>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the em. Where Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the PM where >> hi. Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier way are in the middle of the excitement and the action at the, um where Radio twenty nineteen in San Francisco. Please welcome back to the Cube. David Tennant House, the chief research officer at the end. Where. David Welcome back. >> Thank you. It's always great to have the Cube here radio, >> and it's we had in a really exciting day. And then suddenly this whole space opens up and you can imagine all the innovation and the collaboration that's going on in here. This is the fifteenth radio. This is just one of several big programs that the M where does that really inspires and fosters this really collaborative, innovative culture? You've been here for five years. You came from Microsoft tells a little bit about what makes not just radio, but the emir's culture of innovation unique and really gives it some competitive advantage in the market. >> Yeah, well, so that you know, I think there's a number of different things there. People are super passionate about technology I think there's also this shared thing at P m. Where which is, you know, we're a little understated, right? We're not a big consumer brand. And, you know, we almost pride ourselves in creating technology that goes under the covers, right? So whether it's inside the data center, you know, can we make, you know, with virtual ization, right, Khun? Oui. Make it so that you can run ten times as many virtual machines as you had physical machines and the applications never have to know, right? So that's kind of, you know, for us, it's perfect, technically hard problem and, you know, a little understated. So that kind of, you know, fits with our culture. I think another thing that we found, you know, having a research group often a challenge. His researchers will go to people in the product teams, and they sort of want to start the discussion. I've got this new idea, and maybe it could really help you with your product. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, the product people are, you know, they're working against deadlines. They want to get stuff out. They don't want people derailing their, you know, their agenda and their work. So something we find at PM where which is really I find unique, is let's say we goto a product team in many other companies environments, and I'm really not naming anyone. What happens is you gotta have a discussion with somebody who sort of, you know, is the expert on whatever name your technology and you say the reason starting point isn't Hey, I've got this whole new way of doing your stuff, right? Starting point is can you tell me how your stuff works? And usually the response that other companies is. Why do you want to know? Right. It's a really pointed defense of we find it. The m where is really people are incredibly open. I don't, you know, know exactly how this got embedded in the culture. Maybe because it was a spin off from the university, but deeply embedded in this culture is Oh, yeah, let me tell you how this stuff works. And, uh, you know, maybe you'LL have a better idea. We don't even have to start with, You know, we have a better idea. It's like, you know, and then from there way can have ongoing discussions about >> Oh, that prints and improve it. That Cruz, why you have a community? Yeah, transparent creates openness that creates solidarity around open >> concept. Exactly. And and that's kind of what you see here. Radio. I don't know if people can see in the background is This is, you know, already day for in the Expo Hall and people don't want to leave and they're walking around. They're looking at each other's posters, they're talking to each other, making connections, and then they're going to build on those connections in the coming, you know, week. It's months and over the next year. And, you know, this is they said, you know, this has been going on for four days. You think that by now people have seen all the posters, they talked about everything there is still finding things that they want to talk to the kid. >> The candy store is a lot to taste here and learn ivory engaged graphic contents good and congratulations and thank you. And I just want to add, >> like something I love is, uh, getting here. Actually, before people arrive on the first day each year because when they come in, it's like greeting old friends right. It's sort of like a reunion except nobody's worried about, you know, like school reunion. You know, people are just playing happy to see each other, so that fits with that community thing, you know, because sometimes they're there in their teams and they don't necessarily get what you're being humble. We've talked last year about some of the content you put together in the team, so it's not. It's a hive mind, but you're the chief researcher, >> So you've gotta figure out on at least some canvas to start shaping framing sets of agendas to go after that. So if you can. So Lisa and I were just talking about this here today about how if you have a tech canvas, you don't want to create barriers of thinking. You want to open it up but not make it two restricted. That's your job. What can you tell us about the research agenda that's here and way out there and how how do you see that aperture range >> of yeah topics? Well, I think you know, I want to re first before even getting into that agenda, reaffirm a key point you made right, which is don't constrain people too much. So radio, by the way, is really very, you know, bottoms up. This is not about saying, you know, here's the four topics people really submit. It's a very competitive process people want to be. Not every engineering BM where gets to come to radio, right? It's it's eighteen hundred developers, which is an incredible commitment by the company. He's still a small fraction of our community, so they're actually submitting, you know, bottoms up, uh, to you know, see you and then we have a program committee that reviews it. So that's Ah, bottoms up part of the process from where I sit, You know what I think happens is whether it's our research team or filtering. You know, we'LL look at what comes. Bottoms up and say, Well, what's the signal to noise? For example, there's you know, we've had this year a tremendous amount of machine learning activity, and you see this in the posters here and in the presentations. However, you know that it wasn't too hard to detect a rising signal a couple years ago. So in that case a couple years ago, we said, OK, this is important. We see it in the external community way see it in the developer community. We see it within our own teams and developers. Clearly important. So starting a few years ago, we pulled together some of the senior most technologists, the principal engineers, a subset of them, and said, Hey, we want you guys to dio what we call a of a test study for tests are