>> Hello everyone, we're here at the Data Cloud Summit, and we have a real treat for you. I call it the CMO Power Panel. And we're going to explore how data is transforming marketing, branding and promotion. And with me are three phenomenal marketing pros and chief marketing officers. Denise Persson is the CMO of Snowflake, Scott Holden of ThoughtSpot and Laura Langdon of Wipro. Folks, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." >> Great to be here with you David. >> Awesome, Denise, let's start with you. I want to talk about the role and the changing role of the CMOs, has changed a lot, you know, I suppose of course with all this data, but I wonder what you're experiencing and can you share with us why marketing especially is being impacted by data. >> Well data's really what has helped turn us marketers into revenue drivers, into call centers. And it's clearly a much better place to be. What I'm personally most excited about is the real time access we have to data today. In the past, I used to get a stale report a few weeks after a marketing program was over and at that time we couldn't make any changes to the investments we'd already made. Today, we get data in the midst of running a program. So it can reallocate investments at the time a program is up and running and that's really profound. Today as well, I would say that adaptability has truly become the true superpowers of marketing today and data is really what enables us to adapt to scale. We can adapt to customer's behavior and preferences at scale and that's truly a profound new way of working as well. >> That's interesting what you say cause you know, in tough times used to be okay, sales and engineering, put a brick wall around those and you know, you name it marketing, say, "Okay, cut." But now it's like, you go to marketing and say, "Okay, what's the data say, "how do we have to pivot?" And Scott, I wonder what have data and cloud really brought to the modern marketer that you might not have had before through to this modern era? >> Well, this era, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer than there is right now. And the primary reason is that we have access to data and insights like we've never had before and I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have a hundred times more access to data than I had a decade ago. It's just phenomenal. When you look at the power of cloud, search, AI, these new consumer experiences for analytics, we can do things in seconds that used to take days. And so it's become in us, as Denise said a super power for us to have access to so much data. And it's, you know, COVID has been hard. A lot of our marketing teams who never worked harder making this pivot from the physical world to the virtual world but they're, you know, at least we're working. And the other part of it is that digital has just created this phenomenal opportunity for us because the beauty of digital and digital transformation is that everything now is trackable, which makes it measurable and means that we can actually get insights that we can act on in a smarter way. And you know, it's worth giving an example. If you just look at this show, right? Like this event that we're viewing. In a physical world, all of you watching at home you'd be in front of us in a room and we'd be able to know if you're in the room, right? We'd track to the scanners when you walked in but that's basically it. At that point, we don't really get a good sense for how much you like, what we're saying. You know, maybe you filled out a survey, but only five to 10% of people ever do that. In a digital world, we know how long you stick around. And as a result, like it's easy, people can just with a click, you know, change the channel. And so the bar for content has gone way up as we do these events but we know how long people are sticking around. And that's, what's so special about it. You know, Denise and her team, as the host of this show they're going to know how long people watch this segment. And that knowing is powerful. I mean, it's simple as you know, using a product like ThoughtSpot, you could just ask a question, you know, how many, you know, what's the average view time by session and Bloomer chart pops up. You're going to know what's working and what's not. And that's something that you can take and act on in the future. And that's what our customers are doing. So, you know, Snowflake and ThoughtSpot, we share our customer with Hulu and they're tracking programs. So, what people are watching at home, how long they're watching, what they're watching next. And they're able to do that in a super granular way and improve their content as a result. And that's the power of this new world we live in that's made the cloud and data so accessible to folks like us. >> Well, thank you for that. And I want to come back to that notion and understand how you're bringing data into your marketing ops, but I want to bring Laura in. Laura, Wipro, you guys partner with a lot of brands, a lot of companies around the world. I mean, thousands of partners, obviously Snowflake in ThoughtSpot or two. How are you using data to optimize these co-marketing relationships? You know, specifically, what what are the trends that you're seeing around things like customer experience? >> So, you know, we use data for all of our marketing decisions, our own, as well as with our partners. And I think what's really been interesting about partner marketing data is we can feed that back to our sales team, right? So, it's very directional for them as well and their efforts moving forward. So, I think that's a place where specifically to partners, it's really powerful. We can also use our collected data to go out to customers to better effect. And then you know, regarding these trends, we just did a survey on the state of the intelligent enterprise. We interviewed 300 companies, US and UK, and there were three interesting I thought statistics relevant to this. Only 22% of the companies that we interviewed felt that their marketing was where it needed to be from an automation standpoint. So lots of room for us to grow, right? Lots of space for us to play. And 61% of them believe that it was critical that they implement this technology to become a more intelligent enterprise. But when they ranked on readiness by function, marketing came in six, right? So HR, RND, finance were all ahead of marketing followed by sales. You know, and then the final data point that I think was interesting was 40% of those agreed that the technology was the most important thing, that thought leadership was critical. You know, and I think that's where marketers really can bring our tried and true experience to bear and merge it with this technology. >> Great, thank you. So, Denise, I've been getting the Kool-Aid injection this week around Data Cloud. I've been pushing people but now that I have the CMO in front of me, I want to ask about the Data Cloud and what it means specifically for the customers and what are some of the learnings maybe that you've experienced that can support some of the things that that Laura and Scott were just discussing. >> Yeah, as Scott said before, idea of a hundred times more data than he ever has before. And that's again, if you look at all the companies we talked to around the world it's not about the amount of data that they have that is the problem, it's the ability to access that data. That data for most companies is trapped across silos, across the organization. It sits in data applications, systems or records. Some of that data sits with your partners that you want to access. And that's really what the data cloud comes in. Data cloud is really mobilizing that data for you. It brings all that data together for you in one place. So you can finally access that data and really provide ubiquitous access to that data to everyone in your organization that needs it and can truly unlock the value of that data. And from a marketing perspective, I mean, we are responsible for the customer experience you know, we provide to our customers and if you have access to all the data on your customers, that's when you have that to customer 360, that we've all been talking about for so many years. And if you have all that data, you can truly, you know, look at their, you know, buying behaviors, put all those dots together and create those exceptional customer experiences. You can do things such as the retailers do in terms of personal decision, for instance, right? And those are the types of experiences, you know, our customers are expecting today. They are expecting a 100% personalized experience for them you know, all the time. And if you don't have all the data, you can't really put those experiences together at scale. And that is really where the data cloud comes in. Again, the data cloud is not only about mobilizing your own data within your enterprise. It's also about having access to data from your partners or extending access to your own data in a secure way to your partners within your ecosystems. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned a couple of things. I've been writing about this a lot and in particularly the 360 that we were dying for, but haven't really been able to tap. I didn't call it the data cloud, I don't have a marketing gene. I had another sort of boring name for it, but I think there's similar vectors there. So I appreciate that. Scott, I want to come back to this notion of building data DNA in your marketing, you know, fluency and how you put data at the core of your marketing ops. I've been working with a lot of folks in banking and manufacturing and other industries that are that are struggling to do this. How are you doing it? What are some of the challenges that you can share and maybe some advice for your peers out there? >> Yeah, sure, you brought up this concept of data fluency and it's an important one. And there's been a lot of talk in the industry about data literacy and being able to read data. But I think it's more important to be able to speak data, to be fluent and as marketers, we're all storytellers. And when you combine data with storytelling, magic happens. And so, getting a data fluency is a great goal for us to have for all of the people in our companies. And to get to that end, I think one of the things that's happening is that people are hiring wrong and they're thinking about it, they're making some mistakes. And so a couple of things come to mind especially when I look at marketing teams that I'm familiar with. They're hiring a lot of data analysts and data scientists and those folks are amazing and every team needs them. But if you go too big on that, you do yourself a disservice. The second key thing is that you're basically giving your frontline folks, your marketing managers or people on the front lines, an excuse not to get involved with data. And then that's a big mistake because it used to be really hard. But with the technologies available to us now, these new consumer like experiences for data analytics, anybody can do it. And so we as leaders have to encourage them to do it. And I'll give you just a you know, an example, you know, I've got about 32 people on my marketing team and I don't have any data analysts on my team. Across our entire company, we have a couple of analysts and a couple of data engineers. And what's happening is the world is changing where those folks, they're enablers, they architect the system. They bring in the different data sources. They use technologies like Snowflake as being so great at making it easier for people to pull spectrum technology together and to get access to data out of it quickly, but they're pulling it together and then simple things like, "Hey I just want to see this "weekly instead of monthly." You don't need to waste your expensive data science talent. You know, Gardener puts a stat out there that 50% of data scientists are doing basic visualization work. That's not a good use of their time. The products are easy enough now that everyday marketing managers can do that. And when you have a marketing manager come to you and say, you know, "I just figured out "this campaign which looks great on the surface "is doing poorly from an ROI perspective. That's a magic moment. And so we all need to coach our teams to get there. And I would say, you know, lead by example, give them an opportunity to access data and turn it into a story, that's really powerful. And then lastly, praise