ticket open for two weeks and they can't figure it out. And we worked together and actually got his problem solved, you know? And it was like the only reason is because I've seen that and I worked with combat and they showed me how to fix it and I retain that knowledge. >>That's awesome. DOE takes paying it forward to a whole new level. And it also volumes about how you followed Jimmy chin this morning and nailed it. I tried. It was very difficult, you know, I'm sure that you know why he was filming that solo climber. He was sweaty palms. I was definitely sweaty phone calls. It was, well, Matthew, what a pleasure to have you on the program. So much fun. Thank you. Congratulations on your success and we look forward to hearing it. Many more great things out of Sonic. Thank you. All right. First to a minimum I and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from combo go 19.

(mellow music) >> Voiceover: Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE, here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. WandaJean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. >> Well we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. >> As Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our digital learning ecosystem. So, we have a learning management system, we use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and, you know, all the way around, create efficiencies. >> And how (chuckles). Are the employees willing to go there? Or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? >> Well, I'm a teacher at heart, so what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, "WandaJean, we really want to learn "how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, "there's lots of data." I tell them, you know, "Come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets," and then I want them to tell me the story about their process, and then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming, and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this." So, I want to make sure they're comfortable and, you know, listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process, I'll know how far I can go. >> Now are these kind of next-gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto? Or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and putting them onto? >> I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So, it's knowing where the tools are, and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools, and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business. And how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are, most of the time, digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. So we're definitely no short of tools. But sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out, "How do I get my process "a little more digitized and save myself some time?" >> So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through, in terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually, and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? >> Okay. So, I like to look at things from the triple constraints: Cost, quality, and speed. So, when you think about cost, quality, and speed, you want to take cost out of the process. You want to improve the quality by, you know, creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that, whatever it is, to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list, when it comes to, you know, how are we going to implement this new digital process, Smartsheet is up there. It's the all-in-wonder. I call it the all-in-wonder tool at work, and people say, "Okay, here she comes. "She's going to talk about Smartsheet." That's because, I always say, "Smartsheet does a thousand things." That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about a thousand things. I only want to tell you about the things that, you know, you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, "Look what else I found." So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together, and I say, "But did you see this?" And so, this whole, you know, Santa Claus is comin' to town (all laugh) That's kind of what it feels like. >> So, how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that, A, you know, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in you know, kind of how the teams form, and what's kind of the collaborative workgroup as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? >> I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So, what information is going into this process, what do I need to do with it, and then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff, from a process perspective? So I like that. The @mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those @mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments. And you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But, if you do this @mention, I've noticed that people, when they're using the app, you know, the @mention comes through. Even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, "Oh, somebody's talking to me here." And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So, another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So, a lot of meetings, "'Kay, give me the status, what's the status." Well we can certainly just automate those reports, and make it exactly what, you know, the executive or the leader wanted to know, from a high-level perspective. And so, we don't have to have as many meetings. >> I love it though. That collaboration means cutting out collaboration. >> Mm-hmm. >> That is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is, understanding the upstream and the downstream. Because we heard on the main stage, and we are hearing a lot today, about how it's providing much more visibility. And leaders are able to see the big picture, and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees, for the people who are several notches below, to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? >> Absolutely. So, inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team, and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and, you know, we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need, and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I looked at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great. But when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So, if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, "Oh, automation, it's coming, "and a robot's going to take over my job!" It's not that it's going to do, I have lots to do. But having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me, and 4,000 of them, and everybody might want something from WandaJean. So, I have a intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me, and I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones, and which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, "You know, what have you done for me lately?" And so, all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing, and I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more learning requests, and this many people wanted to learn about a tool, and, so I would have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. >> That's really interesting, right? 'Cause then you go from, the classic paradigm is there's data, right, which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight-up inbound form, to actually get a whole lot of information on what's going on in that community, and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. >> Yes, well we create job requisitions and we hire people for roles. You know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It will be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done, versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So, sometimes it looks really different, like, "Wait a minute, I think I need some more money." (Rebecca laughs) "'Cause I didn't get hired for this." >> Right, right, right, I've done so much more. >> Yes. >> Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization, and the ways in which the Smartsheet is helping break down those silos. >> Okay. So I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you that I believe that silo is an acronym for Secrets in the Learning Organization. And when you have those secrets, and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company cost, quality, speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes. And the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rockstars for the company. So, putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is, when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints, and you know, "Why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this?" Where, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. We can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we could have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without Smartsheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So, I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? (laughter) But if Bob gets pulled into that Smartsheet, it shrinks the world, and it makes our big giant company just that much smaller, and people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. >> Love to get your take on re-skilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're currently doing re-skilling in terms of tools to execute different, you're training people to probably be more collaborative by using these tools and that different types of process. So important that re-skilling happens in the future, as all the jobs change. Just, you know, are people up for this? Are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that there're different ways to get work done than maybe our tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back, saying, you know, "That's not the way we did it 20 years ago!" >> Exactly, you do have that, you do have that. But, you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company. We are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally but I think globally. So that just means, if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of, and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales, and that it's applicable. You know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So, create the fix, and then celebrate that socially, and show someone else, you can do it too. >> Rebecca: You can replicate this. >> You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see when you were larger, you know? You want to see the before and the after, and make sure that, you know, and when people see that, like, "It's possible? "I don't have to be, like, this superstar coder?" When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing, what our employees do. >> So, as a Digital Learning Evangelist, I mean, I don't know, how many are there of you in the world? And is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understanding? I mean, what is it like, and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? >> Well, in other companies, of course, our social networks, LinkedIn and those professional communities that I'm a part of, Smartsheet has a user group community, we can share there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer. And we have a Smartsheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. And you have people coming there and saying, "Has anybody ever done this?" When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing, and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that, you know, I found out that Starbucks actually used Smartsheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a Smartsheet forum out to their baristas, "Are you okay? "Can you make some coffee?" And, you know-- (laughter) >> Can you make the coffee. >> "And, oh by the way, take good pictures of the damage, "so we can submit it to our insurance." So, that's something that our company can use. And I'll take that back to our team, and say, "Guess what Starbucks did with this?" And, "Guess what PayPal did with this?" I sent PayPal's Smartsheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not just that they were impressed. It's that, over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, "We're going to create an integrated marketing calendar, "and we're going to use Smartsheet." That just made me feel so rewarded, that, you know, somebody is listening. You're not just talking! (Rebecca laughs) There are some converts! >> Great. Well, WandaJean, a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Please come back again. >> Yes, I will! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Fricks, stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (minimal techno tone) (mellow music)

>> Man: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's the Cube. (music) Covering VMworld 2019. (music) Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome, indeed, here to the cube and our coverage of VMworld 2019. We are in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. They're open, they're back in business and so is VMware. And we're watching the folks stream out from this morning's keynote session, Pat Gelsinger hosting that session. And it was an impressive setup to say the least. Thousands packing that ballroom downstairs for a plethora of announcements, all from Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Walls, Justin Warren joins us. We haven't been together for a while, it's good to see you.- It's been a little while, yeah. >> How've you been? >> I've been well, I've been well. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I'm surprised they brought us back together after the last time. >> I don't believe... let's not talk about that incident. >> I thought it went so well, we just end on a high note. But it is a pleasure to be with Justin, we'll be with him throughout the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, our coverage here. We're joined right now by two guests, Paul Savill, whose the SVP of Network and Technology Solutions at CenturyLink and Omar Sunna who is the Director of Digital Products at GE Health care. And gentlemen thanks for being with us, it's good to have you here on the Cube. >> Thank you John. >> First off, let's just, gimme, your both, your take just on VMWorld 2019. What you're looking for, what you're expecting, and kind of the early vibe that you have going on. Paul, why don't you take that first? >> Sure, one of the things I've really been impressed with is how VMware is expanding, the kind of open nature of it's relationships, it's developing it's ecosystem, really broadening it out, it's making a number of acquisitions to enable new capabilities. And we're really excited about that. CenturyLink and VMware have been partners for, I think, around 12, 15 years. As we've been building out our own cloud services and so it's a very exciting time to see all this technology coming together in the way that it is. >> I love with the way you put it too, acquisitions. Pat made a little comment about that, it's like, "I can't wait to find out who I'm "going to buy next." >> Yes. >> And they've been, certainly been in a full speed ahead modefor the past year, year and a half. Omar, you're take, early. >> Yeah, man, I think I look at it from a health care solutioning perspective and it's exciting to see this level of technology and kind of the building out of the ecosystem and what could it enable for health care consumers. Especially with the big focus around privacy and and data management. I think some of their, and security, some of their latest acquisitions could actually help grow that ecosystem and offer more options especially to the health care industry. >> All right, well now let's talk about your portfolio at work then, a little bit, at GE Healthcare. Obviously health systems, health care's a huge user you know, these days, well it's kind of simplifying it a bit, but just talk about what you're concerns are, what your attention is, and kind of the things that are keeping you up at night, these days, in terms of health care and what you're doing in the IT space. >> You know, I mean, I think the, you know when we look at our customer environment globally, you know, we tend to kind of summarize some of the key challenges for our customers around three pillars. Access, so being able to provide access to all the patients that need it, regardless of location. With aging population in a lot of developed countries, with also a lot of people having the means to receive more proactive health care, it is challenging the health systems to be able to provide adequate access to patients. Capacity, providing capacity when the resources, including the human capital resources, that health systems have. So how do you free up your specialists to make sure that they're able to provide the right level of patients who need it, patient care for the patients that need it. As well as clinical efficacy. How do we help with software applications, with technology, to help reduce the variation of care, and improve patient outcomes, regardless where the patient is receiving care, within the rural community or with advanced academic medical centers. So we try to kind of think of our solution technologies as helping our customers solve for access, capacity, and clinical efficacy. >> Yeah, so a lot of health care, it's kind of a retail setup in that there's lots of hospitals and other allied health professionals who have lots of different locations that they need to provide heath care for them and that technology needs to live where the patients are and where the doctors are. So it was interesting to see, in the key note, earlier this morning, talking about edge and different kinds of edge as well. We've got thin, medium, and thick edge, according to VMware. So how do you see that rise of edge computing effecting the way that you deal with health care. >> Yeah, I mean tremendous, actually, opportunity for us. And GE is working on capitalizing on the technology, on edge technology, to allow us to bring in AI application right to, where kind of within the customer network. And that is, that's helping us solve for a lot of concerns around private security as well as moving large data sets to the cloud to process, to be able to get benefit out of algorithm and additional applications. So that's actually an exciting area. And agree with you, I mean we're seeing more and more large distributed health care networks emorph, in the U.S. we've definitely seen huge merger and acquisition movement that we continue to see, and consolidation. And then we also see that globally. With regional delivery networks coming up and being able to have software applications live within this distributed network and provide information for the right clinician at the right time is a big initiative for us. And for us this makes a huge difference in the way our providers are able to deliver care for their patients. >> This seems like an ideal opportunity for the folks at CenturyLink to help you with that. >> Abso-- (nervous laughter) >> Yeah, that's right, I mean CenturyLink really, to that point, sees this landscape evolving rapidly. And we even have a phrase internally we use that, "The network is the data center." We believe that in the future, compute is going to be distributed so widely, in such a broad geography and dropped in places where it's most efficient to run it and where it's most efficient to connect it with network, that really, the data centers we think about it today, becomes this very widely distributed platform that is connected together with high performance networking solutions. And that's part of what we're working with GE Healthcare on. >> I'm old enough to remember when "The network is the computer" was the slogan that we're all following now, and it seems that's actually coming true now. Where we have this idea of it, it's not just cloud, and it's not just data centers, and it's not just edge, it's actually a combination of all of them. And you need to be able to deal with that technology wherever it needs to live. Which is, I think, is a positive change from what we were talking about a few years ago, where it seemed to be, we had to make one choice. Now the choice is you actually need a bit of everything. >> Right. >> Tell me about your decision, or at least in terms of on-prem, off-prem, and health care, I would assume, extremely sensitive, obviously, to security concerns and management and certain policies about who can access what, where, when and how, whatever. How are you going about making that decision in this new multi-cloud environment, this hybrid-cloud environment, when people are making migrations, you know, with their businesses, and they're going off-prem. But you, I would assume, have to be a lot more sensitive, or more sensitive to other factors than, perhaps, other businesses have to be. >> Yeah, we definitely do. There is, you know, with regulations, you know, and, for example in Europe, GDPR, there's in country regulations around where data resides. All of that kind of plays a factor in customer adoption of technologies and where they're comfortable. We've talked a lot of CIOs in the health care sector and a lot of them say, "Hey, listen we're on a journey, "we're used to hugging our servers, "we're used to controlling it, and technology has evolved. "But, in terms of our policies, ability to accept liability "of data breaches and what technology providers are willing "to sign up for. "All of that plays a roll in that journey." Like Justin had mentioned, it is actually a, in developing an ecosystem, where you have combination of on-prem and off-prem, is a lot of where health care health systems are investing their money. So we're seeing certain data that resides on-prem that is mission critical versus more historic data can go into cloud technology, cloud storage technology and others. But, there's no doubt that we're at an inflection point, we're seeing a lot more health systems sign up to cloud based SAS applications. Invest in private cloud hosting service, invest in also public cloud hosting services. And all of that actually will create, as a software provider, all that could actually help us create more opportunities and more solutioning for our customers. I love listening to some of the cloud computing power that would allow us to develop newer applications. So it's actually exciting, it's a journey with our customers, you know, we're choosing to kind of be alongside of our customers and help them. Doing a lot of education. And being able to have a relationship with CenturyLink, be able to see the advances and availability of resources that CenturyLink makes available for us as well as other partners that we have help us really make sure that we're able to build the right level of technology meeting the health care customer needs. >> So Paul, fill in the gaps a little bit about where CenturyLink is in trying to solve this, I wouldn't say dilemma, but it certainly is a puzzle of some sort, right, as decisions are made about what's going to be off loaded, what's not, how are we going to access, what do we allow. How do you see CenturyLink's role when you have a customer like Omar, like GE Healthcare, coming to you with their unique needs, and addressing those? >> Sure, well, as unique as GE Healthcare is in the health care industry, there are some common characteristics about how we are seeing enterprise customers look at these situations. And one of them is that placing compute on the premise itself, that, that is generally the most expensive real estate that an enterprise has when it has to go in the hospital, when it has to go at the retail store location. And a lot of enterprises today are doubling the amount of compute and storage that they're having at their premise locations every year because the volume is just growing so much. That's becoming a problem, because you don't want your, you don't want your hospital becoming a bigger and bigger data center, so to speak, right? And so the way that we're approaching the problem and working with this, is in VMware was actually, you know, expressing a very similar viewpoint about the edge and about how the thick edge and the thin edge, and the thin edge of the customer premise is where you want to have the lightest load, but you want to have the most critical applications that are sitting there, you want to have the information that you have to protect the most in a most guarded way that's most important for your operations there. But from there you can more efficiently run things from a distance backing out going all the way back to the public cloud core, if you connect it with high performance networking from end to end. And so what CenturyLink has been doing is putting together these solutions that make that balance of trade, so to speak, between the cost of compute, the cost of where you have to put it, to where it best can be housed, what kind of latency performance that it needs to have to meet it to the performance specification, all the way back to the public cloud design and how to tie it in to the public cloud. And that's where we've been building our competency and the solutions we've been putting together for customers. >> You mentioned the need for high performance networks in there so I've got to ask you about 5G. From what I know about 5G it looks like the kind of situation you have with health care, where you've got lots of mobile tablet devices, you've got lots of other actual equipment IoT devices in a health care situation. That seems like an ideal use case for 5G. Is that what hot 5G is actually for, is the hype real? >> Well, 5G is certainly going to transform the world in terms of it's ability to provide wireless high bandwidth connectivity and low latency connectivity to devices. But, edge compute is not about 5G. You can have edge compute without 5G. In fact, it's a bit of a myth that edge compute can't arrive until 5G comes, because edge compute is something that is available to do today. And, in fact, CenturyLink is deploying edge compute solutions with, by basically building fiber into enterprise locations and then housing compute at different areas of the network at the point that's most optimal for the solution. And there are a variety of wireless solutions that can be used in that campus environment other than 5G to connect wireless devices back securely and safely to that edge compute that sits there. >> But it seems like it still should be, or at least looks like it could be a game changer in what it's going to allow in terms of, I guess, advancing edge computing. >> Right? I mean, you're still going to provide new capabilities and new reach and new functionalities that don't currently exist. >> I take Paul's point, though, because there are other technologies like Wi-Fi 6, for example, which is, it's basically the same thing as 5G, it just uses a different radio communications mechanism. But, and I also take your point that you can do edge computing today, absolutely. You can put computing into retail situations and you can have, I mean we have tablet devices now. We have laptops. So we kind of have edge computing. We always have, it just now, now it has a name. >> Yes, that's correct. >> So, tell me before we let you go, Catalyst Award winner from CenturyLink and VMware, Paul, first off let's talk about how you assess that, what's the determination, the criteria, for that and then I'm going to let crow a little bit Omar, about receiving that award. But tell us about the Catalyst Award first. >> Yes, well we call it the Catalyst Award because, when you think about it, a catalyst is something that excites a chemical process. Technically that is the definition of catalyst. But catalyst, in the way we view it, is something that we wanted to recognize a person or a company, that we felt like was really driving innovation, that was really solving a problem and working, also collaboratively together with VMware and CenturyLink in solving some of these problems. So we looked at GE Healthcare and really felt like, in a place where certainly we have seen such great advances in health care administration and building to save people's lives. Oddly, medical errors is becoming an increasing amount of now the problems in terms of death rates. Because, while we have so many ways to solve problems, so many ways to address it, that portion of what's causing deaths is actually on the rise. And so GE Healthcare is taking the technology that they're deploying and helping to solve that problem, that's why we wanted to recognize Omar and the company today. >> An honor for you I would assume you're all pretty proud of that. >> Yeah, absolutely, and thank you, and, yeah, I mean it's was really fantastic to be recognized by our partners. And a great testimony to the team at GE Healthcare. And our team wakes up in the morning and our mission is to improve lives in the moment that matters. A lot of our technology is used in mission critical and the way we're able to deliver that to our customers relies heavily on our ability to leverage advances in technology and be able to improve our ability to deliver our different applications for our customers. So this, actually been fantastic, the relationship has been tremendous for us. Where we have hosted our solutions in CenturyLink, the level of support that we have received have really enabled us to deliver important application for our customers and meet their SLAs and meet their clinical use cases and the needs of software uptime. So that has been tremendous for us. >> Well congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Well then thanks for your time, both of you. And enjoy the show, enjoy San Francisco, we've got good weather this week. >> That's right, yeah. >> So get out and enjoy that, thank you Paul and Omar. Back with more on the Cube, you're watching our coverage here live in San Francisco in VMWorld 2019. (music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's The Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here in Orlando at the Knowledge conference. Knowledge 17, ServiceNow's big customer show, and that's one of the things Jeff and I, Jeff Frick my co-host and I'm Dave Vellante like about Knowledge is we get to talk to the practitioners, the customers, the doers Naresh Samlal is here, he's the director of mobility and process automation at VITAS Healthcare. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Ah, I am glad to be here thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Tell us about VITAS. What's the organization about >> So VITAS is the largest hospice and palliative care provider in the country. What's unique about our business is that our patient care staff is really in the field. They're not bounded by four walls as compared to a typical healthcare provider. So our nurses, our chaplains, physicians and so forth go to the homes of our patients and being in hospice that, you know, our... We truly believe that Your best care is delivered in your own home, and so that's VITAS's directive is to really deliver that care in their home. Which really creates for a unique setting in managing you know, logistics and the staffing around that whole solution. But we've done it really well for 30 years and, you know we're looking forward to a great future with that. >> Well it's a really important service. Obviously, you know, families and loved ones can be together, and gather in very difficult times. Now in the past 30 years technology has changed quite a bit. How has that affected your business? >> Yes, that's a great question. In many ways, technology at VITAS has not changed. And so a lot of things that we have done historically have been... And still today there's many things that are still the same because that's what works and at the end of the day this fight, leveraging technology, the sensitive time in someone's life really needs that personal interaction and technology can't substitute that. However, we always are challenging ourselves to make that interaction more efficient with technology. So most recently, actually last year, we completed a deployment of 8,000 mobile devices to our patient care staff. So our nurses prior to this rollout walked around with 25 pounds of paper. They were traveling from their homes to our patients' homes, to our offices back and forth with paper, they didn't have access, real time access, to patient records like they do today. We replaced an entire binder with a mobile device. >> Dave: I was going to say these things change the world right? >> With an iPhone. Absolutely. >> So how many how many stops did it, you know, just a little bit of that kind of, their workflow how many stops a day do they make, kind of, what's kind of the scope of that? >> So that's a great question Um, they may, they'll have a starting point in a day, they know where their first patient they don't know where their last patient or how many they're going to see that day. So it could vary. It could be, you know five, it could be up to ten. And it varies based on the need, based on what that visit calls for. So it really varies and being able to have realtime information now and be more flexible and more efficient with these devices we're really able to allow them to give better care and more care quite frankly. >> Jeff: Right. >> So take us through the sort of case example of how you brought in ServiceNow Where's the driver and how did it change your organization. >> So there's quite a bit of efficiency and I talked about how the business has not changed very much over the course of time. But mobile devices as it relates to mobility and VITAS we really saw an opportunity to leverage the staff that we have to do more with them and give them the ability to give better care and not have to worry about the administrative aspects that come with that. For example, today they're able to access our EMR so they patient data right on their mobile device they can order drugs for our patients right on their mobile device. They can enter their time, their traveling, all these logistics that they weren't able to do they had to literally leave their home, go to a patient, go back to our main office or program office in that location, scan any documents they need to scan, enter any time, do some administrative stuff, go back out, that's kind of what the day looked like and so now with these devices we're able to free them up from having that extra travel. There's obviously a lot of cost saving opportunities around that, but it really allowed for, it allows for a nurse and a patient caregiver to maybe be able to see a patient, one patient more, two patients more in a day so that really transforms our business and really at the end of the day it's really going to allow VITAS to provide care because we believe we provide the best care in hospice and palliative care. You know, we feel that if you're not with VITAS you're not getting the best care and this really allows us to really see that through and position ourselves to deliver more. >> So where did you start with ServiceNow? >> So ServiceNow was actually introduced on the ITSM side so we brought it in to really fix our ticketing system get it up to, you know where it needed to be at the very least and out of that there was a parallel opportunity for us at management. So mobility was in its very infancy at the time. We knew we wanted to do it, we knew it could happen, we knew the benefits of it, but the reality of it was a little bit farfetched. Right? And so ServiceNow combined with a few other partners that we work with, really bringing that together and finding that secret sauce, and finding the right recipe for making that work allowed us to do this. One of the biggest things with managing so many devices and them being mobile, you know, physically off our premises is not knowing where they are, right? You know they don't actually hold patient data but there's some risk around security and exposing that so losing these devices, them getting in the wrong hands, was really important for us. So we really needed to first and foremost know where all our devices are at any given moment. Coupled with a few other pieces that work well with ServiceNow we now have that single pane of glass that we can really know exactly where the devices are, manage them in real time, we are able to tie our financial data right back to them so we're able to really get the full visibility of what mobility looks like and ServiceNow is at the core of that. They're at the center, we bring everything back into ServiceNow so we have one place to go manage our data, share and really, you know, be effective with it. >> So the data, the patient data, lives in the cloud? Is that right? >> So, essentially yes. So no data actually lives on the device, it's all a matter of the device being able to access the cloud. So through wifi, if they're at a hospital or if they're at a patient's home, or LTE coverage. >> And it used to live in paper that somehow got scanned, right? Which... >> I can't imagine, 'cause they don't know what the route is so now I assume they go to their first stop, it's got all that patient ABC, they finish, check in, I'm done, and then, where am I going next, get the data. >> I'm glad you brought that up, and so today they're able to access that information and I think part of the next step as to where VITAS is going is to really systematically tell them okay this is probably your next stop and not with a phone call to find out if they're available to do that but systematically know that they're available, when they're going to be available, and set them up with that information. And so that's really where we're looking to next. For mobility and technology at VITAS. >> What about all the, the compliance, the Affordable Care Act, EM, you had mentioned EMR, meaningful use, I mean all these things that you have to worry, HIPAA, maybe the potential unwinding of the Affordable Care Act, or maybe the evolution of it, I mean all these things you got to keep track of, where does that fit? >> So another great point, you know, one of the things, one of the things is, hospice is or end of life care really consumes about 30% of one's cost throughout their life. Most people don't realize that. That's your most expensive time in your life, in your cycle, that's going to go to what's healthcare. And that's where VITAS is very sensitive. And the other thing to note is that the average patient with VITAS is with us for two weeks. So timing is everything. >> Jeff: Two weeks. >> Yes. >> Dave: Yeah, short time. >> Right, so it gives... >> Jeff: And how many visits? What's the average number of visits in that two weeks? >> So we have 16,000 patients on our uh... >> No I mean for that particular, I mean what's kind of your average visits per patient over that two weeks? >> That may vary, depends on the patient, and this is average, right? So that may vary, sometimes it's 24/7 care other times it may be a couple times a day other times maybe once a day. And it really depends >> Dave: Okay, and so it's typically at least once a day, right? >> At least once a day, right. So that's not uncommon. So going back to your question, these things all come into play where as an organization, we feel the effects of regulation changes, right and that impacts our financials as well, so mobility, bringing mobility to the table with the help of ServiceNow and these other players that we make this work really helps us realize these efficiencies. Which at the end of the day, this is how we're able to really stay afloat in those areas and really not feel the impacts quite frankly. And if you look at our last quarter, we thrive. >> Yeah I mean and get paid on time, and not have to go back and forth, back and forth >> Well even like audit I would imagine I mean does the GPS data that demonstrates that your people were there, you know figure back into audits and all kinds of stuff I would imagine >> Right, and we are heavily audited with our devices as well. I mean they're very sensitive You got to think about it too, mobility and such a paradigm shift for a company like VITAS was and is very scrutinized, right? We spend a considerable amount of money in this program. We also see a lot of returns on it. But, it's a very different approach for folks that have done things a certain way for a really long time, right, so you talk about audits, going back to financials ServiceNow really allows us to stay really close to that. Be really tight, and speak with confidence when we provide our data, right, so our CFO is very sensitive to that and in a moment's notice we are able to respond to his request for last week's financials, last month's, what is our loss rate? You know, things like that just wasn't, we didn't have access to that type of date before. And quite frankly it's not something that's very common So most organizations see mobility I would have to say more as a luxury compared to how VITAS uses it today Today, this device is the clinical workstation at VITAS This is how our patient care staff works. This allows them to be productive. It's not a luxury. >> And how often do they come back to the barn, just to come back to the barn so they can get, they're you know, in the field most of the time actually working. >> So at the very least they may come back, they'll come back once a week now for a team meeting versus much more frequent for administrative work. Right? So that's had a tremendous impact on them. >> And how long ago again did you kind of roll out the solution? >> So we completed the rollout to the full audience at the end of last year so Q4 of last year so we've been at full feet for two quarters now and we're, and that really was setting the stage for what's to come next, right, so we're in the middle of rolling out an application right now which is going to allow our patient care staff to order drugs so our physicians and nurses can submit the request for drugs, and like items to treat our patients where as before, what that looked like was them having to leave the patient's house, run to the store, come back, or do a mail order request for drugs. So today... >> And will that be in the ServiceNow app or are you using ServiceNow to kind of manage everything and that's a separate kind of an app? >> Did you guys develop that app on top of ServiceNow or... >> We, so that is isolated from ServiceNow today, but we're standing it up as is, however that's something that we're actually considering looking at ServiceNow to see how we can play in that space as well because ServiceNow has done a lot for us, right we know it's a fantastic tool. We've used it in ways that are unconventional and we continue to do that. So part of, a lot of why we're here this week is to really capitalize on how they help us too. And so we're embarking on the journey program with ServiceNow to really look at how we can transform our business even further and opportunities like this really play a role into that. >> And so are you developing apps on ServiceNow or >> So we do have custom apps on ServiceNow, today they're very, you know, they're quick wins internally they really don't extend towards business they're more internal to IT, but that's really what the next phase of what we're looking at is how does ServiceNow really impact our business and our business processes, right, that's really our next step. >> And we can, can we differentiate just for my own edification, custom apps versus custom modifications, right? Those are two different things right? >> Configurations, right? >> Custom apps, you're building an app on top of the platform, what about custom mods, are you avoiding those at all costs? >> So, I can't say we're avoiding them at all costs and you really can't. You have to have some customization. We try to limit those so we can take on upgrades and take on, and be swift with all the new features that they bring on. So we're one version behind by, you know by design, and so, we're able to consume that as fast as they are able to release it because of our light customization. We try to stay out of the box. >> When you upgrade, do you test... So you're what in -1? >> Right. >> Okay, do you always upgrade to the next version, do you sometimes leapfrog? >> I have not had to leapfrog yet, so we've been pretty good about that and I plan to stick hard into that. >> So help us understand some maybe advice for other customers is you don't really want to leapfrog if you don't have to but sometimes you have to because you're too late in the upgrade cycle, is that right? >> Yeah. >> Okay, so. >> I mean, it's not ideal because you introduce a lot of unknowns if you have to leapfrog, right and ServiceNow, let me say this to your service, the upgrade process with ServiceNow has been unlike anything, any other upgrade process I've been through of any software. >> Dave: In what sense? >> It's been smooth, we've had very little issues coming out of it, we do full regression testing, but our findings are always very minimal, but the actual upgrade process is short, it's effective, it works, it's very informative, and they're getting even better at that, so for, you know that gives us a lot of peace of mind that we have a stable platform that we can really build and thrive on. >> How many upgrades have you gone through? >> We've done three so far? >> Okay >> What is short, Naresh with how long... >> I'm, you know I've done, I've seen inside of an hour at times, so our instance, we're two years into ServiceNow so we don't have you know, massive amount of data like maybe other companies do. We have substantial data there, but they're pretty quick I've seen an hour to do an upgrade. >> And how disruptive is an upgrade? >> Not at all. Here's one of my favorite parts about the upgrade is I don't have to announce that we're doing an upgrade to the general population. >> (laughs) >> Okay, they don't even know. >> That's a good indicator. >> They don't know. They're actually working in it while it's being upgraded. They log off, log back on, new version. Right? So I've been able to consume these upgrades as fast and as easily as I'm talking about. So I did one thing that was probably different than most people are doing. I'm suppressing the UI upgrade, and taking the platform upgrade, so the look and feel stays the same, and so we're in the middle of a program right now to relaunch ServiceNow with a new look and feel, new branding, just give it a whole new facelift, that's when I'm going to release the new UI. That's when we're going to give it... >> Jeff: But you really separate the skinning and the UI from the underlying platform. >> Yeah and you're allowed to do that, right? That's one of the points about it. >> And the UI changes, not on every cycle, is that correct? I mean it just changes periodically right? >> It's periodically. There's been subtle changes, and then there's been you know, full revamp for the better, but for the most part we're able to consume it and stay current with it because, you know, we can contain it that much. >> Yeah but it's different and then the user says oh, you know even like you know, crappy Gmail when they changed the, like oh it's new. >> You got to learn it all over again, you don't like it, it grows on you, well, you know we can control that now. We don't have to like, react to it every time. >> And the strategy to be in -1 is, can you explain that? What's the logic behind that? >> Yeah absolutely, so there's constantly a ton of new features. ServiceNow is learning from us and from many customers and really being reactive to that. And so I want that whatever we have and we're trying to do we're getting, we have access to the latest and greatest, and we don't have to go build something if I know it's there It also helps us identify and plug gaps in our system, so, in our processes. So, for example, we may know we have a host of different things that we need to regularly work on. Consuming an upgrade and it being so simple as just turning something on or just start using it means I can get to be more efficient quicker rather than having to put that on a priority list and get focused, and get a project going, and get a team behind it, it's just more consumable that way and we're able to be more agile, and improve quicker as well. So that's one of the reasons I like doing upgrades and staying current with it. >> Alright Naresh, thanks very much for coming onto The Cube, I appreciate you sharing >> I appreciate it, thank you so much for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest... (applause) Thank you! Right after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(inspirational music) (music ends) >> Okay, so now that we've heard Scott talk about smart data fabrics, it's time to see this in action. Right now we're joined by Jess Jowdy, who's the manager of Healthcare Field Engineering at InterSystems. She's going to give a demo of how smart data fabrics actually work, and she's going to show how embedding a wide range of analytics capabilities, including data exploration business intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning directly within the fabric makes it faster and easier for organizations to gain new insights and power intelligence predictive and prescriptive services and applications. Now, according to InterSystems, smart data fabrics are applicable across many industries from financial services to supply chain to healthcare and more. Jess today is going to be speaking through the lens of a healthcare focused demo. Don't worry, Joe Lichtenberg will get into some of the other use cases that you're probably interested in hearing about. That will be in our third segment, but for now let's turn it over to Jess. Jess, good to see you. >> Hi, yeah, thank you so much for having me. And so for this demo, we're really going to be bucketing these features of a smart data fabric into four different segments. We're going to be dealing with connections, collections, refinements, and analysis. And so we'll see that throughout the demo as we go. So without further ado, let's just go ahead and jump into this demo, and you'll see my screen pop up here. I actually like to start at the end of the demo. So I like to begin by illustrating what an end user's going to see, and don't mind the screen 'cause I gave you a little sneak peek of what's about to happen. But essentially what I'm going to be doing is using Postman to simulate a call from an external application. So we talked about being in the healthcare industry. This could be, for instance, a mobile application that a patient is using to view an aggregated summary of information across that patient's continuity of care or some other kind of application. So we might be pulling information in this case from an electronic medical record. We might be grabbing clinical history from that. We might be grabbing clinical notes from a medical transcription software, or adverse reaction warnings from a clinical risk grouping application, and so much more. So I'm really going to be simulating a patient logging in on their phone and retrieving this information through this Postman call. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hit send, I've already preloaded everything here, and I'm going to be looking for information where the last name of this patient is Simmons, and their medical record number or their patient identifier in the system is 32345. And so as you can see, I have this single JSON payload that showed up here of, just, relevant clinical information for my patient whose last name is Simmons, all within a single response. So fantastic, right? Typically though, when we see responses that look like this there is an assumption that this service is interacting with a single backend system, and that single backend system is in charge of packaging that information up and returning it back to this caller. But in a smart data fabric architecture, we're able to expand the scope to handle information across different, in this case, clinical applications. So how did this actually happen? Let's peel back another layer and really take a look at what happened in the background. What you're looking at here is our mission control center for our smart data fabric. On the left we have our APIs that allow users to interact with particular services. On the right we have our connections to our different data silos. And in the middle here, we have our data fabric coordinator which is going to be in charge of this refinement and analysis, those key pieces of our smart data fabric. So let's look back and think about the example we just showed. I received an inbound request for information for a patient whose last name is Simmons. My end user is requesting to connect to that service, and that's happening here at my patient data retrieval API location. Users can define any number of different services and APIs depending on their use cases. And to that end, we do also support full life cycle API management within this platform. When you're dealing with APIs, I always like to make a little shout out on this, that you really want to make sure you have enough, like a granular enough security model to handle and limit which APIs and which services a consumer can interact with. In this IRIS platform, which we're talking about today we have a very granular role-based security model that allows you to handle that, but it's really important in a smart data fabric to consider who's accessing your data and in what context. >> Can I just interrupt you for a second, Jess? >> Yeah, please. >> So you were showing on the left hand side of the demo a couple of APIs. I presume that can be a very long list. I mean, what do you see as typical? >> I mean you could have hundreds of these APIs depending on what services an organization is serving up for their consumers. So yeah, we've seen hundreds of these services listed here. >> So my question is, obviously security is critical in the healthcare industry, and API securities are like, really hot topic these days. How do you deal with that? >> Yeah, and I think API security is interesting 'cause it can happen at so many layers. So, there's interactions with the API itself. So can I even see this API and leverage it? And then within an API call, you then have to deal with all right, which end points or what kind of interactions within that API am I allowed to do? What data am I getting back? And with healthcare data, the whole idea of consent to see certain pieces of data is critical. So, the way that we handle that is, like I said, same thing at different layers. There is access to a particular API, which can happen within the IRIS product, and also we see it happening with an API management layer, which has become a really hot topic with a lot of organizations. And then when it comes to data security, that really happens under the hood within your smart data fabric. So, that role-based access control becomes very important in assigning, you know, roles and permissions to certain pieces of information. Getting that granular becomes the cornerstone of the security. >> And that's been designed in, it's not a bolt on as they like to say. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, can we get into collect now? >> Of course, we're going to move on to the collection piece at this point in time, which involves pulling information from each of my different data silos to create an overall aggregated record. So commonly, each data source requires a different method for establishing connections and collecting this information. So for instance, interactions with an EMR may require leveraging a standard healthcare messaging format like Fire. Interactions with a homegrown enterprise data warehouse for instance, may use SQL. For a cloud-based solutions managed by a vendor, they may only allow you to use web service calls to pull data. So it's really important that your data fabric platform that you're using has the flexibility to connect to all of these different systems and applications. And I'm about to log out, so I'm going to (chuckles) keep my session going here. So therefore it's incredibly important that your data fabric has the flexibility to connect to all these different kinds of applications and data sources, and all these different kinds of formats and over all of these different kinds of protocols. So let's think back on our example here. I had four different applications that I was requesting information for to create that payload that we saw initially. Those are listed here under this operations section. So these are going out and connecting to downstream systems to pull information into my smart data fabric. What's great about the IRIS platform is, it has an embedded interoperability platform. So there's all of these native adapters that can support these common connections that we see for different kinds of applications. So using REST, or SOAP, or SQL, or FTP, regardless of that protocol, there's an adapter to help you work with that. And we also think of the types of formats that we typically see data coming in as in healthcare we have HL7, we have Fire, we have CCDs, across the industry, JSON is, you know, really hitting a market strong now, and XML payloads, flat files. We need to be able to handle all of these different kinds of formats over these different kinds of protocols. So to illustrate that, if I click through these when I select a particular connection on the right side panel, I'm going to see the different settings that are associated with that particular connection that allows me to collect information back into my smart data fabric. In this scenario, my connection to my chart script application in this example, communicates over a SOAP connection. When I'm grabbing information from my clinical risk grouping application I'm using a SQL based connection. When I'm connecting to my EMR, I'm leveraging a standard healthcare messaging format known as Fire, which is a REST based protocol. And then when I'm working with my health record management system, I'm leveraging a standard HTTP adapter. So you can see how we can be flexible when dealing with these different kinds of applications and systems. And then it becomes important to be able to validate that you've established those connections correctly, and be able to do it in a reliable and quick way. Because if you think about it, you could have hundreds of these different kinds of applications built out and you want to make sure that you're maintaining and understanding those connections. So I can actually go ahead and test one of these applications and put in, for instance my patient's last name and their MRN, and make sure that I'm actually getting data back from that system. So it's a nice little sanity check as we're building out that data fabric to ensure that we're able to establish these connections appropriately. So turnkey adapters are fantastic, as you can see we're leveraging them all here, but sometimes these connections are going to require going one step further and building something really specific for an application. So why don't we go one step further here and talk about doing something custom or doing something innovative. And so it's important for users to have the ability to develop and go beyond what's an out-of-the box or black box approach to be able to develop things that are specific to their data fabric, or specific to their particular connection. In this scenario, the IRIS data platform gives users access to the entire underlying code base. So you not only get an opportunity to view how we're establishing these connections or how we're building out these processes, but you have the opportunity to inject your own kind of processing, your own kinds of pipelines into this. So as an example, you can leverage any number of different programming languages right within this pipeline. And so I went ahead and I injected Python. So Python is a very up and coming language, right? We see more and more developers turning towards Python to do their development. So it's important that your data fabric supports those kinds of developers and users that have standardized on these kinds of programming languages. This particular script here, as you can see actually calls out to our turnkey adapters. So we see a combination of out-of-the-box code that is provided in this data fabric platform from IRIS, combined with organization specific or user specific customizations that are included in this Python method. So it's a nice little combination of how do we bring the developer experience in and mix it with out-of-the-box capabilities that we can provide in a smart data fabric. >> Wow. >> Yeah, I'll pause. (laughs) >> It's a lot here. You know, actually- >> I can pause. >> If I could, if we just want to sort of play that back. So we went to the connect and the collect phase. >> Yes, we're going into refine. So it's a good place to stop. >> So before we get there, so we heard a lot about fine grain security, which is crucial. We heard a lot about different data types, multiple formats. You've got, you know, the ability to bring in different dev tools. We heard about Fire, which of course big in healthcare. And that's the standard, and then SQL for traditional kind of structured data, and then web services like HTTP you mentioned. And so you have a rich collection of capabilities within this single platform. >> Absolutely. And I think that's really important when you're dealing with a smart data fabric because what you're effectively doing is you're consolidating all of your processing, all of your collection, into a single platform. So that platform needs to be able to handle any number of different kinds of scenarios and technical challenges. So you've got to pack that platform with as many of these features as you can to consolidate that processing. >> All right, so now we're going into refinement. >> We're going into refinement. Exciting. (chuckles) So how do we actually do refinement? Where does refinement happen? And how does this whole thing end up being performant? Well the key to all of that is this SDF coordinator, or stands for Smart Data Fabric coordinator. And what this particular process is doing is essentially orchestrating all of these calls to all of these different downstream systems. It's aggregating, it's collecting that information, it's aggregating it, and it's refining it into that single payload that we saw get returned to the user. So really this coordinator is the main event when it comes to our data fabric. And in the IRIS platform we actually allow users to build these coordinators using web-based tool sets to make it intuitive. So we can take a sneak peek at what that looks like. And as you can see, it follows a flow chart like structure. So there's a start, there is an end, and then there are these different arrows that point to different activities throughout the business process. And so there's all these different actions that are being taken within our coordinator. You can see an action for each of the calls to each of our different data sources to go retrieve information. And then we also have the sync call at the end that is in charge of essentially making sure that all of those responses come back before we package them together and send them out. So this becomes really crucial when we're creating that data fabric. And you know, this is a very simple data fabric example where we're just grabbing data and we're consolidating it together. But you can have really complex orchestrators and coordinators that do any number of different things. So for instance, I could inject SQL logic into this or SQL code, I can have conditional logic, I can do looping, I can do error trapping and handling. So we're talking about a whole number of different features that can be included in this coordinator. So like I said, we have a really very simple process here that's just calling out, grabbing all those different data elements from all those different data sources and consolidating it. We'll look back at this coordinator in a second when we introduce, or we make this data fabric a bit smarter, and we start introducing that analytics piece to it. So this is in charge of the refinement. And so at this point in time we've looked at connections, collections, and refinements. And just to summarize what we've seen 'cause I always like to go back and take a look at everything that we've seen. We have our initial API connection, we have our connections to our individual data sources and we have our coordinators there in the middle that are in charge of collecting the data and refining it into a single payload. As you can imagine, there's a lot going on behind the scenes of a smart data fabric, right? There's all these different processes that are interacting. So it's really important that your smart data fabric platform has really good traceability, really good logging, 'cause you need to be able to know, you know, if there was an issue, where did that issue happen in which connected process, and how did it affect the other processes that are related to it? In IRIS, we have this concept called a visual trace. And what our clients use this for is basically to be able to step through the entire history of a request from when it initially came into the smart data fabric, to when data was sent back out from that smart data fabric. So I didn't record the time, but I bet if you recorded the time it was this time that we sent that request in and you can see my patient's name and their medical record number here, and you can see that that instigated four different calls to four different systems, and they're represented by these arrows going out. So we sent something to chart script, to our health record management system, to our clinical risk grouping application, into my EMR through their Fire server. So every request, every outbound application gets a request and we pull back all of those individual pieces of information from all of those different systems, and we bundle them together. And from my Fire lovers, here's our Fire bundle that we got back from our Fire server. So this is a really good way of being able to validate that I am appropriately grabbing the data from all these different applications and then ultimately consolidating it into one payload. Now we change this into a JSON format before we deliver it, but this is those data elements brought together. And this screen would also be used for being able to see things like error trapping, or errors that were thrown, alerts, warnings, developers might put log statements in just to validate that certain pieces of code are executing. So this really becomes the one stop shop for understanding what's happening behind the scenes with your data fabric. >> Sure, who did what when where, what did the machine do what went wrong, and where did that go wrong? Right at your fingertips. >> Right. And I'm a visual person so a bunch of log files to me is not the most helpful. While being able to see this happened at this time in this location, gives me that understanding I need to actually troubleshoot a problem. >> This business orchestration piece, can you say a little bit more about that? How people are using it? What's the business impact of the business orchestration? >> The business orchestration, especially in the smart data fabric, is really that crucial part of being able to create a smart data fabric. So think of your business orchestrator as doing the heavy lifting of any kind of processing that involves data, right? It's bringing data in, it's analyzing that information it's transforming that data, in a format that your consumer's not going to understand. It's doing any additional injection of custom logic. So really your coordinator or that orchestrator that sits in the middle is the brains behind your smart data fabric. >> And this is available today? It all works? >> It's all available today. Yeah, it all works. And we have a number of clients that are using this technology to support these kinds of use cases. >> Awesome demo. Anything else you want to show us? >> Well, we can keep going. I have a lot to say, but really this is our data fabric. The core competency of IRIS is making it smart, right? So I won't spend too much time on this, but essentially if we go back to our coordinator here, we can see here's that original, that pipeline that we saw where we're pulling data from all these different systems and we're collecting it and we're sending it out. But then we see two more at the end here, which involves getting a readmission prediction and then returning a prediction. So we can not only deliver data back as part of a smart data fabric, but we can also deliver insights back to users and consumers based on data that we've aggregated as part of a smart data fabric. So in this scenario, we're actually taking all that data that we just looked at, and we're running it through a machine learning model that exists within the smart data fabric pipeline, and producing a readmission score to determine if this particular patient is at risk for readmission within the next 30 days. Which is a typical problem that we see in the healthcare space. So what's really exciting about what we're doing in the IRIS world, is we're bringing analytics close to the data with integrated ML. So in this scenario we're actually creating the model, training the model, and then executing the model directly within the IRIS platform. So there's no shuffling of data, there's no external connections to make this happen. And it doesn't really require having a PhD in data science to understand how to do that. It leverages all really basic SQL-like syntax to be able to construct and execute these predictions. So, it's going one step further than the traditional data fabric example to introduce this ability to define actionable insights to our users based on the data that we've brought together. >> Well that readmission probability is huge, right? Because it directly affects the cost for the provider and the patient, you know. So if you can anticipate the probability of readmission and either do things at that moment, or, you know, as an outpatient perhaps, to minimize the probability then that's huge. That drops right to the bottom line. >> Absolutely. And that really brings us from that data fabric to that smart data fabric at the end of the day, which is what makes this so exciting. >> Awesome demo. >> Thank you! >> Jess, are you cool if people want to get in touch with you? Can they do that? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Jessica Jowdy, and we'd love to hear from you. I always love talking about this topic so we'd be happy to engage on that. >> Great stuff. Thank you Jessica, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay, don't go away because in the next segment, we're going to dig into the use cases where data fabric is driving business value. Stay right there. (inspirational music) (music fades)

>> Okay, so now that we've heard Scott talk about smart data fabrics, it's time to see this in action. Right now we're joined by Jess Jowdy, who's the manager of Healthcare Field Engineering at InterSystems. She's going to give a demo of how smart data fabrics actually work, and she's going to show how embedding a wide range of analytics capabilities including data exploration, business intelligence natural language processing, and machine learning directly within the fabric, makes it faster and easier for organizations to gain new insights and power intelligence, predictive and prescriptive services and applications. Now, according to InterSystems, smart data fabrics are applicable across many industries from financial services to supply chain to healthcare and more. Jess today is going to be speaking through the lens of a healthcare focused demo. Don't worry, Joe Lichtenberg will get into some of the other use cases that you're probably interested in hearing about. That will be in our third segment, but for now let's turn it over to Jess. Jess, good to see you. >> Hi. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And so for this demo we're really going to be bucketing these features of a smart data fabric into four different segments. We're going to be dealing with connections, collections, refinements and analysis. And so we'll see that throughout the demo as we go. So without further ado, let's just go ahead and jump into this demo and you'll see my screen pop up here. I actually like to start at the end of the demo. So I like to begin by illustrating what an end user's going to see and don't mind the screen 'cause I gave you a little sneak peek of what's about to happen. But essentially what I'm going to be doing is using Postman to simulate a call from an external application. So we talked about being in the healthcare industry. This could be for instance, a mobile application that a patient is using to view an aggregated summary of information across that patient's continuity of care or some other kind of application. So we might be pulling information in this case from an electronic medical record. We might be grabbing clinical history from that. We might be grabbing clinical notes from a medical transcription software or adverse reaction warnings from a clinical risk grouping application and so much more. So I'm really going to be assimilating a patient logging on in on their phone and retrieving this information through this Postman call. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to hit send, I've already preloaded everything here and I'm going to be looking for information where the last name of this patient is Simmons and their medical record number their patient identifier in the system is 32345. And so as you can see I have this single JSON payload that showed up here of just relevant clinical information for my patient whose last name is Simmons all within a single response. So fantastic, right? Typically though when we see responses that look like this there is an assumption that this service is interacting with a single backend system and that single backend system is in charge of packaging that information up and returning it back to this caller. But in a smart data fabric architecture we're able to expand the scope to handle information across different, in this case, clinical applications. So how did this actually happen? Let's peel back another layer and really take a look at what happened in the background. What you're looking at here is our mission control center for our smart data fabric. On the left we have our APIs that allow users to interact with particular services. On the right we have our connections to our different data silos. And in the middle here we have our data fabric coordinator which is going to be in charge of this refinement and analysis those key pieces of our smart data fabric. So let's look back and think about the example we just showed. I received an inbound request for information for a patient whose last name is Simmons. My end user is requesting to connect to that service and that's happening here at my patient data retrieval API location. Users can define any number of different services and APIs depending on their use cases. And to that end we do also support full lifecycle API management within this platform. When you're dealing with APIs I always like to make a little shout out on this that you really want to make sure you have enough like a granular enough security model to handle and limit which APIs and which services a consumer can interact with. In this IRIS platform, which we're talking about today we have a very granular role-based security model that allows you to handle that, but it's really important in a smart data fabric to consider who's accessing your data and in what contact. >> Can I just interrupt you for a second? >> Yeah, please. >> So you were showing on the left hand side of the demo a couple of APIs. I presume that can be a very long list. I mean, what do you see as typical? >> I mean you can have hundreds of these APIs depending on what services an organization is serving up for their consumers. So yeah, we've seen hundreds of these services listed here. >> So my question is, obviously security is critical in the healthcare industry and API securities are really hot topic these days. How do you deal with that? >> Yeah, and I think API security is interesting 'cause it can happen at so many layers. So there's interactions with the API itself. So can I even see this API and leverage it? And then within an API call, you then have to deal with all right, which end points or what kind of interactions within that API am I allowed to do? What data am I getting back? And with healthcare data, the whole idea of consent to see certain pieces of data is critical. So the way that we handle that is, like I said, same thing at different layers. There is access to a particular API, which can happen within the IRIS product and also we see it happening with an API management layer, which has become a really hot topic with a lot of organizations. And then when it comes to data security, that really happens under the hood within your smart data fabric. So that role-based access control becomes very important in assigning, you know, roles and permissions to certain pieces of information. Getting that granular becomes the cornerstone of security. >> And that's been designed in, >> Absolutely, yes. it's not a bolt-on as they like to say. Okay, can we get into collect now? >> Of course, we're going to move on to the collection piece at this point in time, which involves pulling information from each of my different data silos to create an overall aggregated record. So commonly each data source requires a different method for establishing connections and collecting this information. So for instance, interactions with an EMR may require leveraging a standard healthcare messaging format like FIRE, interactions with a homegrown enterprise data warehouse for instance may use SQL for a cloud-based solutions managed by a vendor. They may only allow you to use web service calls to pull data. So it's really important that your data fabric platform that you're using has the flexibility to connect to all of these different systems and and applications. And I'm about to log out so I'm going to keep my session going here. So therefore it's incredibly important that your data fabric has the flexibility to connect to all these different kinds of applications and data sources and all these different kinds of formats and over all of these different kinds of protocols. So let's think back on our example here. I had four different applications that I was requesting information for to create that payload that we saw initially. Those are listed here under this operations section. So these are going out and connecting to downstream systems to pull information into my smart data fabric. What's great about the IRIS platform is it has an embedded interoperability platform. So there's all of these native adapters that can support these common connections that we see for different kinds of applications. So using REST or SOAP or SQL or FTP regardless of that protocol there's an adapter to help you work with that. And we also think of the types of formats that we typically see data coming in as, in healthcare we have H7, we have FIRE we have CCDs across the industry. JSON is, you know, really hitting a market strong now and XML, payloads, flat files. We need to be able to handle all of these different kinds of formats over these different kinds of protocols. So to illustrate that, if I click through these when I select a particular connection on the right side panel I'm going to see the different settings that are associated with that particular connection that allows me to collect information back into my smart data fabric. In this scenario, my connection to my chart script application in this example communicates over a SOAP connection. When I'm grabbing information from my clinical risk grouping application I'm using a SQL based connection. When I'm connecting to my EMR I'm leveraging a standard healthcare messaging format known as FIRE, which is a rest based protocol. And then when I'm working with my health record management system I'm leveraging a standard HTTP adapter. So you can see how we can be flexible when dealing with these