going faster, but also Veum, Where? Technology Study. We want you to actually do a strategy, but not a business strategy. Technology strategy. Look at the landscape of this. Look at where we are. Look at where we need to be and start charting a course. So in that sense, what we you know, coming out of that was, for example, information of an internal machine Learning program office? Who? One of them gold. It's billed the ML community. You talked about that before. Inside the company. It's not just a technical goal, it's an organizational on community goal. And that's just sort of, you know, kind of one example that wasn't the only output of that. But it's it's one example and what you see a big surprise, you know, kind of ten x, the engagement in the space so that that would be, you know, one case. I think one of the key things is, well, pick up on different topics. And then the thing that we do that I think it's different from some other companies to stop and say what our enterprise is going to need to do because at the end of the war in enterprise company and our customers, our enterprises and their needs her actually, although they're in different verticals, for example, let me just use machine learning. But it could be blockchain. It could be I ot. Actually, what they need is different from, say, the machine learning that that the hyper scale er's needs. So we realised that actually, there's a very interesting needs for us to explore the underserved parts of machine learning because all of these companies, if you look at them, they have a larger number of machine learning problems to work on the hyper scaler. You know, Facebook, Google, love them. They're actually working on a very focused set of problems, right? It's you know it's at serving. It's the social network graph. It's, you know, cat photo recognition, and I don't mean to knock those and they've got a great business is built around them. But notice it's a small number of problems. They do it it immense scale. Okay, given Enterprise probably wants to apply machine learning to a large number of problems, they're not going to run each of those problems on a million servers there, actually, probably running those problems on tens or hundreds of the EMS, right? And so what's the technology they need to address those problems and you can go through way looked at, you know, machine learning That way. We looked at I ot that when he said, You know, look, we think the analytics and the M L. That's a really cool things. We want to play in that space, too. But you know what everybody's trying to do. That, and not a lot of attention being paid to our enterprise is going to secure right and and managed all these I O T devices and the gateways to the devices. So we chartered a strategy for both research and business in that space, watching same thing, really exciting technology Now for enterprises, it's not about big point. It's not about currency, right? It's a money decentralized trust. It's an infrastructure for decentralized trust and effectively think of this is, you know, a database like thing. Except now it's going to be shared across many different organizations. And it's going to change how organizations work with each other and how they work with their auditors on how they work with their regulators. So this is great. >> But, you know, let's focus on what am I the way I just retweeted while you were talking? I just got a clip from last year. I asked you that question about Blockchain. You nailed it Way talked about how all the hype and fraud and i CEOs and confusing it. Yeah, but the world kept moving along. A lot of progress on the supply chain side, lots of interest, rafters trust. He sat realized that it's not about >> the eye. Indio. Yeah, so wave you, that is, You know that there's the high poker and, you know, they'LL be a deflation after the hiker passes. But there's real signal under there and so, you know, and we just turn our strategy and we keep marching down that path, and we're, you know, building up more partners, more people to work with. So it's it's that sort of thing. Quantum computing, right? We're not, you know, developing our own quantum computers. I can tell you that right now, and we're not even doing quantum algorithms. I have some albums researchers, but they're not doing quantum algorithm. You know, I kind of wish we were doing some of that stuff, but what we did do, and we looked at this and we said, Okay, hold on a key challenges. Uh, when the quantum computers do show up, we're going to need to transition to new cryptography to quantum resistant. You know, our post quantum there. Two terms, they're used. Cryptography enterprise customers are going to need to do that. Well, one second, they can't wait till this shows up. It takes ten years. Change your crypto. And by the way, you know if you've encrypted data and other people got a copy of your encrypted data, if it's long living data like, you know, health care records, you don't want them decrypting that in five or ten years. So you got a sort of start now and again, this goes back to what oh enterprise customers need to do Well, okay. The new crypto standards for miffed and others aren't quite ready, Okay, but But by the time they're ready, it's going to be too late to get started. Okay, But we could start working with our customers to work on crypto agility to change how they handle their cryptography. First off, get a good inventory of it, and then get set up so that they're using essentially plug mobile libraries so that it's easier for them to change their cryptography as soon as the standard shows up. And by the way, even if quantum computing takes a lot longer than we all think, this is good hygiene anyway. In other words, it's just a no regrets move for our customers and Khun. We sort of help them go down that path. And this is an example where we can actually also partner with our colleagues that are, say, other parts of Del technologies to help make that work for We're working with others in the industry, you know, intel, and we've kind of convened a form of players within the industry. You know, start working in that direction again. What do enterprise you know, what's the cool new technology. What oh enterprises need. >> So you talked about this event being open in terms of like the agenda and the topics being driven from the bottom of it, That gets really cool. So in the spirit of talking about customers and, like you were saying designing for what enterprises need and all of the variations that encompasses where is customer influence not just a radio, but within the em wears research and innovation programs and strategy. What's that? I mean, I just Advisors don't like that. It's >> a great question. So, like many companies, you know, we do have various advisory body's right, so we bring them in and, well, we'Ll sort of half like, you know, the sea tabs are customer technical advisory body. So the more technical people in some of our kind of more leading