people who do it, like, use it as something to celebrate inside our companies is a great way to kind of get this initiative. >> I love it. And talking about democratizing data and making it self service, people feel ownership. You know, Laura, Denise was talking about the ecosystem and you're kind of the ecosystem pro here. How does the ecosystem help marketers succeed? Maybe you can talk about the power of many versus the resource of one. >> Sure, you know, I think it's a game changer and it will continue to be. And I think it's really the next level for marketers to harness this power that's out there and use it, you know, and it's something that's important to us, but it's also something we're starting to see our customers demand. You know, we went from a one size fits all solution to they want to bring the best in class to their organization. We all need to be really agile and flexible right now. And I think this ecosystem allows that, you know, you think about the power of Snowflake, Snowflake mining data for you and then a ThoughtSpot really giving you the dashboard to have what you want. And then an implementation partner like a Wipro coming in, and really being able to plug in whatever else you need to deliver. And I think it's really super powerful and I think it gives us you know, it just gives us so much to play with and so much room to grow as marketers. >> Thank you, Denise, why don't you bring us home. We're almost out of time here, but marketing, art, science, both? What are your thoughts? >> Definitely both, I think that's the exciting part about marketing. It is a balancing act between art and science. Clearly, it's probably more science today than it used to be but the art part is really about inspiring change. It's about changing people's behavior and challenging the status quo, right? That's the art part. The science part, that's about making the right decisions all the time, right? It's making sure we are truly investing in what's going to drive revenue for us. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Great discussion, I really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Wall-to-wall coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on "theCUBE."

>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's the cube, with digital coverage of pager duty summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, today talking with Tammy Bryant is a cube alumna, the principal Site reliability engineer at Gremlin and the co-founder and CTO of the Girl Geek Academy. Tammy, it's great to have you on the program again. >> Hi Lisa, thanks so much for having me again. It's great to be here. >> So one of the things I saw in your background 10 plus years of technical expertise, and SRE, and chaos engineering, and I thought chaos engineering, I feel like I'm living in chaos right now. What is chaos engineering and why do you break things on purpose? >> Yep. So the idea of chaos engineering is that we're, breaking systems but in a thoughtful controlled way, to identify weaknesses in systems. So that's really what it's all about. The idea there is, you know, When you're doing really complicated work with technical systems, so like, for example, distributed systems and say, for example, you're working at a bank, it's tough to be able to pinpoint the exact failure mode that could cause a really large outage for your customers. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. you inject the failure proactively, to identify the issues and then you fix them before they actually cause really big problems for customers and you do it during the middle of the day, you know, when you're feeling great, instead of being paged in the middle of the night for an incident, that's actually like causing your customers pain, and making you lose a lot of money. So that's what chaos engineering really is. >> Are you seeing in the last six months since the world is so different, are you seeing an increase in customers? Now with, the for example, Brick and Mortars shut down and everything having to convert to digital if it wasn't already? Is there an increase in demand for chaos engineering services? >> Yeah, definitely. So a lot of people are asking what is chaos engineering, how can I use ,it will it help me reduce my incidents? and definitely because there are a lot of new services that have been rolled out recently, say, for example, curbside pickup. That's a whole new thing that had to be created really recently to be able to handle a large amount of load. And you know, people show up, they want to get their product really fast, 'cause they want to be able to just get back home quickly. And that's something that we've been working on with our customers is to make sure that curbside pickup experience is really great. The other interesting thing that we've been working on because of the pandemic is making sure that banks are really reliable, and that customers are able to get access to their money when they need it. And able to see that information too. And you can imagine that not as when you're in lockdown, and you only can leave your house for maybe an hour a day, you need to be able to quickly get access to your money to buy food, and we've seen some big incidents recently, where that hasn't been the case. Yeah. >> And I can imagine I mean, just thinking of what happened with, everything six months ago and how people were, we are just, demanding, right, consumers were demanding, we expect to get whatever we want, whether it's something we buy on Amazon, something that we stream on Netflix, or whatnot, we have this expectation that we can almost get it in real time. But there was a there was, you know what, there was a delay a few months ago, and there still is to some degree. But companies like Amazon and Netflix, I can imagine, really must have a big focus on chaos engineering, to test these things regularly. And now have proved, I would imagine to some degree that with chaos engineering that they have built, they're built to withstand that. >> Yes, exactly. So our founders at Gremlin came from Netflix and Amazon, our CEO had worked at both where he done chaos engineering, and that's actually why he decided to create Gremlin. It's the first company in the world to offer chaos engineering as a service. And you know, obviously, when you're working somewhere like Netflix, you know the whole product, you have to be able to get access to that movie, that TV show, right in that moment, and also customers expect to be able to see that on for example. There PlayStation in their living room and it should work and there paying for a subscription, So, to be able to keep them on that subscription, you need to offer a great service. Same thing with Amazon, you know, Amazon.com, they've done a lot of chaos engineering work over many years now to be able to make sure that everything is available. And it's not just that, the entire amazon.com is up and running. It's also for example, that when you go and look at a page that the recommendation service works toO and they're able to show you, hey, here's some other things that you might like to get to buy at this time. And I like as as a consumer, I love that 'cause it helps me save time and effort and even money as well 'cause it's giving you some good advice. So that's the type of statement we do. >> Exactly, So. when you're working with customers, I'd love to understand just a little bit from the, like the conversational standpoint is this now, is chaos engineering now, at kind of the sea level or is it still sort of in within the engineering folks 'cause looking at this as a make or break, knowing that for example, Netflix, there's Hulu, there's Disney Plus, there's Apple TV. Plus, if we don't get something that we're looking for right away, there's prime, we're going to go to another streaming service. So are you starting to see like an increase in demand from companies that no, we have competition right behind us, we've got to be able to set up the infrastructure and ensure that it is reliable. Now more than ever. >> Yeah, exactly. That's really, really important. I'm seeing a lot of executives. I mean, I've seen that since the beginning, really, since I first started working at Gremlin. I would often be invited by executives to come and give talks actually, within their company, to help the teams learn about chaos engineering, and I love doing that, It's really great. So I'd be invited by C levels, or VPs, from different departments. And I often get people adding me on LinkedIn from all over the world who are in leadership roles, because really, like, you know, they're responsible for making sure that their companies can hit those critical metrics and make sure that they're able to achieve their really, you know, demanding business goals, and then they're trying to help their teams be able to achieve that, too. So I've actually been so pleased to see that as well. Like it is really cool to have an executive reach out and say, hey, I'm thinking of helping my team, I'd like to get them introduced to you can you come and just teach them about this topic? And I love being able to do that it's really positive. And it's the right way to improve. >> It is, and I think nowadays, with reliability being more important than ever, you know, we talked to leaders from industry, from every industry. And there are certain things right now that are going to be shaping the winners and the losers of tomorrow. And it sounds to me like chaos engineering is one of those things that's going to be fundamental to any type of business to not just survive these times, but to thrive going forward. >> Yes, I definitely think so. I mean, obviously, people can easily just go to a different URL and try and use a different service. And you know, we're seeing now failure across so many different industries. We didn't see that before. But for example, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the news or heard from friends and family about schools, now being completely online. And then kids can't actually access, their calls their resources, what they need to learn every day. So that really just shows you how much it's impacting us as a society, we really know that the internet is critical. It's amazing that we have the internet, like how lucky we are to have this, but it needs to work for us to actually be able to get value out of it. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. You know, were able to make sure that everything is reliable, so it's up and running. And we do that by looking at things like redundancy. So we'll do failover work where we completely shut down an application or service and make sure it gracefully fails over. We also do a lot of dependency failure work, where you're actually looking to say, this is the critical path of this service. And a lot of people don't think about this, but the critical path really starts at sign in. So you need to make sure that login and sign in works really well. It's not just about like the experience once you've signed in, that has to work well all the way through. So actually if you have a good understanding of user experience, it helps you create a much better pathway and understand those critical pieces that the customer needs to be able to do to have a great experience. And I care a lot about that. Like whenever I go and work somewhere, I always read customer tickets, I always try and understand what are the customer pain points. And I love listening to customers and then just solving their problems. The last thing I want them to do is, you know, be complaining or be really annoyed on Twitter because something just isn't working when they need it to be working. And it is really critical these days. It's a the internet is a really serious part of our day to day life. >> Oh, it's a lifeline. I mean, that's, some folks. It's the only way that they're connecting with the outside world, is through the internet. So when things aren't, I had a friend whose son first day of college couple weeks ago, freshman year, first class couldn't get into zoom. And that's a stressful situation. But I imagine too, though, that and I know you're going to be speaking at the pager duty summit that more folks need to understand what this is. And I can tell the you have a real authentic passion for it. Talk to us about what you're going to be talking about at the pager duty summit. >> Sure thing, I'm really excited to be speaking at Pager Duty Summit