different kinds of applications and systems. And then it becomes important to be able to validate that you've established those connections correctly and be able to do it in a reliable and quick way. Because if you think about it, you could have hundreds of these different kinds of applications built out and you want to make sure that you're maintaining and understanding those connections. So I can actually go ahead and test one of these applications and put in, for instance my patient's last name and their MRN and make sure that I'm actually getting data back from that system. So it's a nice little sanity check as we're building out that data fabric to ensure that we're able to establish these connections appropriately. So turnkey adapters are fantastic, as you can see we're leveraging them all here, but sometimes these connections are going to require going one step further and building something really specific for an application. So let's, why don't we go one step further here and talk about doing something custom or doing something innovative. And so it's important for users to have the ability to develop and go beyond what's an out of the box or black box approach to be able to develop things that are specific to their data fabric or specific to their particular connection. In this scenario, the IRIS data platform gives users access to the entire underlying code base. So you cannot, you not only get an opportunity to view how we're establishing these connections or how we're building out these processes but you have the opportunity to inject your own kind of processing your own kinds of pipelines into this. So as an example, you can leverage any number of different programming languages right within this pipeline. And so I went ahead and I injected Python. So Python is a very up and coming language, right? We see more and more developers turning towards Python to do their development. So it's important that your data fabric supports those kinds of developers and users that have standardized on these kinds of programming languages. This particular script here, as you can see actually calls out to our turnkey adapters. So we see a combination of out of the box code that is provided in this data fabric platform from IRIS combined with organization specific or user specific customizations that are included in this Python method. So it's a nice little combination of how do we bring the developer experience in and mix it with out of the box capabilities that we can provide in a smart data fabric. >> Wow. >> Yeah, I'll pause. >> It's a lot here. You know, actually, if I could >> I can pause. >> If I just want to sort of play that back. So we went through the connect and the collect phase. >> And the collect, yes, we're going into refine. So it's a good place to stop. >> Yeah, so before we get there, so we heard a lot about fine grain security, which is crucial. We heard a lot about different data types, multiple formats. You've got, you know the ability to bring in different dev tools. We heard about FIRE, which of course big in healthcare. >> Absolutely. >> And that's the standard and then SQL for traditional kind of structured data and then web services like HTTP you mentioned. And so you have a rich collection of capabilities within this single platform. >> Absolutely, and I think that's really important when you're dealing with a smart data fabric because what you're effectively doing is you're consolidating all of your processing, all of your collection into a single platform. So that platform needs to be able to handle any number of different kinds of scenarios and technical challenges. So you've got to pack that platform with as many of these features as you can to consolidate that processing. >> All right, so now we're going into refine. >> We're going into refinement, exciting. So how do we actually do refinement? Where does refinement happen and how does this whole thing end up being performant? Well the key to all of that is this SDF coordinator or stands for smart data fabric coordinator. And what this particular process is doing is essentially orchestrating all of these calls to all of these different downstream systems. It's aggregating, it's collecting that information it's aggregating it and it's refining it into that single payload that we saw get returned to the user. So really this coordinator is the main event when it comes to our data fabric. And in the IRIS platform we actually allow users to build these coordinators using web-based tool sets to make it intuitive. So we can take a sneak peek at what that looks like and as you can see it follows a flow chart like structure. So there's a start, there is an end and then there are these different arrows that point to different activities throughout the business process. And so there's all these different actions that are being taken within our coordinator. You can see an action for each of the calls to each of our different data sources to go retrieve information. And then we also have the sync call at the end that is in charge of essentially making sure that all of those responses come back before we package them together and send them out. So this becomes really crucial when we're creating that data fabric. And you know, this is a very simple data fabric example where we're just grabbing data and we're consolidating it together. But you can have really complex orchestrators and coordinators that do any number of different things. So for instance, I could inject SQL Logic into this or SQL code, I can have conditional logic, I can do looping, I can do error trapping and handling. So we're talking about a whole number of different features that can be included in this coordinator. So like I said, we have a really very simple process here that's just calling out, grabbing all those different data elements from all those different data sources and consolidating it. We'll look back at this coordinator in a second when we introduce or we make this data fabric a bit smarter and we start introducing that analytics piece to it. So this is in charge of the refinement. And so at this point in time we've looked at connections, collections, and refinements. And just to summarize what we've seen 'cause I always like to go back and take a look at everything that we've seen. We have our initial API connection we have our connections to our individual data sources and we have our coordinators there in the middle that are in charge of collecting the data and refining it into a single payload. As you can imagine, there's a lot going on behind the scenes of a smart data fabric, right? There's all these different processes that are interacting. So it's really important that your smart data fabric platform has really good traceability, really good logging 'cause you need to be able to know, you know, if there was an issue, where did that issue happen, in which connected process and how did it affect the other processes that are related to it. In IRIS, we have this concept called a visual trace. And what our clients use this for is basically to be able to step through the entire history of a request from when it initially came into the smart data fabric to when data was sent back out from that smart data fabric. So I didn't record the time but I bet if you recorded the time it was this time that we sent that request in. And you can see my patient's name and their medical record number here and you can see that that instigated four different calls to four different systems and they're represented by these arrows going out. So we sent something to chart script to our health record management system, to our clinical risk grouping application into my EMR through their FIRE server. So every request, every outbound application gets a request and we pull back all of those individual pieces of information from all of those different systems and we bundle them together. And for my FIRE lovers, here's our FIRE bundle that we got back from our FIRE server. So this is a really good way of being able to validate that I am appropriately grabbing the data from all these different applications and then ultimately consolidating it into one payload. Now we change this into a JSON format before we deliver it, but this is those data elements brought together. And this screen would also be used for being able to see things like error trapping or errors that were thrown alerts, warnings, developers might put log statements in just to validate that certain pieces of code are executing. So this really becomes the one stop shop for understanding what's happening behind the scenes with your data fabric. >> Etcher, who did what, when, where what did the machine do? What went wrong and where did that go wrong? >> Exactly. >> Right in your fingertips. >> Right, and I'm a visual person so a bunch of log files to me is not the most helpful. Well, being able to see this happened at this time in this location gives me that understanding I need to actually troubleshoot a problem. >> This business orchestration piece, can you say a little bit more about that? How people are using it? What's the business impact of the business orchestration? >> The business orchestration, especially in the smart data fabric is really that crucial part of being able to create a smart data fabric. So think of your business orchestrator as doing the heavy lifting of any kind of processing that involves data, right? It's bringing data in, it's analyzing that information, it's transforming that data, in a format that your consumer's not going to understand it's doing any additional injection of custom logic. So really your coordinator or that orchestrator that sits in the middle is the brains behind your smart data fabric. >> And this is available today? This all works? >> It's all available today. Yeah, it all works. And we have a number of clients that are using this technology to support these kinds of use cases. >> Awesome demo. Anything else you want to show us? >> Well we can keep going. 'Cause right now, I mean we can, oh, we're at 18 minutes. God help us. You can cut some of this. (laughs) I have a lot to say, but really this is our data fabric. The core competency of IRIS is making it smart, right? So I won't spend too much time on this but essentially if we go back to our coordinator here we can see here's that original that pipeline that we saw where we're pulling data from all these different systems and we're collecting it and we're sending it out. But then we see two more at the end here which involves getting a readmission prediction and then returning a prediction. So we can not only deliver data back as part of a smart data fabric but we can also deliver insights back to users and consumers based on data that we've aggregated as part of a smart data fabric. So in this scenario, we're actually taking all that data that we just looked at and we're running it through a machine learning model that exists within the smart data fabric pipeline and producing a readmission score to determine if this particular patient is at risk for readmission within the next 30 days. Which is a typical problem that we see in the healthcare space. So what's really exciting about what we're doing in the IRIS world is we're bringing analytics close to the data with integrated ML. So in this scenario we're actually creating the model, training the model, and then executing the model directly within the IRIS platform. So there's no shuffling of data, there's no external connections to make this happen. And it doesn't really require having a PhD in data science to understand how to do that. It leverages all really basic SQL like syntax to be able to construct and execute these predictions. So it's going one step further than the traditional data fabric example to introduce this ability to define actionable insights to our users based on the data that we've brought together. >> Well that readmission probability is huge. >> Yes. >> Right, because it directly affects the cost of for the provider and the patient, you know. So if you can anticipate the probability of readmission and either do things at that moment or you know, as an outpatient perhaps to minimize the probability then that's huge. That drops right to the bottom line. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And that really brings us from that data fabric to that smart data fabric at the end of the day which is what makes this so exciting. >> Awesome demo. >> Thank you. >> Fantastic people, are you cool? If people want to get in touch with you? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Jessica Jowdy and we'd love to hear from you. I always love talking about this topic, so would be happy to engage on that. >> Great stuff, thank you Jess, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay, don't go away because in the next segment we're going to dig into the use cases where data fabric is driving business value. Stay right there.

>>Now welcome back to the Cube as we continue our coverage here. AWS Reinvent 2022, going out here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Tens of thousands of attendees. That exhibit Hall is full. Let me tell you, it's been something else. Well, here in the executive summit, sponsored by Accenture. Accenture rather. We're gonna talk about Baptist Health, what's going on with that organization down in South Florida with me. To do that, I have Tony Abro, who's the SVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer. I have Ashley Lane, the managing director of the Accenture Healthcare Practice, and on the far end Poop Kumar, who is the VP and cto Baptist Health Florida won and all. Welcome. Thank you. First off, let's just talk about Baptist Health, the size of your footprint. One and a half million patient visits a year, not a small number. >>That was probably last year's number, but okay. >>Right. But not a small number about your footprint and, and what, I guess the client base basically that you guys are serving in it. >>Absolutely. So we are the largest organization in South Florida system provider and the 11 hospitals soon to be 12, as you said, it's probably about 1.8 million by now. People were, were, were supporting a lot of other units and you know, we're focusing on the four southern counties of South Florida. Okay. >>So got day Broward. Broward, yep. Down that way. Got it. So now let's get to your migration or your cloud transformation. As we're talking about a lot this week, what's been your, I guess, overarching goal, you know, as you worked with Accenture and, and developed a game plan going forward, you know, what was on the front end of that? What was the motivation to say this is the direction we're going to go and this is how we're gonna get there? >>Perfect. So Baptist started a digital transformation initiative before I came about three years ago. The board, the executive steering committee, decided that this is gonna be very important for us to support us, to help our patients and, and consumers. So I was brought in for that digital transformation. And by the way, digital transformation is kind of an umbrella. It's really business transformation with technology, digital technologies. So that's, that's basically where we started in terms of consumer focused and, and, and patient focus. And digital is a big word that really encompasses a lot of things. Cloud is one of, of course. And, you know, AI and ML and all the things that we are here for this, this event, you know, and, and we've started that journey about two years ago. And obviously cloud is very important. AWS is our main cloud provider and clearly in AWS or any club providers is not just the infrastructure they're providing, it's the whole ecosystem that provides us back value into, into our transformation. And then somebody, I think Adam this morning at the keynote said, this is a team sport. So with this big transformation, we need all the help and that we can get to mines and, and, and hands. And that's where Accenture has been invaluable over the last two years. >>Yeah, so as a team sport then depu, you, you've got external stakeholders, otherwise we talked about patience, right? Internal, right. You've, you've got a whole different set of constituents there, basically, but it takes that team, right? You all have to work together. What kind of conversations or what kind of actions, I guess have you had with different departments and what different of sectors of, of the healthcare business as Baptist Health sees it in order to bring them along too, because this is, you know, kind of a shocking turn for them too, right? And how they're gonna be doing business >>Mostly from an end user perspective. This is something that they don't care much about where the infrastructure is hosted or how the services are provided from that perspective. As long as the capabilities function in a better way, they are seemingly not worried about where the hosting is. So what we focus on is in terms of how it's going to be a better experience for, from them, from, from their perspective, right? How is it going to be better responsiveness, availability, or stability overall? So that's been the mode of communication from that perspective. Other than that, from a, from a hosting and service perspective, the clientele doesn't care as much as the infrastructure or the security or the, the technology and digital teams themselves. >>But you know, some of us are resistant to change, right? We're, we're just, we are old dogs. We don't like new tricks and, and change can be a little daunting sometimes. So even though it is about my ease of use and my efficiency and why I can then save my time on so and so forth, if I'm used to doing something a certain way, and that's worked fine for me and here comes Tony and Depo and here comes a, >>They're troublemaker >>And they're stir my pot. Yeah. So, so how do you, the work, you were giving advice maybe to somebody watching this and say, okay, you've got internal, I wouldn't say battles, but discussions to be held. How did you navigate through that? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And Baptist has been a very well run system, very successful for 60 something odd years. Clearly that conversation did come, why should we change? But you always start with, this is what we think is gonna happen in the future. These are the changes that very likely will happen in the future. One is the consumer expectations are the consumer expectations in terms of their ability to have access to information, get access to care, being control of the process and their, their health and well-being. Everything else that happens in the market. And so you start with the, with that, and that's where clearly there are, there are a lot of signs that point to quite a lot of change in the ecosystem. And therefore, from there, the conversation is how do we now meet that challenge, so to speak, that we all face in, in, in healthcare. >>And then from there, you kind of designed the, a vision of where we want to be in terms of that digital transformation and how do we get there. And then once that is well explained and evangelized, and that's part of our jobs with the help of our colleagues who have, have been doing this with others, then is the, what I call a tell end show. We're gonna say, okay, in this, in this road, we're gonna start with this. It's a small thing and we're gonna show you how it works in terms of, in terms of the process, right? And then as, as you go along and you deliver some things, people understand more, they're on board more and they're ready for for more. So it's iterative from small to larger. >>The proof is always in the place, right? If you can show somebody, so actually I, I obviously we know about Accenture's role, but in terms of almost, almost what Tony was just saying, that you have to show people that it works. How, how do you interface with a client? And when you're talking about these new approaches and you're suggesting changes and, and making these maybe rather dramatic proposals, you know, to how they do things internally, from Accenture's perspective, how do you make it happen? How, how do you bring the client along in this case, batches >>Down? Well, in this case, with Tony and Depu, I mean, they have been on this journey already at another client, right? So they came to Baptist where they had done a similar journey previously. And so it wasn't really about convincing >>Also with Accenture's >>Health, also with Accenture's Health, correct. But it wasn't about telling Tony Dupe, how do we do this? Or anything like that. Cuz they were by far the experts and have, you know, the experience behind it. Well, it's really like, how do we make sure that we're providing the right, right team, the right skills to match, you know, what they wanted to do and their aspirations. So we had brought the, the healthcare knowledge along with the AWS knowledge and the architects and you know, we said that we gotta, you know, let's look at the roadmap and let's make sure that we have the right team and moving at the right pace and, you know, testing everything out and working with all the different vendors in the provider world specifically, there's a lot of different vendors and applications that are, you know, that are provided to them. It's not a lot of custom activity, you know, applications or anything like that. So it was a lot of, you know, working with other third party that we really had to align with them and with Baptist to make sure that, you know, we were moving together at speed. >>Yeah, we've heard about transformation quite a bit. Tony, you brought it up a little bit ago, depu, just, if you had to define transformation in this case, I mean, how big of a, of a, of a change is that? I mean, how, how would you describe it when you say we're gonna transform our, you know, our healthcare business? I mean, I think there are a lot of things that come to my mind, but, but how do you define it and, and when you're, when you're talking to the folks with whom you've got to bring along on this journey? >>So there's the transformation umbrella and compos two or three things. As Tony said, there is this big digital transformation that everybody's talking about. Then there is this technology transformation that powers the digital transformation and business transformation. That's the outcome of the digital transformation. So I think we, we started focusing on all three areas to get the right digital experience for the consumers. We have to transform the way we operate healthcare in its current state or, or in the existing state. It's a lot of manual processes, a lot of antiquated processes, so to speak. So we had to go and reassess some of that and work with the respective business stakeholders to streamline those because in, it's not about putting a digital solution out there with the anti cured processes because the outcome is not what you expect when you do that. So from that perspective, it has been a heavy lifting in terms of how we transform the operations or the processes that facilitates some of the outcomes. >>How do you know it's working >>Well? So I I, to add to what Deep was saying is I think we are fortunate and that, you know, there are a lot of folks inside Baptist who have been wanting this and they're instrumental to this. So this is not a two man plus, you know, show is really a, you know, a, a team sport. Again, that same. So in, in that, that in terms of how do we know it works well when, when we define what we want to do, there is some level of precision along the way. In those iterations, what is it that we want to do next, right? So whatever we introduce, let's say a, a proper fluid check in for a patient into a, for an appointment, we measure that and then we measure the next one, and then we kind of zoom out and we look at the, the journey and say, is this better? >>Is this better for the consumer? Do they like it better? We measure that and it's better for the operations in terms of, but this is the interesting thing is it's always a balance of how much you can change. We want to improve the consumer experience, but as deeply said, there's lot to be changed in, in the operations, how much you do at the same time. And that's where we have to do the prioritization. But you know, the, the interesting thing is that a lot of times, especially on the self servicing for consumers, there are a lot of benefits for the operations as well. And that's, that's where we're in, we're in it together and we measure. Yeah, >>Don't gimme too much control though. I don't, I'm gonna leave the hard lifting for you. >>Absolutely, absolutely right. Thank you. >>So, and, and just real quick, Ashley, maybe you can shine some light on this, about the relationship, about, about next steps, about, you know, you, you're on this, this path and things are going well and, and you've got expansion plans, you want, you know, bring in other services, other systems. Where do you want to take 'em in the big picture in terms of capabilities? >>Well, I, I mean, they've been doing a fantastic job just being one of the first to actually say, Hey, we're gonna go and make an investment in the cloud and digital transformation. And so it's really looking at like, what are the next problems that we need to solve, whether it's patient care diagnosis or how we're doing research or, you know, the next kind of realm of, of how we're gonna use data and to improve patient care. So I think it's, you know, we're getting the foundation, the basics and everything kind of laid out right now. And then it's really, it's like what's the next thing and how can we really improve the patient care and the access that they have. >>Well, it sure sounds like you have a winning accommodation, so I I keep the team together. >>Absolutely. >>Teamwork makes the dream >>Work. Absolutely. It is, as you know. So there's a certain amount of, if you look at the healthcare industry as a whole, and not, not just Baptist, Baptist is, you know, fourth for thinking, but entire industry, there's a lot of catching up to do compared to whatever else is doing, whatever else the consumers are expecting of, of an entity, right? But then once we catch up, there's a lot of other things that we were gonna have to move on, innovate for, for problems that we maybe we don't know we have will have right now. So plenty of work to do. Right. >>Which is job security for everybody, right? >>Yes. >>Listen, thanks for sharing the story. Yeah, yeah. Continued success. I wish you that and I appreciate the time and expertise here today. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be back with more. You're watching the Cube here. It's the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And the cube, as I love to remind you, is the leader in tech coverage.