customers and we'LL show them things that we're working on, you know, under any kind of India arrangement, and get their feedback, you know, sort of OK, Does this make sense? You know? If not, why not? If it does, you know often it's not that finery, right? It's how would you use it? And we really sort of them give that feedback backto our teams. Now many people do this kind of thing, so we have lots of other customer engagements. We bring customers into forms like radio to be on panels, breakouts, things like that to give presentation so that basically, let's face it in one or two events, that's not going to convey much signal to our engineers. It's a madam, a six storey engineers way want you to be out talking to customers, right? So getting our engineers to be at PM world but way have programmes to actually allow engineers and encourage them to get out, make customer visits above and beyond. And by the way, if you look at it again, our principal engineers in our fellows I think what you find is the vast bulk of them are distinguished because they love engaging with customers. They don't just do it because it's part of the job. They love getting that feedback, so it actually helps them in their career, and we try to sort of essentially teach that to folks. One of the programs we have that in the CTO office, but I love it's not him. It's not in my part, So you know this is a case of I love all the things that we have that just my own, You know, uh, is it's like it's like loving your nieces and nephews, right? Not just your own children way. You were going to ask you your favorite child so way have, like, the CTO ambassadors program, Uh, which basically is coming from the field. So we have, you know, field engineers. They're not on the development side, but these air super technical people that are out in the field touching our customers all the time in any company, there's always a subset of those folks that just have a really good intuitions for where the customers are going and are good at raising their hands about that. So way actually have a program with CTO Ambassador Program CTO way where, you know, literally we give them a pin right way, give them a bad on DH. So we've tried to identify that subset of the field engineers and way regularly bring them in, you know, to pollo alter or bring them together. Whether it's a V m world or radio or whatever again, same thing. We're going to let them know what we've got cooking. We're going to get their feedback. We're gonna hear from them on. And this is not just on research right away. This is on the product pipe lines. You know what's going on in the road map and everything else now to me again. That's just actually a starting point. Because when I put my people in front of Seo is its telling my people, this is the group of folks. When you have a new idea, don't just talk to the product people go find CTO is because, you know, one of the best ways and I'm gonna be a little selfish. One of the best ways for us to influence the customers it influence the company is to get customers excited about something you were doing right. So you know Helen Lawson talk about technology push. And if you really want to be a success, we'LL get innovating it. In a large company, you need to create whole absolutely, and so the CDOs are great. They help us find people to do posies with, because you have to find just the right. You have to find a customer that has a need for this new stuff, but they also have to be somebody that understands this isn't yet a product. This is a journey, right? We're going to jointly try something out. You're gonna learn about whether this new tech can help you and how it could help you. We're going to learn what the product ultimately means, but, you know, you're not gonna be able to actually take out your checkbook at the end and get it right away. So you have toe, you know, be comfortable investing the time and energy, and then they have >> a spy in three that is really one of the core elements that's essential to drive innovation. >> Absolutely. And you need that. As I said, you need that customer partnership to help fine tune things. It's, you know, one of the things more broadly I try to do with research team is, you know, on the one, and give them the freedom to say, Hey, I have a new idea and I want to explore that new idea. That's great. Now, if you think about it right, then they're running open. Luke, they're running based on, you know, kind of their guesses. What educated guess. Right? And their intuition what people might want in the future. So that's good. What a then do it say. Okay, that's great. Uh, you know, you did a little bit. You wrote a paper build a prototype. Okay, so now they get a prototype bill. Okay, That starts getting this idea little more concrete. They're okay with that. The next step, it sort of is. Okay. Now, >> you got to >> get somebody to use that prototype, because I need you to get. And you need you to get feedback and create a feedback loop. Because otherwise, what's gonna happen is they made that first intuitive guests. So let's say they had their really phenomenal and they have a seventy five percent chance of getting it right. Okay, that that. But if they now continue to make a series of educated guesses and they have, ah, you know, seventy eighty percent chance on each educated guests and they make a siri's of four or five of those they have almost, you know, very quickly, close to zero chance of being in the right spot if you just multiply out the probabilities. But if they make that first big league and they start getting customer feedback That actually helps them right get more and more focused on where the bull's eye is. You have a really great chance of changing, >> so they don't build this great technology with no customers. Crichton second >> don't want somebody for a problem, right? But if you want to, you know, kind of have >> some really big ball change. You've >> got to be. >> Well, you've got to be willing to make that first big step without the feedback because the customers don't wear right. And if you just went to the customers said if you had this, what would you do? And they probably say, No, no, no. Instead of that, I want another feature over here. So you got to go and build that first prototype and take the leap of faith. The issue is, if you compound the leap of faith, your odds of being successful slope. If you quickly get into the hands of the customers, get feedback and start focusing in on where the value is, your chance goes up dramatically. >> Awesome. I wish we had more time with you, David. We're gonna let you get back to all of the amazing innovation that I have no doubt it's going on right behind us. Thank you. Something, Johnny on the Cube today. >> Look forward to seeing you again soon. >> Absolutely. For John Ferrier, I'm least Martin. You're watching the cubes. Exclusive coverage of the young Where? Radio twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.