very soon. My talk is called building, and scaling SRE teams, so site reliability engineering teams. And this is something that I've done previously. I've built out the SRE teams at Dropbox for both databases as well as storage. So block storage, and then I also lead the code workflows team. And that's for, you know, over 500 million users, people accessing the critical data that they store on Dropbox all the time. You know the way that folks use Dropbox is in so many different ways. Maybe it's like really famous music musicians who are trying to create an amazing new album that happens or maybe it's a lawyer preparing for a court case, and they need to be able to access their documents. So those are a lot of customer stories that would come up over time. And prior to that, I worked at the National Australia Bank as well leading teams too and obviously like people care about their money if they can't access their money. If there incorrect transactions, if there are missing transactions, you know, duplicate transactions, maybe people don't mind so much about it you get like a double deposit, but it's still not good from the bank's perspective. So there's all types of different chaos that can happen. And I found it to be really interesting to be able to dive into that and make sure that you can make improvements. And I love that it makes customers happier. And also, it helps you improve your company as a whole. So it's a really good thing to be able to do, And with my talk, I'm going to talk to folks about, you know, not only why it's important to build out a reliability practice at your organization, you know, back in the day, people used to go, why would you need a security team? You know, why would we need that? now everybody has a security team, everyone has a chief security officer as well. But why don't we focus on reliability, like we know that we see incidents out in the news all the time, but for some reason, we don't have the chief reliability officer. I think that's definitely going to be something that will appear in the future just like the chief security officer roll up. But that's what I'm going to talk about there. How you can find site reliability engineers, I'll share a few of my secrets. I won't give any spoilers out. But there's actually quite a few places that you can find amazing people. There's even a school that you can hire them from, which I've done in the past. And then I'll talk to you about how you can interview them to make sure that you get the best people on your team. There are a number of things that I think are very important to interview for. And then once you've got those folks on your team, I'll talk to you about how you can make sure that they're successful. How to set them up for success and make sure that they're aligned to not only your business goals, but also your core values as a company, which is really important too. >> Yeah, that's fantastic. It's very well rounded, I'm curious, what are some of the the characteristics that you think are really critical for someone to become a successful SRE? >> Yeah, so there's a few key things that I look for. One thing is that, somebody who is really good at troubleshooting, so they need to be able to be comfortable with complexity, ambiguity and open ended challenges and problems and also thrive in those types of environments. Because often you're seeing something that you've never seen happen before. And also you're working with really complicated systems. So you just need to be able to feel good in that moment. And you can test for that during an interview question on troubleshooting and debugging. So that's something that I'll go into in more detail. But that's definitely the first characteristic. The other thing, of course, is you want to have someone who is good at being able to build solutions. So they can code, they understand automation, they can figure out how can I take this pain point, this problem? And how can I automate it and then scale this out and make it available for everyone across my organization? So someone who has that mindset of building tools for others, and often they are internal tools, because maybe you're building a tool that helps everybody know, who's on call every single critical service at the company and also non critical service and they can identify that in a minute or less like maybe even just in a few seconds, and then they can quickly get that person involved, if anything need to escalate to them. Via for example, a tool like pager duty, that's really what you want. You want them to be able to think, how can I just make this efficient? How can I make sure that we can get really great results? And yeah, I think they also just need to be really personable too and work well in a really complicated organizational structure. Because usually they have to work with the engineering team, the finance team to understand the revenue impact. They need to be able to work with the PR team and the social media team, if they're incidents, and then they need to provide information about when this incident is going to be resolved, and how they can update VIP customers. They need to talk to the sales team, because what happens if you're giving a demonstration, and then somehow there's an issue, or failure that happens, an incident and then in the middle of your very important sales demo, you're not able to actually deliver it that can happen a lot too. So there are a lot of very important key skills. >> Sounds like it's a really cross functional role, pivotal to an organization, that needs to understand how these different functions not only operate, but also operate together, is that somebody that you think has certain types of previous work experience? Is this something that you talked to the Girl Geek Academy girls about? How did they get into? I'm curious, like what the career path is? >> Yeah, it's interesting, like I find a lot of SRE's often come from either a few different backgrounds. One is they came through the world of Linux and understanding systems, and just being really interested in that. Like deep diving into the kernel, understanding how to improve performance of systems. The other side is maybe they came from coding background where they were actually building applications and features. I started off actually on that side, but I also had a passion for Linux. And then I sort of spread over into the other side and was able to learn both. And then often you know, someone who's comfortable with being on call and handling incidents, but it is a lot of skills, like that's actually something that I often talk to folks about, and they asked me how can I become a great SRE? There's so many things I need to learn. And I just say, you know, take it slow, try and gradually increase your number of skills. People often say that there is like there's some curve for SRE's, where you have the operations side, on one side, and then the coding side on the other. And often like the best person sits right in the middle where they have both ops and engineering skills. But it's really hard to find those people. It's okay if you have someone that's like, really deep, has amazing knowledge of Linux and scaling systems and internet management, and then you can pair them up with a really amazing programmer who's great at software engineering and software architecture, that's okay, too. >> We've been hearing for a long time about this sort of negative unemployment with respect to cyber security professionals. Is that, are you guys falling into that same category as well with SRE? Or is it somehow different or you just know this is exactly what we're looking for? We want to go out there, and even in the Girl, Greek Academy, maybe help girls learn how to be able to find what I imagine are a lot of opportunities. >> Yeah, there are so many opportunities for this. So it's definitely an opportunity because what I see is there's not enough SRE's. So tons of companies all over the world will actually ping me and say, hey, Tommy, how do I hire SRE's, that's why I decided to give this talk because I wanted to package that up and just share that information as to how you can do it. And also, maybe you can't find the SRE's because they don't exist. But you can help retrain your team. So you can have an engineer learn the skills that are required to be an SRE, that's totally possible too, maybe move them over to become an SRE. With girl geek Academy, one of the things that I've done is run hackathons and workshops and just online training sessions to help girls learn these new skills. So that's exactly what our mission is, is to teach 1 million girls technical skills by 2025. And I love to do mentoring at scale, which is why it's been really cool to be able to do it online and through these like workshops and remote hackathons. And I definitely love to do something where else work with some of our customers actually, and run an event. I did one a while back, it was really cool, we were able to have all of the girls come in and be at the customer's office and actually learn skills with the customer, which was really fun. And it helps them actually think, hey, I could work one day that would be really amazing. And I'm going to do that again in November. And it's kind of fun too. We can do things like have like, you know, dad and mom and then daughter day, where you actually bring your daughter to work and help her learn technical skills. That's really fun because they get to see what you do and they understand it more and see how cool chaos engineering really is. Then they think oh, wow, you're so awesome, this is great. >> I love it, that's fantastic. Well it sounds like, like I said before your passion for it is really there. What, I think is really interesting is how you're talking about chaos engineering and just the word in and of itself chaos. But you painted in such a positive lights critical business critical, but also the all the opportunities there that businesses have to learn and fine tune so such an interesting conversation. Yeah, Tammy. We have you back on the program. But I thank you so much for joining me today. And for those folks that lucky enough that are attending the pager duty summit, they're going to get to learn a lot from you. Thank you. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> For Tammy Bryant, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we're here for a special CUBE Conversation. Obviously we're remote, we're in the studio most of the time but on the weekends I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts. And here I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local communities, especially in this time of COVID. You have local communities where local journalism is suffering, but also connectedness. And connected experience is what's going to make the difference as we come out of this pandemic as a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan Drew who is the vice president of engineering for Clinical Didja, they make an app called Local BTV which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well for local communities. It's a phenomenal project and it's unique. Somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to be very important. Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with me. >> Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> Okay so I'm a big fan, I've been using the app in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket, it might even be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new app location, and this is the focus of this conversation in this CUBE Talk. Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local BTV that you are protecting, this platform for broadcast television, it has a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >> Yeah certainly, I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television. So unlike a lot of products on the market, you know like your Hulus or other VMPV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. We have to be able to receive over-the-air signals in each market. Many channels that serve local content are still over the air. And that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. So that sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers, but then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way, and we do that in our cloud platform which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >> All right let me take a breath here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so since you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture of this ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >> Yeah, so obviously it starts with some of the core services like EC2, S3, RDS, which everybody on the planet uses. We're also very focused on using ECS; we're completely containerized which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. And one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because their container service is wired into all the other services like cloudwatch metrics, auto-scaling policies, IM policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way, and use those services to much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. We also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use Kinesis and Redshift to collect realtime metrics from all of our markets across the U.S. That allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex ETL systems like Kafka and other things. As well as store it in a large data lake like Redshift and Corid for analytics and things like that. We also use technologies like Media Tailor, so for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to is realtime targeted advertising. In the broadcast space, many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance, and not personalized obviously for that reason. Whereas one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Tailor is we can provide realtime targeted advertising which is a huge win for these stations. >> What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys can offer broadcast station partners 'cause you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast stations as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in as well. What are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering, what is Amazon bringing to the table there and what are you doing that's unique? >> Well again, it allows us, because we can do things centrally as well as the local reception, it allows us to do some interesting things like if we have channels that are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more viewers that way. We have the ability to even do hyper local or community channels that are not necessarily broadcasting all of the standard antennas, but can get us a feed from whatever zip code in whatever market, and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market, in other markets, or even just in their local area. So consider the case where maybe a high school or a college wants to show games or local content, we provide a platform where they can now do that, and reach more people using our app and our platform very very easily. So that's another area that we want to help expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >> Now I think, just going on a side tangent here, I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO, you guys have an amazing business opportunity. Again, I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that someone who follows and has huge passion about local journalism, you know you see awesome efforts out there like Charlie Sennott from the Ground Truth Project Report for America, they take a journalism kind of print view, but if you add that Didja business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app, video. And now COVID more than ever, I really want to know things like there's a mural in downtown Palo Alto, Black lives matter, I want to know what's going on with the local summer restaurants, putting people out on the sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to like next door or very laggy media, whether it's the website, so again, I think this is an opportunity for that, plus education. I mean, Amazon educate for instance, you can get a degree on computing by sitting on the couch. So again, this is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint that you're providing essentially linear TV to that. >> Exactly. >> In the local economy. So I just want to give you a shout-out for that because I think it's super important. I think people should get behind this, so congratulations. Okay I'm off on my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff 'cause I think what's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly, and what you've done here, you've leveraged the benefits of Amazon and the goodness of cloud, you essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly and pretty impressive. So I got to ask you, what Amazon services are most important for your business? >> Well like I said, I think for us, it's managing the central services so we sort of talked about managing the software, the APIs, and those are kind of the glue, so for us standing up a new metro is obviously getting the data center contracts and all the other messy stuff you have to deal with, just to have a footprint. But essentially once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. And we can be starting channels literally within half a day. So that's the real win for us is having all that central glue and that central management system and the scalability where we can just add another 10, 20, 50, 100 markets and the system is set up to scale centrally where we can start collecting metrics through Cloud watch from those data centers, we're collecting logs and diagnostic information so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is sane and not crazy. We don't need a 24/7 knock of a thousand people to do this, you know, and do that in a way that we, as a relatively small company, can still scale and do that in a sensible way, and a cost-effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size, but at any size, you want to make sure if you're going to go into 200 plus markets that you have a really good cost model and that's one of the things where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things, and in an efficient, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. The cost for us to go into a new metro now is so small relatively speaking that that's really what allows us to do as a business and now we just opened up New York and we're going to keep expanding on that model so that's been a huge win for us is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties or building our own obviously-- >> So Amazon gives you the knock basically leverage and scale. The data center you're referring to, that's pretty much just to get an origination point in the territory. >> Dan: Exactly, that's right. >> So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in, making sure that they got all the normal path to recovery and the normal stuff, it's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >> Yeah, so one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do transcoding and origination of the video so we receive the video locally and then we want to transcode and deliver it locally and that way we're not sending video across the country and back type of thing. So that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. So we essentially have another container cluster using Kubernetes in this case. But that Kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the Kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the central service, and then from then on, we just go into the central service and say stand up these channels and it all pops up. >> Well my final question on the Amazon piece is really about the future capability besides having a CUBE channel which we'd love to have on there, I told my guys we'll get there. But we're just too busy working around the clock as you guys are with COVID-19. (overlapping chatter) I could almost see a slew of new services coming out, just on the Amazon side. If I'm on the Amazon side I'm thinking, okay I'll post this as an opportunity for me. I can see sage making and machine learning coming in and adding value for the user experience. And also enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with Prime and moving people around and delivering things. I mean the headroom for Amazon in this thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon, I could see them winning with this. I know certainly I know you're using Elemental as well, but for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the roadmap or what you might envision the future looking like? >> Well, I think part of it I think there's two parts. One of it is what are we going to deliver ourselves so we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local BTV product. But we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. For example, you mentioned Prime and a lot of people are now realizing, especially with COVID and what's going on, the importance of local television and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how we can be the provider of that local TV content. And that's really a lot of stations are super excited about that too 'cause you know, again, looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms, and distribution mechanisms, and the viewers obviously at the end of the day, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations but the news is still maybe very focused on LA or San Francisco or whatever. And so being able to enable the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform and viewer perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. Our main focus is make local great and get the broadcast world out there and that's not going anywhere especially with things like HSE3 on the front, and we just want to make sure those people are successful and enrich people and make revenue. >> Yeah, you got a lot of (mumbles) but I think one of the things that's interesting about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on just current market value investing, versus kind of the game-changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism, and I look at that and I'm like, okay that's a huge opportunity just there, changing the game on societal impact on journalism, huge education opportunity for court cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV so I got to ask ya, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Pretend, let's make it, I am an idiot. I don't understand, isn't this just TV? What are you doing different because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco if I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago if I'm in San Francisco, I get that. But why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can't I just get it on YouTube, TikTok, what is this? >> Yes and no. There's TV and then there's TV as you know. If you look at the TV landscape, it's pretty fractured but typically when you're talking about YouTube or Hulu, you're talking about sort of cable TV channels. You know, you're going to get your A&E, you're going to get some of your local through ABC and whatnot, but you're not really getting local content. So for example, in our Los Angeles market, there are about 100 and something over-the-air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like your Hulus or your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen. So we're talking about 90 plus channels that are local to LA that you can only get through an antenna. And those are hitting the type of demographics that, quite frankly, some of these other players just don't see as important. >> Under different minorities or immigrants, the each entrepreneurs of our country. >> Yes exactly, so we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's, again, why we feel like we've got something that is really unique and that is really under-served as far as on a television standpoint. The other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are under served themselves in terms of technology. If you look at ad insertion and a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there, it's very focused on the OTT market, so again, going back to the Hulus and the YouTubes. >> OTT, over-the-top you mean. >> Over the top, yeah. And so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while and I sort of mentioned the way ad buying works. It's still sort of the traditional ad buying that happens a couple weeks in front, not a lot of targeted or anything ability. And even when we get to HSE3, you're now relying on having an HES3 TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etc, etc, which is, again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies to not only the ad insertion and the