foreign [Music] my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be coming to you today from the cube in Palo Alto we're going to be talking about kubecon giving a little preview of the hype and what you might be able to expect in Detroit with the one and only co-founder and CEO of the cube and siliconangle John ferriere John hello how are you today thanks for hosting and doing the preview with me my goodness a pleasure I we got acquainted this time last year how do you think the ecosystem has changed are you excited well first of all I missed kubecon Valencia because I had covid I was so excited to be there this big trip plan and then couldn't make it but so much has gone on I mean we've been at every kubecon the cube was there at the beginning when openstack was still going on kubernetes just started came out of Google we were there having beers with Lou Tucker and a bunch of The Luminaries when it all kind of came together and then watch it year by year progress through and how it's changed the industry and mainly how open source has been really the wave behind it combining with the Linux foundation and then cncf and then open source movement and good kubernetes has been amazing and under it all containers has been the real driver and all this so you know Docker containers Docker was a well-funded company they had to Pivot and were restructured now they're pure open source so containers have gone Supernova on top of that kubernetes and with that's a complete ecosystem of opportunity to create the next operating system in in software development so to me kubecon is at the center of software software 2030 what do you want to call it super cloud it's that it's really action it's not where the old school is it's where the new school is excellent so what has you most excited this year what's the biggest change from this time last year and now well two things I'm looking at this year uh carefully both from an editorial lens and also from a sponsorship lenses where is the funding going on the sponsorships because again a very diverse ecosystem of Builders but also vendors so I'm going to see how that Dynamics going on but also on the software side a lot of white space going on in the stack or in the map if you will you know the run times you've got observability you got a lot of competition maybe projects might be growing some Rising some falling maybe merge together I'm going to see how that but there's a lot of white spaces developing so I'm curious to see what's new on that area and then service meshes is a big deal this year so I'm looking for what's going on so it's been kind of a I won't say cold war but kind of like uh you know where is this going to go and because it's a super important part of of the of the orchestration and managing containers and so be very interested to see how service mesh does istio and other versions out there have been around for a while so that and also the other controversy is the number of stars on GitHub a project may have so sometimes that carries a lot of weight but we're going to look at which ones are rising which ones are falling again um which ones are getting the most votes by the developers vote with their code yeah absolutely well we did definitely miss you down in Los Angeles but it will be great to be in Detroit what has you most excited do you think that we're going to see the number of people in person that we have in the past I know you've seen it since the beginning so I think this year is going to be explosive from that psychology angle because I think it was really weird because La was on they were a bold to make that move we're all there is first conference back it was a lot a lot of like badges don't touch me only handshakes fist pumps but it was at the beginning of the covid second wave right so it was kind of still not yet released where everyone's was not worried about it so I think it's in the past year in the past eight months I mean I've been places with no masks people have no masks Vegas other places so I think it's going to be a year where it will be a lot more people in person because the growth and the opportunities are so big it's going to drive a lot of people in person just like Amazon reinvent those yeah absolutely and as the most important and prominent event in the kubernetes space I think everyone's very excited to to get back together when we think about this space do you think there that anyone's the clear winner yet or do you think it's still a bit of a open territory in terms of the companies and Partnerships I think Red Hat has done a great job and they're you know I think they're going to see how well they can turn this into gold for them because they've positioned themselves very well open shift years ago was kind of waffling I won't say it in a bad way but like but once they got view on containers and kubernetes red has done an exceptional job in how they position their company being bought by ibms can be very interesting to see how that influences change so if Red Hat can stay red hat I think IBM will win I think customers that's one company I like the startups we're seeing companies like platform nine Rafi systems young companies coming out in the kubernetes as a service space because I think whoever can make kubernetes easier because I think that's the hard part right now even though that the show is called kubecon is a lot more than kubernetes I think the container layer what docker's doing has been exceptional that's the real action the question is how does that impact the kubernetes layers so kubernetes is not a done deal yet I think it hasn't really crossed the chasm yet it's certainly popular but not every company is adopting it so we're starting to see that we need to see more adoption of kubernetes seeing that happen it's going to decide who the winners are totally agree with that if you look at the data a lot of companies are and people are excited about kubernetes but they haven't taken the plunge to shifting over their stack or fully embracing it because of that complexity so I'm very curious to see what we learn this week about who those players might be moving forward how does it feel to be in Detroit when was the last time you were here I was there in 2007 was the last time I was in that town so uh we'll see what's like wow yeah but things have changed yeah the lions are good this year they've got great hockey goalies there so you know all right you've heard that sports fans let John know what you're thinking your Sports predictions for this season I love that who do you hope to get to meet while we're at the show I want to meet more end user customers we're gonna have Envoy again on the cube I think Red Hat was going to be a big sponsor this year they've been great um we're looking for end user project most looking for some editorial super cloud like um commentary because the cncf is kind of the developer Tech Community that's powering in my opinion this next wave of software development Cloud native devops is now Cloud native developers devops is kind of going away that's killed I.T in my opinion data and security Ops is the new kind of Ops the new it so it's good to see how devops turns into more of a software engineering meet supercloud so I think you're going to start to see the infrastructure become more programmable it's infrastructure as code so I think if anything I'm more excited to hear more stories about how infrastructure as code is now the new standard so if when that truly happens the super cloud model be kicking into high gear I love that let's you touched on it a little bit right there but I want to dig in a bit since you've been around since the beginning what is it that you appreciate or enjoy so much about the kubernetes community and the people around this I think there are authentic people and I think they're they're building they're also Progressive they're very diverse um they're open and inclusive they try stuff and um they can be critical but they're not jerks about it so when people try something um they're open-minded of a failure so it's a classic startup mentality I think that is embodied throughout the Linux Foundation but CNC in particular has to bridge the entrepreneurial and corporate Vibe so they've done an exceptional job doing that and that's what I like about this money making involved but there's also a lot of development and Innovation that comes out of it so the next big name and startup could come out of this community and that's what I hope to see coming out here is that next brand that no one's heard of that just comes out of nowhere and just takes a big position in the marketplace so that's going to be interesting to see hopefully we have on our stage there yeah that's the goal we're going to interview them all a year from now when we're sitting here again what do you hope to be able to say about this space or this event that we might not be able to say today I think it's going to be more of clarity around um the new modern software development techniques software next gen using AI more faster silicon chips you see Amazon with what they're doing the custom silicon more processing but I think Hardware matters we've been talking a lot about that I think I think it's we're going to shift from what's been innovative and what's changed I think I think if you look at what's been going on in the industry outside of crypto the infrastructure hasn't really changed much except for AWS what they've done so I'm expecting to see more Innovations at the physics level way down in the chips and then that lower end of the stack is going to be dominated by either one of the three clouds probably AWS and then the middle layer is going to be this where the abstraction is around making infrastructure as code really happen I think that's going to be Clarity coming out of this year next year we should have some visibility into the vertical applications and of the AI and machine learning absolutely digging in on that actually even more because I like what you're saying a lot what verticals do you think that kubernetes is going to impact the most looking even further out than say a year I mean I think that hot ones Healthcare fintech are obvious to get the most money they're spending I think they're the ones who are already kind of creating these super cloud models where they're actually changed over their their spending from capex to Opex and they're driving top line revenue as part of that so you're seeing companies that wants customers of the I.T vendors are now becoming the providers that's a big super cloud Trend we see the other verticals are going to be served by a lot of men in Surprise oil and gas you know all the classic versus Healthcare I mentioned that one those are the classic verticals retail is going to I think be massively huge as you get more into the internet of things that's truly internet based you're going to start to see a lot more Edge use cases so Telecom I think it's going to be completely disrupted by new brands so I think once that you see see how that plays out but all verticals are going to be disrupted just a casual statement to say yeah yeah no doubt in my mind that's great I'm personally really excited about the edge applications that are possible here and can't wait to see can't wait to see what happens next I'm curious as to your thoughts how based given your history here and we don't have to say number of years that you've been participating in in Cape Cod but give them your history what's the evolution looked like from that Community perspective when you were all just starting out having that first drink did you anticipate that we would be here with thousands of people in Detroit you know I knew the moment was happening around um 2017-2018 Dan Coney no longer with us he passed away I ran into him randomly in China and it was like what are you doing here he was with a bunch of Docker guys so they were already investing in so I knew that the cncf was a great Steward for this community because they were already doing the work Dan led a great team at that time and then they were they were they were kicking ass and they were just really setting the foundation they dig in they set the architecture perfectly so I knew that that was a moment that was going to be pretty powerful at the early days when we were talking about kubernetes before it even started we were always always talking about if this this could be the tcpip of of cloud then we could have kind of a de facto interoperability and Lou Tucker was working for Cisco at the time and we were called it interclouding inter-networking what that did during the the revolution Cloud yeah the revolution of the client server and PC Revolution was about connectivity and so tcpip was the disruptive enable that created massive amounts of wealth created a lot of companies created a whole generation of companies so I think this next inflection point is kind of happening right now I think kubernetes is one step of this abstraction layer but you start to see companies like snowflake who's built on AWS and then moved to multiple clouds Goldman Sachs Capital One you're going to see insurance companies so we believe that the rise of the super cloud is here that's going to be Cloud 3.0 that's software 3.0 it's software three what do you want to call it it's not yesterday's Cloud lift and shift and run a SAS application it's a true Enterprise digital digital transformation so that's that's kind of the trend that we see riding in now and so you know if you're not on that side of the street you're going to get washed away from that wave so it's going to be interesting to see how how it all plays out so it's fun to watch who's on the wrong side it is very fun I hope you all are listening to this really powerful advice from John he's dropping some serious knowledge bombs on us well holding the back for kubecon because we've got we got all the great guests coming on and that's where all the content comes from I mean the best part of the community is that they're sharing yeah absolutely so just for old time's sake and it's because it's how I met your fabulous team last year Define kubernetes for the audience kubernetes is like what someone said it was a magical Christmas I heard that was a well good explanation with that when I heard that one um you mean the technical definition or like the business definition or maybe both you can give us an interpretive dance if you'd like I mean the simplest way to describe kubernetes is an orchestration layer that orchestrates containers that are containing applications and it's a way to keep things running and runtime assembly of like the of the data so if you've got you're running containers you can containerize applications kubernetes gives you that capability to run applications at scale which feeds into uh the development uh cycle of the pipelining of apps so if you're writing applications and you want to scale up it's a fast way to stand up massive amounts of scale using containers and kubernetes so a variety of other things that are in the in the in the system too so that was pretty good there's a lot more under the hood but that's the oversimplified version I think that's what we were going for I think it's actually I mean it's harder to oversimplify it sometimes in this case it connects it connects well it's the connective tissue between all the container applications yes last question for you John we are here at the cube we're very excited to be headed to Detroit very soon what can people expect from the cube at coupon this year so we'll be broadcasting Wednesday Thursday and Friday we'll be there early I'll be there Monday and Tuesday we'll do our normal kind of hanging around getting some scoop on the on the ground floor you'll see us there Monday and Tuesday probably in the in the lounge too um come up and say hi to us um again we're looking for more stories this year we believe this is the year that you're going to hear a lot more storytelling coming out of this community as people get more proof points so come up to us share your email your your handle give us yours give us your story we'll publish it we think we think this is going to be the year that cloud native developers start showing the signs of the of the rise of the supercloud that's going to come out of this this community so you know if you got something to say you know we're open to share stories so we're here all that speaking of John how can people say hi to you and the team on Twitter at Furrier at siliconangle at thecube thecube.net siliconangle.com LinkedIn Dave vellantis they were open on all channels all right signal Instagram WhatsApp perfect well pick your channel we really hope to hear from you John thank you so much for joining us for this preview session and thank you for tuning in my name is Savannah Peterson here in Palo Alto at thecube Studios looking forward to Detroit we can't wait to hear your thoughts do let us know in the comments and let us know if you're headed to Michigan cheers [Music] thank you

foreign greetings from San Francisco thecube is live this is our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here we're going to be talking with some ladies from Rackspace next please welcome Adriana Bustamante VP of strategic alliances and Hannah Deuce director of strategic alliances from Rackspace it's great to have you on the program thank you so much for having us good afternoon good morning is it lunchtime already almost almost yes and it's great to be back in person we were just talking about the keynote yesterday that we were in and it was standing room only people are ready to be back they're ready to be hearing from VMware it's ecosystem its Partners it's Community yes talk to us Adriana about what Rackspace is doing with Dell and VMware particularly in the healthcare space sure no so for us Partnerships are a big foundation to how we operate as a company and um and I have the privilege of doing it for over over 16 years so we've been looking after the dell and VMware part partnership ourselves personally for the last three years but they've been long-standing partners for for us and and how do we go and drive more meaningful joint Solutions together so Rackspace you know been around since since 98 we've seen such an evolution of coming becoming more of this multi-cloud transformation agile Global partner and we have a lot of customers that fall in lots of different verticals from retail to public sector into Healthcare but we started noticing and what we're trying trying to drive as a company is how do we drive more specialized Solutions and because of the pandemic and because of post-pandemic and everyone really trying to to figure out what the new normal is addressing different clients we saw that need increasing and we wanted to Rally together with our most strategic alliances to do more Hannah talk about obviously the the pandemic created such problems for every industry but but Healthcare being front and center it still is talk about some of the challenges that Healthcare organizations are coming to Rackspace going help yeah common theme that we've heard from some of our large providers Healthcare Providers has been helped me do more with less which we're all trying to do as we navigate The New Normal but in that space we found the opportunity to really leverage some of our expertise long-term expertise and that the talent and the resource pool that we had to really help in a some of the challenges that are being faced at a resource shortage Talent shortage and so Rackspace is able to Leverage What what we've done for many many years and really tailor it to the outcomes that Health Care Providers are needing nowadays that more with less Mantra runs across the gamut but a lot of it's been helped me modernize helped me get to that next phase I can't I can't I don't have the resources to DIY it myself anymore I need to figure out a more robust business continuity program and so helping with business continuity Dr you know third copies of just all all this data that's growing so it's not just covered pandemic driven but it's that's definitely driving the the need and the requirement to modernize so much quicker it's interesting that you mentioned rackspace's history and expertise in doing things and moving that forward and leveraging that pivoting focusing on specific environments to create something net new we've seen a lot of that here if you go back 10 years I don't know if that's the perfect date to go back to but if you go back 10 years ago you think about VMware where would we have expected VMware to be in this era of cloud we may have thought of things very very differently differently Rackspace a Pioneer in creating off-premises hey we will do this for you didn't even really call it Cloud at the time right but it was Cloud yeah and so the ability for entities like Rackspace like VMware we had a NetApp talking to us about stuff they're doing in the cloud 10 years ago if you I would say no they'd be they'll be gone they'll be gone so it's really really cool to see Rackspace making this transition and uh you know being aware of everything that's going on and focusing on the best value proposition moving forward I mean am I am I you know do I sound like somebody who would who would fit into the Rackspace culture right now or do I not get it yes you sound like a rocker we'll make you an honorary record that's what we call a Rackspace employees yes you know what we've noticed too and is budgets are moving those decision makers are moving so again 10 years ago just like you said you would be talking to sometimes a completely different Persona than we do than we do today and we've seen a shift more towards that business value we have a really unique ability to bring business and Technical conversations together I did a lot of work in the past of working with a lot of CMO and and digital transformation companies and so helping bring it and business seeing the same and how healthcare because budgets are living in different places and even across the board with Rackspace people are trying to drive more business outcomes business driven Solutions so the technical becomes the back end and really the ingredients to make all of that all of that happen and that's what we're helping to solve and it's a lot it's very fast paced everyone wants to be agile now and so they're leaning on us more and more to drive more services so if you've seen Rackspace evolve we're driving more of that advisement and those transformation service type discussions where where our original history was DNA was very much always embedded in driving a great experience now they're just wanting more from us more services help us how help us figure out the how Adriana comment on the outcomes that you're helping Healthcare organizations achieve as as we as we it's such a relatable tangible topic Healthcare is Right everybody's everybody's got somebody who's sick or you've been sick or whatnot what are some of those outcomes that we can ex that customers can expect to achieve with Rackspace and VMware oh great great question so very much I