stuff we can do for the livestream, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations that they really don't have right now unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do. So we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited about. >> All right, I got to ask you, put you on the spot here, 'cause I always see Andy Jassy at (mumbles) hopefully I'll see him this year if they do an in-person event. He's really dynamic and you should send him an email; he tends to read his emails a lot, and if you're a customer and I know you are, but I've got to ask you, if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevator and he's like, hey why should I pay attention to Didja? Why is it important for Amazon and why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >> Well I think part of what Amazon's goal, especially if you get into their work in public sector and education, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community and local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage and I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergy. As far as our goals in those areas around really helping, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue, it's about how do we help people in communities be better as well? So there's a bottom line in terms of people, benefit, and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. And that's very important to us as a business as well is that's why we're focused on local TV and we're not just doing another Fubo where it's really easy to get an IP national fee. It's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and the local channels and the local viewers to get the content that they're missing out on right now. So I think there's a, I hate it but I'm going to use it, synergy on that front as far as-- >> Synergy and the new normal. >> Synergy and the new normal? I think COVID and some of the other things that have been happening in the news with the Black Lives Matter and a lot of the things going around where local and community has been in the spotlight and getting the word out and having really local things versus I'm just seeing this thing from three counties away which I don't really care about and it's not telling me what's happening down the street like you said. And that's really what we want to help improve and support. >> Yeah it's a great mission, and it's one we care a lot about theCUBE. We've seen the data: content drives community engagement, and community's where the truth is. So in an era when we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things. That's what we're seeing a lot of things. And as more data's exposed, as you turn the lights on, so to speak, that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal, and thrive. So to me, big believer in what you guys are doing. Local BTV has a great mission. I wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case technically. I mean to me, I think the technical superiority of what you've done give ability to stand up to these kinds of network with massive number of potential reach out of the gate, that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Great, thank you very much and thanks for taking the time. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm John Furrier with the Cube. We're here for a special cube conversation about seeing with remote where Studio most of the time. But on the weekends we get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts, and he I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local community, especially this time of Cove. It you have local community work, local journalism suffering, but also connectedness and connected experiences was going to make. The difference is we come out of this pandemic a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan. True is the vice president of engineering for chemical Didja. They make an app called local Be TV, which basically takes over the air television and stream it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well. For local communities. It's a phenomenal project, and it's unique, somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to really put Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with >>Thanks for having me appreciate it. >>Okay, so I'm a big fan. I've been using the APP in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket might be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new application, and this is the focus of the conversations. Q. Talk Amazon is a big part of this talk about your local BTV that you architect with this platform for broadcast television as a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >>Certainly. I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television eso. Unlike a lot of products on the markets, you know, like your Hulu's or other VM PV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that, we have to be able to receive, um, over the air signals in each market. Um, many channels that serve local content are still over the air, and that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and available to many users. So that's part of our value. Proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but, uh, allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. Uh, so that's sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers. But then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way. Uh, and we do that in our cloud platform, which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >>Let me take take a breath. Here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so that you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture is. RAM is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >>Yeah. So, um, obviously it starts with some of the core services, like easy to s three RDS, which everybody on planet uses. Um, we're also very focused on using e CS. We're completely containerized, which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. Um, and one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because they're container services wired into all the other services, like cloud watch metrics, auto scaling policies, I am policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way. Um, and use those services too much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. Um, we also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use kinesis and red shift to collect real time metrics from all of our markets across the US that allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex detail systems like Kafka and other things. Um, as well, it's stored in a large data lake like red shift in Korea for analytics. And you know, things like that. Um, we also use, um, technologies like media Taylor s. So, for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to Israel. Time targeted advertising in the broadcast space. Many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance. Um, and not personalized, obviously. You know, for that reason, where is one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Taylor is we can provide real time targeted advertising, which is a huge win for these stations. >>What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys offer? Broadcast station partners? Because you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast ages as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in, and it's well, what are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering? What is Amazon brings to the table there. What are you doing that >>well again, it allows us because we can do things centrally. You know as well as the local reception. It allows us to do some interesting things. Like if we have channels that, um, are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, Um, then we could easily put them in other markets and get them even more of years. That way we have the ability to even do, like hyper local or community channels, you know that are not necessarily broadcasting over the standard antennas, um, but can get us a feed from, you know, whatever zip code and whatever market and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market and other markets, or even just in their local area. So, you know, consider the case where maybe a high school or college you know, wants to show games or local content. Um, we provide a platform where they can now do that and reach more people, Um, using our app in our platform very, very easily. So that's another area that we want help Expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, Um, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >>You know, I think just is not going to side tangent here. I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO? You guys have an amazing business opportunity again. I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that follows in. It has huge passion of local journalism. You see awesome efforts out there by Charlie Senate from the Ground Truth Project report for America. They take a journalism kind of friend view. But if you add like that digital business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app of video. And now it Koven. More than ever. I really want to know things like this. A mural downtown Palo Alto. Black lives, matters. I want to know what's going on. Local summer restaurants, putting people out of sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to, like, next door or very Laghi media, whether it's the website. So again, I think this is an opportunity to that plus education. I mean, Amazon education, for instance. You can get a degree cloud computing by sitting on the couch. So you know, this is again. This is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint, but you're providing essentially linear TV to app because in the local economy, So I just want to give you a shout out for that because I think it's super important. I think you know, people should get behind this, so congratulations, Okay, I'm often my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff. So I think it's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly. And what you've done here, you can leverage the benefits of Amazon. Goodness of cloud. You essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly. Try it. And it pretty impressive. So I gotta ask you what? Amazon services are most important for your business. >>Um, well, like I said, I think for us it's matching the central services. So we sort of talked about, uh, managing the software, the ap eyes, Um, and those are kind of the glue. So, you know, for us standing up a new metro is obviously, you know, getting the data center contracts and all the other you know, >>and >>ask yourself, you have to deal with just have a footprint. But essentially, once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. Right? And we could be starting channels literally, literally within half a day. Um, so that's the really win for us is, um, having all that central blue and that central management system and the scalability where, you know, we can just add another 10 20 5100 markets. And the system is set up to scale centrally, um, where we can start collecting metrics the cloudwatch from those data centers. We're collecting logs and diagnostic information s so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is saying and not crazy. We don't need a 24 7 knock of 1000 people to do this. Um, you know, and do that in a way that, you know, we as a relatively small company can still scale and do that in a sensible way in a cost effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size. But at any size, um, you want to make sure if you're gonna go into 200 plus markets, that you have a really good cost model. Um and that's one of the things that where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things in an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost effective way. You know, the cost for us to go into the new metro now is so small, you know, relatively speaking, but that's really allows. What allows us to do is the business of now. We just opened up New York, you know, and we're going to keep expanding on that model. So that's been a huge win for us. Is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties, and we're building our own, you know, obviously which >>So Amazon gives you the knock, basically leverage and scale the data center you're referring to. That's pretty much just to get an origination point in the Derek. Exactly. That's right. So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in making sure they got all the normal backup recovery in the normal stuff. It's not like a heavy duty build up. Can you explain that? >>Yeah. So one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local. Um, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do trans coding and origination of the video. So we receive the video locally, and then we want to transport and deliver it locally. And that way we're not sending video across the country and back try to things so that That is sort of the hybrid part of our model. Right? So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. Right? So we essentially have another container cluster using kubernetes in this case. But that kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the Central Service, and then from then on, it just we just go into the Central Service and say, Stand up these channels. Um and it all pops up >>with my final question on the Amazon piece is really about future capabilities Besides having a Cube channel, which I would love to have gone there. And I told my guys, We'll get there, but it's just too busy working around the clock is You guys are with Kobe tonight? Yeah, sand. I can almost see a slew of new services coming out just on the Amazon site. If I'm on the Amazon site, I'm thinking, okay, Outpost is the opportunity for me. I got stage maker machine learning coming in and value for user experience and also, you know, enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with prime moving people around and delivering the head room for Amazon. This thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon could see them winning with this and certainly, you know, using elemental as well. But for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the road map or what? You might envision the future looking like, >>Well, I think part of it. I think there's two parts. One is what are we gonna deliver ourselves, you know. So we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local beauty product. Um, but we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. Um, and you know, for example, you mentioned prime. And a lot of people are now realizing, especially with Cove, it and what's going on the importance of local television. Uh, and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how how we can be the provider of that local TV content. You know, um and that's really a lot of stationed. Are super excited about that, too, because, you know, again looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach. You know, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms and distribution mechanisms and the viewers. Obviously, at the end of the day, um, you know, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. You know, Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay Area stations, but the news is still may be very focused on L. A or San Francisco or whatever, Um and so being able to enable, uh, you know, the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion. It is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform. And you were perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. You know, our main focus is make local great, you know, get the broadcast world out there, and that's not going anywhere, especially with things like HSC tree. Uh, you know, on that front, um, and you know, we just want to make sure that those people are successful, um, and can reach people and revenue and, you know, >>you got a lot of uncertainty, But I think one of the things that's just think about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on that just the current market value, investing versus kind of game changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases. I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism. I'm like, I look at that and I'm like, Okay, that's a huge opportunity. Just they're changing the game on Societal impact on journalism, Huge education, opportunity for cord cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV. So I gotta ask you, you know, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Why are pretending that this person from this making I am entity after I don't understand it? Isn't this just TV? What are you doing Different? Because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco. I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago. I'm in San Francisco. I get that. You know why? Why is this important? Isn't this just TV can I just get on YouTube? I mean, tech talk. Well, talk about the yes >>or no. I mean, there's a TV, and then there's TV, You know, as you know, um and, you know, if you look at the TV landscape just pretty fracture. But typically, when you're talking about YouTube or who you're talking about, sort of cable TV channels, you know you're going to get your Andy, you're gonna get some of your local to ABC and what not? Um, but you're not really getting local contact. And So, for example, in our Los Angeles market, um, we there are There are about 100 something over the air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like you lose your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen, right? So there's like 90 plus channels that are local to L. A. That you can only get through an antenna, right? And those were hitting the type of demographics. You know, quite frankly, some of these other players or just, you know, don't see is important >>under other minorities exact with immigrants. You know, the entrepreneurs of our country? Yes, >>exactly. You know, So, you know, we see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other. You know, um, minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's again Why, You know, we feel like we've got something that is really unique. Um, and that is really underserved, you know, as far as on a television sampling, Um, the other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels, our underserved themselves in terms of technology, Right, if you look at, you know, ad insertion, um and you know a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there. It's very focused on the OT market. So again, going back to who lose, and >>then you take a little over the top with the >>over the top. Yeah. Um and so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while. You know, I sort of mentioned like the way ad buying works, you know, it's still sort of the traditional and buying that happens a couple weeks in front, Not a lot of targeted or anything ability. Um, And even when we get to the HSC three, we're now relying on having an h A street TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etcetera, etcetera, which is again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps, you know, using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies. So not only the ad insertion and stuff we can do for the live stream, Um, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations, uh, that they really don't have right now, unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Neilson, which a lot of local small stations don't do. Uh, so we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that really looking forward to and really excited >>about. I gotta ask you put you on the spot here because I don't see Andy Jassy at reinvent might Hopefully I'll see in this year. They do a person event. He's really dynamic. And you just said, I mean, I think he tends to read his emails a lot. And if you're a customer and you are. But if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevators like okay, why should I pay attention to digital? What's why is it important for Amazon? And why is it important for the world? How do you raise the bar on society? >>Well, I think part of what Amazon's goal. And you know, especially if you get into, you know, their work in public sector on education. Um, you know, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community on local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage, and, um, I hate the word synergy, but I'm gonna use the word synergies, you know, um, this for us, You know, our goals in those areas around really helping, you know, uh, you know, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue. It's about how do we help people in communities be better as well. Um, so there's a bottom line in terms of uh huh. People benefit and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. Right. And you know, that's very important to us as a business as well is, you know, that's why we're focused on local TV. And we're not just doing another food. Go where it's really easy to get a nightie national feed. You know, it's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and local channels and the local viewers to get the content, um that they're missing out on right now. Um, so I think there's a your energy on that front. Um, as >>far synergy and the new normal to have energy in the new normal. You know, I think I think >>of it. And, you know, um, and some of the other things that have been happening in the news of the black lives matter And, um, you know, a lot of things going around where you know, local and community has been in the spotlight, right? And getting the word out and having really local things versus hundreds. Seeing this thing from you know, three counties away which I don't really care about. It's not telling me what's happening down the street, like you said, Um, and that's really what we want to help improve and support. >>Yeah, no, it's a great mission is one. We care a lot about the Cube. We've seen the data content drives, community engagement and communities where the truth is so in an era where we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things, and that's what we're seeing. A lot of things. And as more data is exposed as you turn the lights on, so this week that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal and thrive. So to me, a big believer in what you guys are doing local BTV is a great mission. I wish you guys well, and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case. Technically, I mean to me, I think the technical superiority, what you've done, the ability to stand up these kinds of networks with massive number potential reach out of the gate. It's just pretty impressive. Congratulations, >>right? Thank you very much. And thanks for taking the time. >>Okay. Dan Drew, vice president of Jennifer. Did you start up That a lot of potential will. See. Let's go check out the comments on YouTube while we're here. Since we got you, let's see what's going on in the YouTube front year. Yeah, The one question was from someone asked me Was from TV serious that Dan, Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time on Sunday and testing out this new zoom home recording my home studio. But you got to get cleaned up. Thanks for taking the time Problem. Okay, Take care. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Keep studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm John Furry with the Cube. We're here for a special Q conversation, housing with remote, where in studio most of the time. But on the weekends, I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts, and he I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local community, especially this time of Cove. It you have local community work, local journalism suffering, but also connected this and connected experiences was gonna make. The difference is we come out of this pandemic a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan. True is the vice president of engineering for Chemical. Did you? They make a nap coat local be TV, which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to many your TV and on demand as well. For local communities, it's a phenomenal project and its unique, somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's gonna be something that's going to really put Dan, thank you for coming along and chatting. Thanks >>for having me appreciate it. >>Okay, so I'm a big fan. I've been using the APP in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket. I might be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new application, and this is the focus of the conversations. Q. Talk Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local be TV that you are protected. This platform for broadcast television has a unique hybrid cloud. Architecture. Can you tell us about that? >>Certainly. I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television eso unlike a lot of products on the markets, you know, like your Hulu's or other VM PV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. Ah, we have to be able to receive, um, over the air signals in each market. Um, many channels that serve local content are still over the air, and that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value. Proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but, uh, allow the station's themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. Eso that's sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers. But then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way. On. We do that in our cloud platform, which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon service. >>Let me take take a breath. Here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon. So such a using a lot of the plumbing take us through what the architectures ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >>Yeah. So, um, obviously starts with some of the core services, like easy to s three already us, which everybody on planet uses. Um, we're also very focused on using PCs were completely containerized, which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. Um, and one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because they're container services wired into all the other services, like cloud, What metrics? Auto scaling policies. I am policies. Things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way. Um, and use those services too much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. Um, we also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use kinesis and red shift to collect real time metrics from all of our markets across the U. S. Uh, that allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex each l systems like Kafka and other things. Um, as well a stored in a, uh, large data lake like red shift in Korea for analytics. And you know, things like that. Um, we also use, um, technologies like media Taylor s O, for example, one of the big features that, uh, most stations do not have access to Israel. Time targeted advertising in the broadcast space. Many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance. Um, and not personalized, obviously. You know, for that reason. Where is one of the big features we can bring to the table? Using our system and technologies like Media Taylor is we can provide real time targeted advertising, which is a huge win for these stations. >>What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys are? Offer broadcast station partners because you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast ages as well, but also your enabling new broadcasters to jump. And it's well, what are some of the unique capability that you're delivering? What is that? It's on the table there. What are you doing? This You >>well again. It allows us because we can do things centrally. You know as well as the local reception allows us to do some interesting things. Like if we have channels that, um, are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, Um, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more of years. That way we have the ability to even do, like hyper local or community channels, you know that are not necessarily broadcasting over the standard antennas, um, but could get us a feed from, you know, whatever. Zip code in whatever market and we can give them away toe reach viewers in the entire market and other markets, or even just in their local area. So, you know, consider the case where maybe a high school or a college you know, wants to show games or local content. Um, we provide a platform where they can now do that and reach more people, Um, using our app in our platform very, very easily. So that's another area that we want toe help Expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, Um, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want toe, um, reach their community more effectively, or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets? >>No, I think just is not going to side tension here. I talked with your partner. Jim longs to see you guys have an amazing business opportunity again. I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that follows in. It has huge passion of local journalism. You see awesome efforts out there by Charlie Senate from the ground Truth project report for America. They take a journalism kind of friend few. But if you add like that, did you business model ought to This local journalism you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app of video. And now it Koven. More than ever. I really want to know things like this. A mural with downtown Palo Alto Black lives matters. I want to know what's going on. Local summer restaurants, putting people out of sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to, like, next door or very Laghi media, whether it's the website. So again, I think this is an opportunity to that plus education. I mean Amazon educated Prince, that you can get a degree cloud computing by sitting on the couch. So, you know, this is again. This is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint, but you're providing essentially linear TV toe because in the local economy, So I just want to give you a shout out for that because I think it's super important. I think you know, people should get behind this. Eso congratulates. Okay, I'm often my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud steps. I think what super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly and what you've done here, you delivery of the benefits of Amazon of the goodness of cloud you, especially in stand up a metro region pretty quickly try it. And it pretty impressive. So I gotta ask you what? Amazon services are most important for your business. >>Um, well, like I said, I think for us it's matching the central services. So we sort of talked about, uh, managing the software, the AP eyes, um, and those kind of the glue. So, you know, for us standing up a new metro is obviously, you know, getting the data center contracts and all the other you know, >>and >>ask yourself, you have to deal with just have a footprint. But essentially, once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. Right? And we could be starting channels >>literate >>literally within half a day. Um, so that's the rial win for us is, um, having all that central blue and the central management system and the scalability where You know, we can just add another 10 20 5100 markets. And the system is set up to scale centrally, um, where we can start collecting metrics their cloudwatch from those data centers. We're collecting logs and diagnostic information. Eso weaken the type health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is saying and not crazy. We don't need a 24 7 knock of 1000 people to do this. Um, you know, and do that in a way that, you know, we, as a relatively small company can still scale and do that in a sensible way, a cost effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size. But at any size, um, you want to make sure if you're gonna go into 200 plus markets, that you have a really good cost model. Um and that's one of the things that where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things and an efficient, scalable, reliable and cost effective way. You know, the cost for us to go into the New Metro now is so small, you know, relatively speaking. Um, but that's really allows. What allows us to do is a business of now. We just opened up New York, you know, and we're going to keep expanding on that model. So that's been a huge win for us. Is evaluating what Amazon could bring to the table versus other third parties and or building our own? You know, obviously which >>So Amazon gives you the knock, basically leverage and scale the data center you're referring to. That's pretty much just to get an origination point in the derrick. Exactly. That's right. It's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in making sure they got all the normal commute back of recovery in the North stuff. It's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >>Yeah. So one thing we do do in our data centres is because we are local. Um, we have sort of primary data centers. Ah, where we do do trance coating and origination of the video eso we receive the video locally, and then we want to transport and deliver it locally. And that way we're not sending video across the country and back trying to think so that that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. Right? So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. Right? So we essentially have another container cluster using kubernetes in this case. But that kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the Central Service, and then from then on, it just we just go into the Central Service and say, Stand up these channels. Um and it all pops up >>with my final question on the Amazon pieces is really about future capabilities Besides having a cube channel, which I would love to head on there. And I told my guys, We'll get there. But what is this too busy working around the clock is You guys are with Kobe tonight? Yeah, sand. I can almost see a slew of new services coming out just on the Amazon site if I'm on the Amazon. So I'm thinking, OK, outposts. The opportunity from a I got stage maker machine learning coming in any value for user experience and also, you know, enabling in their own stuff. They got a ton of stuff with prime the moving people around and delivering the head room for Amazon. This thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon could see them winning with this. I'm certainly I know using elemental as well. But for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the road map or what? You might envision the future looking like, >>Well, I think part of it. I think there's two parts. One is what are we gonna deliver ourselves, you know? So we sort of talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local beauty product. Um, but we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. Um, and you know, for example, you mentioned prime. And a lot of people are now realizing, especially with Cove, it and what's going on the importance of local television. Ah, and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how how we can be the provider of that local TV content, you know, um and that's really a lot of stationed are super psyched about that to just, you know, again looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach. You know, we're basically the way that we conjoined those two things together between the station's the other video platforms and distribution mechanisms and the viewers. Obviously, at the end of the day, um, you know, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff this interesting to them. You know, like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations, but the news is still may be very focused on L. A or San Francisco or whatever. Um and so being able to enable, uh, you know, the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion, uh, is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform. And, you know, if you were perspective, so we're hoping to do that in any way we can. You know, our main focus is make local great, you know, uh, get the broadcast world out there, and that's not going anywhere, especially with things like HSC tree. Uh, you know on the front. Um, and you know, we just want to make sure that those people are successful, um, and can reach people and make revenue. And, you know, >>you got a lot of it and search number two. But I think one of the things that's just think about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on that Just, you know, current market value investing versus kind of game changing shifts is that you guys air horizontally, enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases. I was pointing out from my perspective journalism, you know, I'm like, I look at that and I'm like, OK, that's a huge opportunity. Just they're changing the game on, you know, societal impact on journalism, huge education, opportunity for cord cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV. I gotta ask you, you know, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute by our pretending that this person from this making I amenity after I don't understand is it Isn't this just TV? What