can't mentioned earlier it's how do I modernize how do I optimize how do I take the biggest advantage of the budgets and the landscape that I have I want to get to the Cloud we need to help our patients and get access to that data is this ready to go into the cloud is this not ready to go into the cloud you know how do we how do we help make sure we're taking care of our patients we're keeping things secure and accessible you know what else do you think is coming up yeah and one specific one uh sequencing genetic sequencing and so we've had this come up from a few different types of providers whether it's medical devices that they may provide to their end clients and an outcome that they're looking for is how do we get how do we leverage um here's rip here's what we do but now we have so many more people we need to give this access to we need them to be able to have access to the sequencing that all of this is doing all of these different entities are doing and the outcome that they're trying to get to to is more collaboration so so that way we can speed up in the face of a pandemic we can speed up those resolutions we could speed up to you know whether it's a vaccine needed or something that's going to address the next thing that might be coming you know um so that's a specific one I've heard that from a handful of different different um clients that that we work with and so trying to give them a Consolidated not trying to we are able to deliver them a Consolidated place that their application and tooling can run in and then all of these other entities can safely and securely access this data to do what they're going to do in their own spaces and then hopefully it helps the betterment of of of us globally like as humans in the healthcare space we all benefit from this so leveraging the technology to really drive a valuable outcome helps us all so so and by the way I like trying to because it conveys the proper level of humility that we all need to bring to this because it's complicated and anybody who looks you in the eye it pretends like they know exactly how to do it you need to run from those people no it is and and look that's where our partners become so significant we we know we're Best in Class for specific things but we rely on our Partnerships with Dell and VMware to bring their expertise to bring their tried and true technology to help us all together collectively deliver something good technology for good technology for good it is inherently good and it's nice when it's used for goodness it's nice when it's yeah yeah talk about security for a second you know we've seen the threat landscape change dramatically obviously nobody wants to be the next breach ransomware becoming a household term it's now a matter of when we get a head not F where has security gone in terms of conversations with customers going help us ensure that what we're doing is delivering data access to the right folks that need it at the right time in real time in a secure fashion no uh that's another good question in hot and burning so you know I think if we think about past conversations it was that nice Insurance offering that seemed like it came at a high cost if you really need it I've never been breached before um I'll get it when I when I need it but exactly to your point it's the win and not the if so what we're finding and also working with a nice ecosystem of Partners as well from anywhere from Akamai to cloudflare to BT it's how do we help ensure that there is the security as Hannah mentioned that we're delivering the right data access to the right people and permissions you know we're able to help meet multitude of compliance and regulations obviously health care and other regulated space as well we look to make sure that from our side of the house from the infrastructure that we have the right building blocks to help them Reach those compliance needs obviously it's a mutual partnership in maintaining that compliance and that we're able to provide guidance and best practices on to make sure that the data is living in a secure place that the people that need access to it get it when they when they need it and monitor those permissions and back to your complexity comment so more and more complex as we are a global global provider so when you start to talk to our teams in the UK and our our you know clients there specializing um kind of that Sovereign Cloud mentality of hey we need to have um we need to have a cloud that is built for the specific needs that reside within Healthcare by region so it's not just even I mean you know we're we're homegrown out of San Antonio Texas so like we know the U.S and have spent time here but we've been Global for many years so we just get down into the into the nitty-gritty to customize what's needed within each region well Hannah is that part of the Rackspace value proposition at large moving forward because frankly look if I if I want if I want something generic I can I can swipe credit card and and fire up some Services sure um moving forward this is something that is going to more characterize the Rackspace experience and I and I understand that the hesitancy to say hey it's complicated it's like I don't want to hear that I want to hear that it's easy it's like well okay we'll make it easy for you yes but it's still complicated is that okay that's the honest that's that's the honest yeah that's why you need help right that's why we need to talk about that because people people have a legitimate question why Rackspace yep and we don't I don't want to put you on the spot but no yeah but why why Rackspace you've talked a little bit about it already but kind of encapsulate it oh gosh so good good question why Rackspace it's because you can stand up [Laughter] well you can you do it there's many different options out there um and if I had a PowerPoint slide I'd show you this like lovely web of options of directions that you could go and what is Rackspace value it's that we come in and simplify it because we've had experience with this this same use case whatever somebody is bringing forward to us is typically something we've dealt with at numerous times and so we're repeating and speeding up the ability to simplify the complex and to deliver something more simplified well it may be complex within us and we're like working to get it done the outcome that we're delivering is is faster it's less expensive than dedicating all the resources yourself to do it and go invest in all of that that we've already built up and then we're able to deliver it in a more simplified manner it's like the duck analogy the feet below the water yes exactly and a lot of expertise as well yes a lot talk a little bit about the solution that that Dell VMware Rackspace are delivering to customers sure so when we think about um Healthcare clouds or Cloud specific to the healthcare industry you know there's some major players within that space that you think epic we'll just use them as an example this can play out with others but we are building out a custom or we have a custom clouds able to host epic and then provide services up through the Epic help application through partnership so that is broadening the the market for us in the sense that we can tailor what the what that end and with that healthcare provider needs uh do they do they have the expertise to manage the application okay you do that and then we will build out a custom fit Cloud for that application oh and you need all the adjacent things that come with it too so then we have reference architecture you know built out already to to tailor to whatever all those other 40 80 90 hundreds of applications that need to come with that and then and then you start to think about Imaging platforms so we have Imaging platforms available for those specific needs whether it's MRIs and things like that and then the long-term retention that's needed with that so all of these pieces that build out a healthcare ecosystem and those needs we've built those we've built those out and provide those two to our clients yesterday VMware was talking about Cloud chaos yes and and it's true you talk about the complexity and Dave talks about it too like acknowledging yes this is a very complex thing to do yeah there's just so many moving parts so many Dynamics so many people involved or lack thereof people they they then talked about kind of this this the goal of getting customers from cloud chaos to Cloud smart how does that message resonate with Rackspace and how are you helping customers get from simplifying the chaos to eventually get to that cloud smart goal so a lot of it I I believe is with the power of our alliances and I was talking about this earlier we really believe in creating those powerful ecosystems and Jay McBain former for Forester analyst talks about you know the people are going to come ahead really are serve as that orchestration layer of bringing everybody together so if you look at all of that cloud chaos and all of the different logos and the webs and which decisions to make you know the ones that can help simplify that bring it all together like we're going to need a little bit of this like baking a cake in some ways we're going to need a little bit of sugar we'll need this technology this technology and whoever is able to put it together in a clean and seamless way and as Hannah said you know we have specific use cases in different verticals Healthcare specifically and talking from the Imaging and the Epic helping them get hospitals and different you know smaller clinics get to the edge so we have all of the building blocks to get them what they need and we can't do that without Partners but we help simplify those outcomes for those customers yep so there's where they're Cloud smart so then they're like I want I want to be agile I want to work on my cost I want to be able to leverage a multi-cloud fashion because some things may may inherently need to be on Azure some things we inherently need to be on VMware how do we make them feel like they still have that modernized platform and Technology but still give the secure and access that they need right yeah we like to think of it as are you multi-cloud by accident or multi-cloud by Design and help you get to that multi-cloud by Design and leveraging the right yeah the right tools the right places and Dell was talking about that just that at Dell Technologies world just a couple months ago that most most organizations are multi-cloud by default not designed are you seeing any customers that are are able or how are you able to help customers go from that we're here by default for whatever reason acquisition growth.oit line of business and go from that default to a more strategic multi-cloud approach yes it takes planning and commitment you know you really need the business leaders and the technical leaders bought in and saying this is what I'm gonna do because it is a journey because exactly right M A is like inherited four different tools you have databases that kind of look similar but they're a little bit different but they serve four different things so at Rackspace we're able to help assess and we sit down with their teams we have very amazing rock star expertise that will come in and sit with the customers and say what are we trying to drive for it let's get a good assessment of the landscape and let's figure out what are you trying to get towards in your journey and looking at what's the best fit for that application from where it is now to where it is where it wants to be because we saw a lot of customers move to the cloud very quickly you know they went Cloud native very fast some of it made sense retailers who had the spikiness that completely made sense we had some customers though that we've seen move certain workloads they've been in the public Cloud now for a couple years but it was a static website it doesn't make as much sense anymore for certain things so we're able to help navigate all of those choices for them so it's interesting you just you just said something sort of offhand about having experts having them come in so if I am a customer and I have some outcome I want to achieve yes the people that I'm going to be talking to from Rackspace or from Rackspace and the people from Rackspace who are going to be working with the actual people who are deploying infrastructure are also Rackspace people so the interesting contrast there between other circumstances oftentimes is you may have a Global Systems integrator with smart people representing what a cloud provider is doing the perception if they try to make people perceive that okay everybody is working in lockstep but often there are disconnects between what the real capabilities are and what's being advertised so is that I mean I I know it's like a leading question it's like softball get your bats out but I mean isn't that an advantage you've got a single you know the saying used to be uh one throat to show now it's one back to pack because it's kind of Contour friendly yeah yeah but talk about that is that a real Advantage it does it really helps us because again this is our our this is our expertise this is where we where we live we're really close to the infrastructure we're great at the advisement on it we can help with those ongoing and day two management and Opera in operations and what it feels like to grow and scale so we lay this out cleanly and and clearly as possible if this is where we're really good we can we can help you in these areas but we do work with system integrators as well and part of our partner Community because they're working on sometimes the bigger overall Transformations and then we're staying look we understand this multi-cloud but it helps us because in the end we're doing that end to end for for them customer knows this is Rackspace and on hand and we we really strive to be very transparent in what it is that we want to drive and outcomes so sometimes at the time where it's like we're gonna talk about a certain new technology Dell might bring some of their Architects to the table we will say here is Dell with us we're doing that actively in the healthcare space today and it's all coming together but you know at the end of the day this is what Rackspace is going to drive and deliver from an end to end and we tap those people when needed so you don't have to worry about picking up the phone to call Dell or VMware so if I had worded the hard-hitting journalist question the right way it would have elicited the same responses that yeah yeah it drives accountability at the end of the day because what we advised on what we said now we got to go deliver yeah and it's it's all the same the same organization driving accountability so from a customer perspective they're engaging Rackspace who will then bring in dell and VMware as needed as we find the solution exactly we have all of the certification I mean the team the team is great on getting all of the certs because we're getting to handling all of the level one level two level three business they know who to call they have their dedicated account teams they have engagement managers that help them Drive what those bigger conversations are and they don't have to worry about the experts because we either have it on hand or we'll pull them in as needed if it's the bat phone we need to call awesome ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me today talking about what Rackspace is up to in the partner ecosystem space and specifically what you're doing to help Healthcare organizations transform and modernize we appreciate your insights and your thoughts yeah thank you for having us thank you pleasure for our guests and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022 we'll be back after a short break foreign [Music]

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 22, brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. >> Valencia, Spain, a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Towns along with Paul Gillon, Senior Editor Enterprise Architecture for Silicon Angle. Welcome Paul. >> Thank you Keith, pleasure to work with you. >> We're going to have some amazing people this week. I think I saw stat this morning, 65% of the attendees, 7,500 folks. First time KubeCon attendees, is this your first conference? >> It is my first KubeCon and it is amazing to see how many people are here and to think of just a couple of years ago, three years ago, we were still talking about, what the Cloud was, what the Cloud was going to do and how we were going to integrate multiple Clouds. And now we have this whole new framework for computing that is just rifled out of nowhere. And as we can see by the number of people who are here this has become the dominant trend in Enterprise Architecture right now how to adopt Kubernetes and containers, build microservices based applications, and really get to that transparent Cloud that has been so elusive. >> It has been elusive. And we are seeing vendors from startups with just a few dozen people, to some of the traditional players we see in the enterprise space with 1000s of employees looking to capture kind of lightning in a bottle so to speak, this elusive concept of multicloud. >> And what we're seeing here is very typical of an early stage conference. I've seen many times over the years where the floor is really dominated by companies, frankly, I've never heard of that. The many of them are only two or three years old, you don't see the big dominant computing players with the presence here that these smaller companies have. That's very typical. We saw that in the PC age, we saw it in the early days of Unix and it's happening again. And what will happen over time is that a lot of these companies will be acquired, there'll be some consolidation. And the nature of this show will change, I think dramatically over the next couple or three years but there is an excitement and an energy in this auditorium today that is really a lot of fun and very reminiscent of other new technologies just as they requested. >> Well, speaking of new technologies, we have Dave Cole, CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. >> That's right. >> Chief Marketing Officer of Spectrum Cloud. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> So let's talk about this big ecosystem, Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> Solve problem? >> Well the dream is... Well, first of all applications are really the lifeblood of a company, whether it's our phone or whether it's a big company trying to connect with its customers about applications. And so the whole idea today is how do I build these applications to build that tight relationship with my customers? And how do I reinvent these applications rapidly in along comes containerization which helps you innovate more quickly? And certainly a dominant technology there is Kubernetes. And the question is, how do you get Kubernetes to help you build applications that can be born anywhere and live anywhere and take advantage of the places that it's running? Because everywhere has pluses and minuses. >> So you know what, the promise of Kubernetes from when I first read about it years ago is, runs on my laptop? >> Yeah. >> I can push it to any Cloud, any platforms. >> That's right, that's right. >> Where's the gap? Where are we in that phase? Like talk to me about scale? Is it that simple? >> Well, that is actually the problem is that today, while the technology is the dominant containerization technology in orchestration technology, it really still takes a power user, it really hasn't been very approachable to the masses. And so was these very expensive highly skilled resources that sit in a dark corner that have focused on Kubernetes, but that now is trying to evolve to make it more accessible to the masses. It's not about sort of hand wiring together, what is a typical 20 layer stack, to really manage Kubernetes and then have your engineers manually can reconfigure it and make sure everything works together. Now it's about how do I create these stacks, make it easy to deploy and manage at scale? So we've gone from sort of DIY Developer Centric to all right, now how do I manage this at scale? >> Now this is a point that is important, I think is often overlooked. This is not just about Kubernetes. This is about a whole stack of Cloud Native Technologies. And you who is going to integrate that all that stuff, piece that stuff together? Obviously, you have a role in that. But in the enterprise, what is the awareness level of how complex this stack is and how difficult it is to assemble? >> We see a recognition of that we've had developers working on Kubernetes and applications, but now when we say, how do we weave it into our production environments? How do we ensure things like scalability and governance? How do we have this sort of interesting mix of innovation, flexibility, but with control? And that's sort of an interesting combination where you want developers to be able to run fast and use the latest tools, but you need to create these guardrails to deploy it at scale. >> So where do the developers fit in that operation stack then? Is Kubernetes an AIOps or an ops task or is it sort of a shared task across the development spectrum? >> Well, I think there's a desire to allow application developers to just focus on the application and have a Kubernetes related technology that ensures that all of the infrastructure and related application services are just there to support them. And because the typical stack from the operating system to the application can be up to 20 different layers, components, you just want all those components to work together, you don't want application developers to worry about those things. And the latest technologies like Spectra Cloud there's others are making that easy application engineers focus on their apps, all of the infrastructure and the services are taken care of. And those apps can then live natively on any environment. >> So help paint this picture for us. I get AKS, EKS, Anthos, all of these distributions OpenShift, the Tanzu, where's Spectra Cloud helping me to kind of cobble together all these different distros, I thought distro was the thing just like Linux has different distros, Randy said different distros. >> That actually is the irony, is that sort of the age of debating the distros largely is over. There are a lot of distros and if you look at them there are largely shades of gray in being different from each other. But the Kubernetes distribution is just one element of like 20 elements that all have to work together. So right now what's happening is that it's not about the distribution it's now how do I again, sorry to repeat myself, but move this into scale? How do I move it into deploy at scale to be able to manage ongoing at scale to be able to innovate at-scale, to allow engineers as I said, use the coolest tools but still have technical guardrails that the enterprise knows, they'll be in control of. >> What does at-scale mean to the enterprise customers you're talking to now? What do they mean when they say that? >> Well, I think it's interesting because we think scale's different because we've all been in the industry and it's frankly, sort of boring old word. But today it means different things, like how do I automate the deployment at-scale? How do I be able to make it really easy to provision resources for applications on any environment, from either a virtualized or bare metal data center, Cloud, or today Edge is really big, where people are trying to push applications out to be closer to the source of the data. And so you want to be able to deploy it-scale, you want to manage at-scale, you want to make it easy to, as I said earlier, allow application developers to build their applications, but ITOps wants the ability to ensure security and governance and all of that. And then finally innovate at-scale. If you look at this show, it's interesting, three years ago when we started Spectra Cloud, there are about 1400 businesses or technologies in the Kubernetes ecosystem, today there's over 1800 and all of these technologies made up of open source and commercial all version in a different rates, it becomes an insurmountable problem, unless you can set those guardrails sort of that balance between flexibility, control, let developers access the technologies. But again, manage it as a part of your normal processes of a scaled operation. >> So Dave, I'm a little challenged here, because I'm hearing two where I typically consider conflicting terms. Flexibility, control. >> Yes. >> In order to achieve control, I need complexity, in order to choose flexibility, I need t-shirt, one t-shirt fits all and I get simplicity. How can I get both that just doesn't compute. >> Well, that's the opportunity and the challenge at the same time. So you're right. So developers want choice, good developers want the ability to choose the latest technology so they can innovate rapidly. And yet ITOps, wants to be able to make sure that there are guardrails. And so with some of today's technologies, like Spectra Cloud, it is, you have the ability to get both. We actually worked with dimensional research, and we sponsor an annual state of Kubernetes survey. We found this last summer, that two out of three IT executives said, you could not have both flexibility and control together, but in fact they want it. And so it is this interesting balance, how do I give engineers the ability to get anything they want, but ITOps the ability to establish control. And that's why Kubernetes is really at its next inflection point. Whereas I mentioned, it's not debates about the distro or DIY projects. It's not big incumbents creating siloed Kubernetes solutions, but in fact it's about allowing all these technologies to work together and be able to establish these controls. And that's really where the industry is today. >> Enterprise , enterprise CIOs, do not typically like to take chances. Now we were talking about the growth in the market that you described from 1400, 1800 vendors, most of these companies, very small startups, our enterprises are you seeing them willing to take a leap with these unproven companies? Or are they holding back and waiting for the IBMs, the HPS, the MicrosoftS to come in with the VMwares with whatever they solution they have? >> I think so. I mean, we sell to the global 2000. We had yesterday, as a part of Edge day here at the event, we had GE Healthcare as one of our customers telling their story, and they're a market share leader in medical imaging equipment, X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans, and they're starting to treat those as Edge devices. And so here is a very large established company, a leader in their industry, working with people like Spectra Cloud, realizing that Kubernetes is interesting technology. The Edge is an interesting thought but how do I marry the two together? So we are seeing large corporations seeing so much of an opportunity that they're working with the smaller companies, the latest technology. >> So let's talk about the Edge a little, you kind of opened it up there. How should customers think about the Edge versus the Cloud Data Center or even bare metal? >> Actually it's a... Well bare metal is fairly easy is that many people are looking to reduce some of the overhead or inefficiencies of the virtualized environment. But we've had really sort of parallel little white tornadoes, we've had bare metal as infrastructure that's been developing, and then we've had orchestration developing but they haven't really come together very well. Lately, we're finally starting to see that come together. Spectra Cloud contributed to open source a metal as a service technology that finally brings these two worlds together, making bare metal much more approachable to the enterprise. Edge is interesting, because it seems pretty obvious, you want to push your application out closer to your source of data, whether it's AI inferencing, or IoT or anything like that, you don't want to worry about intermittent connectivity or latency or anything like that. But people have wanted to be able to treat the Edge as if it's almost like a Cloud, where all I worry about is the app. So really, the Edge to us is just the next extension in a multi-Cloud sort of motif where I want these Edge devices to require low IT resources, to automate the provisioning, automate the ongoing version management, patch management, really act like a Cloud. And we're seeing this as very popular now. And I just used the GE Healthcare example of that, imagine a CAT scan machine, I'm making this part up in China and that's just an Edge device and it's doing medical imagery which is very intense in terms of data, you want to be able to process it quickly and accurately, as close to the endpoint, the healthcare provider is possible. >> So let's talk about that in some level of details, we think about kind of Edge and these fixed devices such as imaging device, are we putting agents on there, or we looking at something talking back to the Cloud? Where does special Cloud inject and help make that simple, that problem of just having dispersed endpoints all over the world simpler? >> Sure. Well we announced our Edge Kubernetes, Edge solution at a big medical conference called HIMMS, months ago. And what we allow you to do is we allow the application engineers to develop their application, and then you can de you can design this declarative model this cluster API, but beyond Cluster profile which determines which additional application services you need and the Edge device, all the person has to do with the endpoint is plug in the power, plug in the communications, it registers the Edge device, it automates the deployment of the full stack and then it does the ongoing versioning and patch management, sort of a self-driving Edge device running Kubernetes. And we make it just very easy. No IT resources required at the endpoint, no expensive field engineering resources to go to these endpoints twice a year to apply new patches and things like that, all automated. >> But there's so many different types of Edge devices with different capabilities, different operating systems, some have no operating system. I mean that seems, like a much more complex environment, just calling it the Edge is simple, but what you're really talking about is 1000s of different devices, that you have to run your applications on how are you dealing with that? >> So one of the ways is that we're really unbiased. In other words, we're OS and distro agnostic. So we don't want to debate about which distribution you like, we don't want to debate about which OS you want to use. The truth is, you're right. There's different environments and different choices that you'll want to make. And so the key is, how do you incorporate those and also recognize everything beyond those, OS and Kubernetes and all of that and manage that full stack. So that's what we do, is we allow you to choose which tools you want to use and let it be deployed and managed on any environment. >> And who's... >> So... >> I'm sorry Keith, who's responsible for making Kubernetes run on the Edge device. >> We do. We provision the entire stack. I mean, of course the company does using our product, but we provision the entire Kubernetes infrastructure stack, all the application services and the application itself on that device. >> So I would love to dig into like where pods happen and all that. But, provisioning is getting to the point that is a solve problem. Day two. >> Yes. >> Like you just mentioned HIMMS, highly regulated environments. How does Spectra Cloud helping with configuration management, change control, audit, compliance, et cetera, the hard stuff. >> Yep. And one of the things we do, you bring up a good point is we manage the full life cycle from day zero, which is sort of create, deploy, all the way to day two, which is about access control, security, it's about ongoing versioning in a patch management. It's all of that built into the platform. But you're right, like the medical industry has a lot of regulations. And so you need to be able to make sure that everything works, it's always up to the latest level have the highest level of security. And so all that's built into the platform. It's not just a fire and forget it really is about that full life cycle of deploying, managing on an ongoing basis. >> Well, Dave, I'd love to go into a great deal of detail with you about kind of this day two ops and I think we'll be covering a lot more of that topic, Paul, throughout the week, as we talk about just as we've gotten past, how do I deploy Kubernetes pod, to how do I actually operate IT? >> Absolutely, absolutely. The devil is in the details as they say. >> Well, and also too, you have to recognize that the Edge has some very unique requirements, you want very small form factors, typically, you want low IT resources, it has to be sort of zero touch or low touch because if you're a large food provider with 20,000 store locations, you don't want to send out field engineers two or three times a year to update them. So it really is an interesting beast and we have some exciting technology and people like GE are using that. >> Well, Dave, thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE, you're now KubeCon, you've not been on before? >> I have actually, yes its... But I always enjoy it. >> Great conversation. From Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin and Dave Vale are live in Las Vegas. We are covering our third day of covering Dell technologies world 2022. The first live in-person event since 2019. It's been great to be here. We've had a lot of great conversations about all the announcements that Dell has made in the last couple of days. And we're gonna unpack a little bit more of that. Now. One of our alumni is back with us. Shannon champion joins us again, vice president product marketing at Dell technologies, and she's a company by Pete Robinson, the director of infrastructure engineering at Salesforce. Welcome. Thank >>You. >>So Shannon, you had a big announcement yesterday. I run a lot of new software innovations. Did >>You hear about that? I heard a little something >>About that. Unpack that for us. >>Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it's so exciting to be here in person and have such a big moment across our storage portfolio, to see that on the big stage, the boom to announce major updates across power store, PowerMax and power flex all together, just a ton of innovation across the storage portfolio. And you probably also heard a ton of focus on our software driven innovation across those products, because our goal is really to deliver a continuously modern storage experience. That's what our customers are asking us for that cloud experience. Let's take the most Val get the most value from data no matter where it lives. That's on premises in the public clouds or at the edge. And that's what we, uh, unveil. That's what we're releasing. And that's what we're excited to talk about. >>Now, Pete, you, Salesforce is a long time Dell customer, but you're also its largest PowerMax customer. The biggest in the world. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing with PowerMax and your experience. >>Yeah, so, um, for Salesforce, trust is our number one value and that carries over into the infrastructure that we develop, we test and, and we roll out and Parex has been a key part of that. Um, we really like the, um, the technology in terms of availability, reliability, um, performance. And it, it has allowed us to, you know, continue to grow our customers, uh, continue needs for more and more data. >>So what was kind of eye popping to me was the emphasis on security. Not that you've not always emphasized security, but maybe Shannon, you could do a rundown of, yeah. Maybe not all the features, but give us the high level. And at Pete, I, I wonder how I, if you could comment on how, how you think about that as a practitioner, but please give us that. >>Sure. Yeah. So, you know, PowerMax has been leading for, uh, a long time in its space and we're continuing to lean into that and continue to lead in that space. And we're proud to say PowerMax is the world's most secure mission, critical storage platform. And the reason we can say that is because it really is designed for comprehensive cyber resiliency. It's designed with a zero trust security architecture. And in this particular release, there's 19 different security features really embedded in there. So I'm not gonna unpack all 19, but a couple, um, examples, right? So multifactor authentication also continuous ransomware anomaly detection, a leveraging cloud IQ, which is, uh, huge. Um, and last but not least, um, we have the industry's most granular cyber recovery at scale PowerMax can do up to 65 million imutable snapshots per array. So just, uh, and that's 30 times more than our next nearest competitor. So, you know, really when you're talking about recovery point objectives, power max can't be beat. >>So what does that mean to you, Pete? >>Uh, well, it's it's same thing that I was mentioning earlier about that's a trust factor. Uh, security is a big, a big part of that. You know, Salesforce invests heavily into the securing our customer data because it really is the, the core foundation of our success and our customers trust us with their data. And if we, if we were to fail at that, you know, we would lose that trust. And that's simply not, it's not an option. >>Let's talk about that trust for a minute. We know we've heard a lot about trust this week from Michael Dell. Talk to us about trust, your trust, Salesforce's trust and Dell technologies. You've been using them a long time, but cultural alignment yeah. Seems to be pretty spot on. >>I, I would agree. Um, you know, both companies have a customer first mentality, uh, you know, we, we succeed if the customer succeeds and we see that going back and forth in that partnership. So Dell is successful when Salesforce is successful and vice versa. So, um, when we've it's and it goes beyond just the initial, you know, the initial purchase of, of hardware or software, you know, how you operate it, how you manage it, um, how you continue to develop together. You know, our, you know, we work closely with the Dell engineering teams and we've, we've worked closely in development of the new, new PowerMax lines to where it's actually able to help us build our, our business. And, and again, you know, continue to help Dell in the process. So you've >>Got visibility on the new, a lot of these new features you're playing around with them. What I, I, I obviously started with security cuz that's on top of everybody's mind, but what are the things are important to you as a customer? And how do these features the new features kind of map into that? Maybe you could talk about your experience with the, I think you're in beta, maybe with these features. Maybe you could talk about that. >>Yeah. Um, probably the, the biggest thing that we're seeing right now, other than OB the obvious enhancements in hardware, which, which we love, uh, you know, better performance, better scalability, better, and a better density. Um, but also the, some of the software functionality that Dells starting to roll out, you know, we've, we've, we've uh, implemented cloud IQ for all of our PowerMax systems and it's the same thing. We continue to, um, find features that we would like. And we've actually, you know, worked closely with the cloud IQ team. And within a matter of weeks or months, those features are popping up in cloud IQ that we can then continue to, to develop and, and use. >>Yeah. I think trust goes both ways in our partnership, right? So, you know, Salesforce can trust Dell to deliver the, you know, the products they need to deliver their business outcomes, but we also have a relationship to where we can trust that Salesforce is gonna really help us develop the next generation product that's gonna, you know, really deliver the most value. Yeah. >>Can you share some business outcomes that you've achieved so far leveraging power max and how it's really enabled, maybe it's your organization's productivity perspective, but what are some of those outcomes that you've achieved so far? >>Um, there there's so many to, to, to choose from, but I would say the, probably the biggest thing that we've seen is a as we roll out new infrastructure, we have various generations that we deploy. Um, when we went to the new PowerMax, um, initially we were concerned about whether our storage infrastructure could keep up with the new compute, uh, systems that we were rolling out. And when we went through and began testing it, we came to realize that the, the performance improvements alone, that we were seeing were able to keep up with the compute demand, making that transition from the older VMAX platforms to the PMAX practically seamless and able to just deploy the new SKUs as, as they came out. >>Talk about the portfolio that you apply to PowerMax. I mean, it's the highest of the highest end mission critical the toughest workloads in the planet. Salesforce has made a lot of acquisitions. Yeah. Um, do you throw everything at PowerMax? Are you, are you selective? What's your strategy there? So >>It's, it's selective. In other words that there's no square peg that meets every need, um, you know, acquisitions take some time to, to ingest, um, you know, some run into cloud, some run in first, in, in first party. Um, but so we, we try to take a very, very intentional approach to where we deploy that technology. >>So 10 years ago, someone in your position, or maybe someone who works for you was probably do spent a lot of time managing lawns and tuning performance. And how has that changed? >>We don't do that. <laugh> we? >>We can, right. So what do you do with right. Talk, talk more double click on that. So how talk about how that transition occurred from really non-productive activities, managing storage boxes. Yeah. And, and where you are today, what are you doing with those resources? >>It, it, it all comes outta automation. Like, you know, the, you know, hardware is hardware to a point, um, but you reach a point where the, the manageability scale just goes exponential and, and we're way, well past that. And the only way we've been able to meet that, meet that need is to, to automate and really develop our operations, to be able to not just manage at a lung level or even at the system level, but manage at the data center level at the geographical, you know, location level and then being able to, to manage from there. >>Okay. Really stupid question. But I'm gonna ask it cause I wanna hear your answer. True. Why can't you just take a software defined storage platform and just run everything on that? Why do you need all these different platforms and why do you gotta spend all this money on PowerMax? Why, why can't you just do >>That? That's the million dollar question. Uh, I, I ask that all the time. <laugh>, um, I think software defined is it's on its way. Um, it's come a long way just in the last decade. Yeah. Um, but in terms of supporting what I consider mission critical, large scale, uh, applications, it's, it's not, it's just simply not on par just yet with what we do with PowerMax, for example. >>And that's exactly how we position it in our portfolio. Right? So PowerMax runs on 95% of the fortune 100 companies, top 20 healthcare companies, top 10 financial services companies in the world. So it's really mission critical high end has all of the enterprise level features and capabilities to really have that availability. That's so important to a lot of companies like Salesforce and, and Pete's right, you know, software define is on its way and it provides a lot of agility there. But at the end of the day for mission critical storage, it's all about PowerMax. >>I wonder if we're ever gonna get to, I mean, you, you, you, it was interesting answer cuz you kind of, I inferred from your that you're hopeful and even optimistic that someday will get to parody. But I wonder because you can't be just close enough. It's almost, you have to be. >>I think, I think the key answer to that is it's it's the software flying gets you halfway there. The other side of the coin is the application ecosystem has to change to be able to solve that other, other side of it. Cuz if you simply simply take an application that runs on a PowerMax and try to run it, just forklift it over to a software defined. You're not gonna have very much luck. >>Recovery has to be moved up to stack >>Operations recovery, the whole, whole whole works. >>Jenny, can you comment on how customers like Salesforce? Like what's your process for involving them in testing in roadmap and in that direction, strategic direction that you guys are going? Great >>Question. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, customer feedback is huge. You've heard it. I'm sure this is not new right product development and engineering. We love to hear from our customers. And there's multiple ways you heard about beta testing, which we're really fortunate that Salesforce can help us provide that feedback for our new releases. But we have user groups, we have forums. We, we hear directly from our sales teams, our, you know, our customers, aren't shy, they're willing to give us their feedback. And at the end of the day, we take that feedback and make sure that we're prioritizing the right things in our product management and engineering teams so that we're delivering the things that matter. Most first, >>We've heard a lot of that this week. So I would agree guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Salesforce. What you doing with PowerMax? All the stuff that you announced yesterday, alone. Hopefully you get to go home and get a little bit of rest. >>Yes. >>I'm sure that there's, there's never a dull moment. Never. Can't wait guys. Great to have you. >>Thank you. You guys, >>For our guests on Dave Volante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the queue. We are live day three of our coverage of Dell technologies world 2022, Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of the show.

(contemplative upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a great topic on expanding capabilities for urgent computing. Dan Stanzione, he's Executive Director of TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Rajesh Pohani, VP of PowerEdge, HPC Core Compute at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John, good to be here. >> Rajesh, you got a lot of computing in PowerEdge, HPC, Core Computing. I mean, I get a sense that you love compute, so we'll jump right into it. And of course, I got to love TACC, Texas Advanced Computing Center. I can imagine a lot of stuff going on there. Let's start with TACC. What is the Texas Advanced Computing Center? Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, we're part of the University of Texas at Austin here, and we build large-scale supercomputers, data systems, AI systems, to support open science research. And we're mainly funded by the National Science Foundation, so we support research projects in all fields of science, all around the country and around the world. Actually, several thousand projects at the moment. >> But tied to the university, got a lot of gear, got a lot of compute, got a lot of cool stuff going on. What's the coolest thing you got going on right now? >> Well, for me, it's always the next machine, but I think science-wise, it's the machines we have. We just finished deploying Lonestar6, which is our latest supercomputer, in conjunction with Dell. A little over 600 nodes of those PowerEdge servers that Rajesh builds for us. Which makes more than 20,000 that we've had here over the years, of those boxes. But that one just went into production. We're designing new systems for a few years from now, where we'll be even larger. Our Frontera system was top five in the world two years ago, just fell out of the top 10. So we've got to fix that and build the new top-10 system sometime soon. We always have a ton going on in large-scale computing. >> Well, I want to get to the Lonestar6 in a minute, on the next talk track, but... What are some of the areas that you guys are working on that are making an impact? Take us through, and we talked before we came on camera about, obviously, the academic affiliation, but also there's a real societal impact of the work you're doing. What are some of the key areas that the TACC is making an impact? >> So there's really a huge range from new microprocessors, new materials design, photovoltaics, climate modeling, basic science and astrophysics, and quantum mechanics, and things like that. But I think the nearest-term impacts that people see are what we call urgent computing, which is one of the drivers around Lonestar and some other recent expansions that we've done. And that's things like, there's a hurricane coming, exactly where is it going to land? Can we refine the area where there's going to be either high winds or storm surge? Can we assess the damage from digital imagery afterwards? Can we direct first responders in the optimal routes? Similarly for earthquakes, and a lot recently, as you might imagine, around COVID. In 2020, we moved almost a third of our resources to doing COVID work, full-time. >> Rajesh, I want to get your thoughts on this, because Dave Vellante and I have been talking about this on theCUBE recently, a lot. Obviously, people see what cloud's, going on with the cloud technology, but compute and on-premises, private cloud's been growing. If you look at the hyperscale on-premises and the edge, if you include that in, you're seeing a lot more user consumption on-premises, and now, with 5G, you got edge, you mentioned first responders, Dan. This is now pointing to a new architectural shift. As the VP of PowerEdge and HPC and Core Compute, you got to look at this and go, "Hmm." If Compute's going to be everywhere, and in locations, you got to have that compute. How does that all work together? And how do you do advanced computing, when you have these urgent needs, as well as real-time in a new architecture? >> Yeah, John, I mean, it's a pretty interesting time when you think about some of the changing dynamics and how customers are utilizing Compute in the compute needs in the industry. Seeing a couple of big trends. One, the distribution of Compute outside of the data center, 5G is really accelerating that, and then you're generating so much data, whether what you do with it, the insights that come out of it, that we're seeing more and more push to AI, ML, inside the data center. Dan mentioned what he's doing at TACC with computational analysis and some of the work that they're doing. So what you're seeing is, now, this push that data in the data center and what you do with it, while data is being created out at the edge. And it's actually this interesting dichotomy that we're beginning to see. Dan mentioned some of the work that they're doing in medical and on COVID research. Even at Dell, we're making cycles available for COVID research using our Zenith cluster, that's located in our HPC and AI Innovation Lab. And we continue to partner with organizations like TACC and others on research activities to continue to learn about the virus, how it mutates, and then how you treat it. So if you think about all the things, and data that's getting created, you're seeing that distribution and it's really leading to some really cool innovations going forward. >> Yeah, I want to get to that COVID research, but first, you mentioned a few words I want to get out there. You mentioned Lonestar6. Okay, so first, what is Lonestar6, then we'll get into the system aspect of it. Take us through what that definition is, what is Lonestar6? >> Well, as Dan mentioned, Lonestar6 is a Dell technology system that we developed with TACC, it's located at the University of Texas at Austin. It consists of more than 800 Dell PowerEdge 6525 servers that are powered with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors. And just to give you an example of the scale of this cluster, it could perform roughly three quadrillion operations per second. That's three petaFLOPS, and to match what Lonestar6 can compute in one second, a person would have to do one calculation every second for a hundred million years. So it's quite a good-size system, and quite a powerful one as well. >> Dan, what's the role that the system plays, you've got petaFLOPS, what, three petaFLOPS, you mentioned? That's a lot of FLOPS! So obviously urgent computing, what's cranking through the system there? Take us through, what's it like? >> Sure, well, there there's a mix of workloads on it, and on all our systems. So there's the urgent computing work, right? Fast turnaround, near real-time, whether it's COVID research, or doing... Project now where we bring in MRI data and are doing sort of patient-specific dosing for radiation treatments and chemotherapy, tailored to your tumor, instead of just the sort of general for people your size. That all requires sort of real-time turnaround. There's a lot AI research going on now, we're incorporating AI in traditional science and engineering research. And that uses an awful lot of data, but also consumes a huge amount of cycles in training those models. And then there's all of our traditional, simulation-based workloads and materials and digital twins for aircraft and aircraft design, and more efficient combustion in more efficient photovoltaic materials, or photovoltaic materials without using as much lead, and things like that. And I'm sure I'm missing dozens of other topics, 'cause, like I said, that one really runs every field of science. We've really focused the Lonestar line of systems, and this is obviously the sixth one we built, around our sort of Texas-centric users. It's the UT Austin users, and then with contributions from Texas A&M , and Texas Tech and the University of Texas system, MD Anderson Healthcare Center, the University of North Texas. So users all around the state, and every research problem that you might imagine, those are into. We're just ramping up a project in disaster information systems, that's looking at the probabilities of flooding in coastal Texas and doing... Can we make building code changes to mitigate impact? Do we have to change the standard foundation heights for new construction, to mitigate the increasing storm surges from these sort of slow storms that sit there and rain, like hurricanes didn't used to, but seem to be doing more and more. All those problems will run on Lonestar, and on all the systems to come, yeah. >> It's interesting, you mentioned urgent computing, I love that term because it could be an event, it could be some slow kind of brewing event like that rain example you mentioned. It could also be, obviously, with the healthcare, and you mentioned COVID earlier. These are urgent, societal challenges, and having that available, the processing capability, the compute, the data. You mentioned digital twins. I can imagine all this new goodness coming from that. Compare that, where we were 10 years ago. I mean, just from a mind-blowing standpoint, you have, have come so far, take us through, try to give a context to the level of where we are now, to do this kind of work, and where we were years ago. Can you give us a feel for that? >> Sure, there's a lot of ways to look at that, and how the technology's changed, how we operate around those things, and then sort of what our capabilities are. I think one of the big, first, urgent computing things for us, where we sort of realized we had to adapt to this model of computing was about 15 years ago with the big BP Gulf Oil spill. And suddenly, we were dumping thousands of processors of load to figure out where that oil spill was going to go, and how to do mitigation, and what the potential impacts were, and where you need to put your containment, and things like that. And it was, well, at that point we thought of it as sort of a rare event. There was another one, that I think was the first real urgent computing one, where the space shuttle was in orbit, and they knew something had hit it during takeoff. And we were modeling, along with NASA and a bunch of supercomputers around the world, the heat shield and could they make reentry safely? You have until they come back to get that problem done, you don't have months or years to really investigate that. And so, what we've sort of learned through some of those, the Japanese tsunami was another one, there have been so many over the years, is that one, these sort of disasters are all the time, right? One thing or another, right? If we're not doing hurricanes, we're doing wildfires and drought threat, if it's not COVID. We got good and ready for COVID through SARS and through the swine flu and through HIV work, and things like that. So it's that we can do the computing very fast, but you need to know how to do the work, right? So we've spent a lot of time, not only being able to deliver the computing quickly, but having the data in place, and having the code in place, and having people who know the methods who know how to use big computers, right? That's been a lot of what the COVID Consortium, the White House COVID Consortium, has been about over the last few years. And we're actually trying to modify that nationally into a strategic computing reserve, where we're ready to go after these problems, where we've run drills, right? And if there's a, there's a train that derails, and there's a chemical spill, and it's near a major city, we have the tools and the data in place to do wind modeling, and we have the terrain ready to go. And all those sorts of things that you need to have to be ready. So we've really sort of changed our sort of preparedness and operational model around urgent computing in the last 10 years. Also, just the way we scheduled the system, the ability to sort of segregate between these long-running workflows for things that are really important, like we displaced a lot of cancer research to do COVID research. And cancer's still important, but it's less likely that we're going to make an impact in the next two months, right? So we have to shuffle how we operate things and then just, having all that additional capacity. And I think one of the things that's really changed in the models is our ability to use AI, to sort of adroitly steer our simulations, or prune the space when we're searching parameters for simulations. So we have the operational changes, the system changes, and then things like adding AI on the scientific side, since we have the capacity to do that kind of things now, all feed into our sort of preparedness for this kind of stuff. >> Dan, you got me sold, I want to come work with you. Come on, can I join the team over there? It sounds exciting. >> Come on down! We always need good folks around here, so. (laughs) >> Rajesh, when I- >> Almost 200 now, and we're always growing. >> Rajesh, when I hear the stories about kind of the evolution, kind of where the state of the art is, you almost see the innovation trajectory, right? The growth and the learning, adding machine learning only extends out more capabilities. But also, Dan's kind of pointing out this kind of response, rapid compute engine, that they could actually deploy with learnings, and then software, so is this a model where anyone can call up and get some cycles to, say, power an autonomous vehicle, or, hey, I want to point the machinery and the cycles at something? Is the service, do you guys see this going that direction, or... Because this sounds really, really good. >> Yeah, I mean, one thing that Dan talked about was, it's not just the compute, it's also having the right algorithms, the software, the code, right? The ability to learn. So I think when those are set up, yeah. I mean, the ability to digitally simulate in any number of industries and areas, advances the pace of innovation, reduces the time to market of whatever a customer is trying to do or research, or even vaccines or other healthcare things. If you can reduce that time through the leverage of compute on doing digital simulations, it just makes things better for society or for whatever it is that we're trying to do, in a particular industry. >> I think the idea of instrumenting stuff is here forever, and also simulations, whether it's digital twins, and doing these kinds of real-time models. Isn't really much of a guess, so I think this is a huge, historic moment. But you guys are pushing the envelope here, at University of Texas and at TACC. It's not just research, you guys got real examples. So where do you guys see this going next? I see space, big compute areas that might need some data to be cranked out. You got cybersecurity, you got healthcare, you mentioned oil spill, you got oil and gas, I mean, you got industry, you got climate change. I mean, there's so much to tackle. What's next? >> Absolutely, and I think, the appetite for computing cycles isn't going anywhere, right? And it's only going to, it's going to grow without bound, essentially. And AI, while in some ways it reduces the amount of computing we do, it's also brought this whole new domain of modeling to a bunch of fields that weren't traditionally computational, right? We used to just do engineering, physics, chemistry, were all super computational, but then we got into genome sequencers and imaging and a whole bunch of data, and that made biology computational. And with AI, now we're making things like the behavior of human society and things, computational problems, right? So there's this sort of growing amount of workload that is, in one way or another, computational, and getting bigger and bigger. So that's going to keep on growing. I think the trick is not only going to be growing the computation, but growing the software and the people along with it, because we have amazing capabilities that we can bring to bear. We don't have enough people to hit all of them at once. And so, that's probably going to be the next frontier in growing out both our AI and simulation capability, is the human element of it. >> It's interesting, when you think about society, right? If the things become too predictable, what does a democracy even look like? If you know the election's going to be over two years from now in the United States, or you look at these major, major waves >> Human companies don't know. >> of innovation, you say, "Hmm." So it's democracy, AI, maybe there's an algorithm for checking up on the AI 'cause biases... So, again, there's so many use cases that just come out of this. It's incredible. >> Yeah, and bias in AI is something that we worry about and we work on, and on task forces where we're working on that particular problem, because the AI is going to take... Is based on... Especially when you look at a deep learning model, it's 100% a product of the data you show it, right? So if you show it a biased data set, it's going to have biased results. And it's not anything intrinsic about the computer or the personality, the AI, it's just data mining, right? In essence, right, it's learning from data. And if you show it all images of one particular outcome, it's going to assume that's always the outcome, right? It just has no choice, but to see that. So how we deal with bias, how do we deal with confirmation, right? I mean, in addition, you have to recognize, if you haven't, if it gets data it's never seen before, how do you know it's not wrong, right? So there's about data quality and quality assurance and quality checking around AI. And that's where, especially in scientific research, we use what's starting to be called things like physics-informed or physics-constrained AI, where the neural net that you're using to design an aircraft still has to follow basic physical laws in its output, right? Or if you're doing some materials or astrophysics, you still have to obey conservation of mass, right? So I can't say, well, if you just apply negative mass on this other side and positive mass on this side, everything works out right for stable flight. 'Cause we can't do negative mass, right? So you have to constrain it in the real world. So this notion of how we bring in the laws of physics and constrain your AI to what's possible is also a big part of the sort of AI research going forward. >> You know, Dan, you just, to me just encapsulate the science that's still out there, that's needed. Computer science, social science, material science, kind of all converging right now. >> Yeah, engineering, yeah, >> Engineering, science, >> slipstreams, >> it's all there, >> physics, yeah, mmhmm. >> it's not just code. And, Rajesh, data. You mentioned data, the more data you have, the better the AI. We have a world what's going from silos to open control planes. We have to get to a world. This is a cultural shift we're seeing, what's your thoughts? >> Well, it is, in that, the ability to drive predictive analysis based on the data is going to drive different behaviors, right? Different social behaviors for cultural impacts. But I think the point that Dan made about bias, right, it's only as good as the code that's written and the way that the data is actually brought into the system. So making sure that that is done in a way that generates the right kind of outcome, that allows you to use that in a predictive manner, becomes critically important. If it is biased, you're going to lose credibility in a lot of that analysis that comes out of it. So I think that becomes critically important, but overall, I mean, if you think about the way compute is, it's becoming pervasive. It's not just in selected industries as damage, and it's now applying to everything that you do, right? Whether it is getting you more tailored recommendations for your purchasing, right? You have better options that way. You don't have to sift through a lot of different ideas that, as you scroll online. It's tailoring now to some of your habits and what you're looking for. So that becomes an incredible time-saver for people to be able to get what they want in a way that they want it. And then you look at the way it impacts other industries and development innovation, and it just continues to scale and scale and scale. >> Well, I think the work that you guys are doing together is scratching the surface of the future, which is digital business. It's about data, it's about out all these new things. It's about advanced computing meets the right algorithms for the right purpose. And it's a really amazing operation you guys got over there. Dan, great to hear the stories. It's very provocative, very enticing to just want to jump in and hang out. But I got to do theCUBE day job here, but congratulations on success. Rajesh, great to see you and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Okay. >> Thanks very much. >> Great conversation around urgent computing, as computing becomes so much more important, bigger problems and opportunities are around the corner. And this is theCUBE, we're documenting it all here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (contemplative music)