are you doing? Different? Because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco. I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago in San Francisco. I get that. You know why? Why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can I just get on YouTube? Mean Tic tac? Well, talk about the yes >>or no. I mean, there's TV, and then there's TV, You know, as you know, um and, you know, if you look at the TV landscape just pretty fracture. But typically, when you're talking about YouTube or who you're talking about, sort of cable TV channels, you know, you're gonna get your Annie, you're going to get some of your local to ABC and what not? Um, but you're not really getting local contact. And So, for example, in our Los Angeles market, um, we there are There are about 100 something over the air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like you lose your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe 1/2 a dozen or a dozen, right? So there's like 90 plus channels that are local to L. A. That you can only get through an antenna, right? And those air hitting the type of demographics. You know, quite frankly, some of these other players or just, you know, don't see is important >>under other minorities. Back with immigrants, you know, hit the launch printers of our country. Yes, >>exactly. You know, So, you know, we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other. You know, um, minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's again Why, you know, we feel like we've got something that is really unique. Um, and that is really underserved, you know, as far as on a television sampling, Um, the other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are underserved themselves in terms of technology. Right? If you look at, you know, at insertion, um and you know, a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live tv out there. It's very focused on the o t T market. So again, going back to who lose and >>the utility well, over the top of >>over the top. Yeah. Um and so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while, you know? And I sort of mentioned, like the way ad buying works. You know, it's still sort of the traditional and buying that happens a couple weeks in front. Not a lot of targeted or anything ability. Um, And even when we get to the HSC three, you're now relying on having an H s street TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etcetera, etcetera, which is again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps, you know, using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies. So not only the ad insertion and stuff we can do for the life stream, Um, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations, uh, that they really don't have right now, unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do s so we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited >>about. I gotta ask you, put you on the spot. He'll because I don't see Andy Jassy. It reinvented might. Hopefully I'll see him this year. They do a person event. He's really dynamic. And you just said it made me think he tends to read his emails a lot. And if your customer and you are. But if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevators like, Hey, why should I pay attention to? Did you? What's why is it important for Amazon? And why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >>Well, I think part of what Amazon's goal And you know, especially if you get into, you know, their work in the public sector on education. Um, you know, that's really where you know, we see we're focusing with the community on local television and enabling new types of local television eso. I think there's a lot of, uh, advantage, and, um, I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergies, you know, um, this for us, You know, our goals in those areas around, you know, really helping, you know, Uh, you know, one of the terms flying around now is the dot double bottom line, where it's not just about revenue. It's about how do we help people and communities be better as well? Um, so there's a bottom line in terms of, uh, people benefit and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue, Right? And you know, that's very important to us as a business as well is, you know, that's why we're focused on local TV. And we're not just doing another food. Go where it's really easy to get a night. The national feed. You know, it's really important to us to enable the local, um, community and the local broadcasters and local channels and the local viewers to get that content, Um, that they're missing out on right now. Um, so I think there's a energy on that front A so >>far, synergy and the new normal to have energy in the near normal. You know, I think I think Kobe did. >>And you know, um, and some of the other, uh, things that have been happening in the news of the black lives matter and, um, you know, a lot of things going around where you know, local and community has been in the spotlight right and getting the word out and having really local things versus 100. Seeing this thing from, you know, three counties away, which I don't really care about, it's not telling me what's happening down the street, like you said, Um, and that's really what we want to help improve and support. >>Yeah, I know it's a great mission is one we care a lot of cute. We've seen the data content drives, community engagement and communities where the truth is so in an era where we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're gonna start to see things. That's what we're seeing, a lot of things. And as more data is exposed as you turn the lights on, so this week that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal and thrive. So, to me, big believer in what you guys are doing local be TV is a great mission. Wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case. Technically, I mean to me. I think the technical superiority of what you've done. Abilities stand up. These kinds of networks with massive number potential reach out of the gate. It's just pretty impressive. Congratulations, >>Right. Thank you very much. And thanks for taking the time. >>Okay. Dan Drew, vice president of James. Did you start up? That's a lot of potential. Will. See. Let's go check out the comments on YouTube while we're here. Since we got you, let's see what's going on the YouTube front year. Yeah. The one question was from someone asked me, Was stiff from TV Cres that William Dan, Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time on Sunday and testing out this new zoom home recording my home studio, which I got to get cleaned up a little. Thank you for your time problem. Okay, take care.

>> Male narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to the DockerCon Virtual Conference. DockerCon 20 being held digitally online is the CUBE's coverage. I'm John for your host of the CUBE. This is the CUBE virtual CUBE digital. We're getting all the remote interviews. We're here in our Palo Alto studio, quarantined crew, all getting the data for you. Got Peter Guangeti who's the Chief Marketing Officer Cockroach Labs, a company that we became familiar with last year. They had the first multicloud event in the history of the industry last year, notable milestone. Hey first, it's always good you're still around. So first you got the first position, Peter. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the CUBE for DockerCon 20. >> Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. >> So it's kind of interesting, I mentioned that tidbit to give you a little bit of love on the fact that you guys ran or were a part of the first multicloud conference in the industry. Okay, now that's all everyone's talking about. You guys saw this early. Take a minute to explain Cockroach Labs. Why you saw this trend? Why you guys took the initiative and took the risk to have the first ever multicloud conference last year? >> So that's news to me that we were the first, actually. That's a bit of a surprise, cause for us we see multicloud and hybrid cloud as the obvious. I think the credit really for this belongs with folks like Gartner and others who took the time to listen to their customer, right? Took the time to understand what was the need in the market, which, you know, what I hear when I talk to CEOs is cloud is a capability, not a place, right? They're looking at us and saying, "yes, I have a go to cloud strategy, "but I also have made massive investments in my data center. "I believe I don't want to be locked in yet again "to another vendor with proprietary PIs, "proprietary systems, et cetera." So, what I hear when I talk to customers is, "I want to be multicloud show me how, "show me how to do that in a way "that isn't just buying from multiple vendors, right?" Where I've cost arbitrage, show me a way where I actually use the infrastructure in a creative way. And that really resonates with us. And it resonates with us for a few reasons. First is, we built a distributed SQL database for a reason, right? We believed that what you really need in the modern age for global applications is something that is truly diverse and distributed, right? You can have a database that behaves like a single database that lives in multiple locations around the world. But then you also have things like data locality. It's okay with German data stays in Germany because of German law. But when I write my application, I never write each of these things differently. Now, the other reason is, customers are coming to us and saying, "I want a single database that I can deploy "in any of the cloud providers." Azure SQL, and that is a phenomenal product. Google Spanner is a phenomenal product. But once I do that, I'm locked in. Then all I have is theirs. But if I'm a large global auto manufacturer, or if I'm a startup, that's trying to enter multiple markets at the same time. I don't want that. I want to be able to pick my infrastructure and deploy where I want, how I want. And increasingly, we talk to the large banks and they're saying, "I spent tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars "on data centers. "I don't want to throw them out. "I just want better utilization. "And the 15 to 20% that I get "from deploying software on bare metal, right? "I want to be able to containerize. "I want to be able to cloudify my data center "and then have ultimately what we see more and more "as what they call a tripod strategy "where your own data center and two cloud providers "behaving as a single unit "for your most important applications." >> That's awesome. I want to thank you for coming on to, for DockerCon 20, because this is an interesting time where developers are going to be called to the table in a very aggressive way because of COVID-19 crisis is going to accelerate until they pull the future forward ahead of most people thought. I mean, we, in the industry, we are inside the ropes, if you will. So we've been talking about stainless applications, stateful databases, and all the architectural things that's got that longer horizon. But this is an interesting time because now companies are realizing from whether it's the shelter in place at scale problems that emerge to the fact that I got to have high availability at a whole nother level. This kind of exposes a major challenge and a major opportunity. We're expecting projects to be funded, some not to be funded, things to move around. I think it's going to really change the conversation as developers get called in and saying, "I really got to look at my resources at scale. "The database is a critical one because you want data "to be part of that, this data plane, if you will, "across clouds." What's your reaction to this? Do you agree with that, the future has been pulled forward? And what's Cockroach doing to help developers do manage this? >> Yeah, John, I think you're exactly right. And I think that is a story that I'm glad that you're telling. Because, I think there's a lot of signal that's happening right now. But we're not really thinking about what the implications are. And we're seeing something that's I think quite remarkable. We're seeing within our existing customer base and the people we've been talking to, feast or famine. And in some cases, feast and famine in the same company. And what does that really mean? We've looked at these graphs for what's going to happen, for example, with online delivery services. And we've seen the growth rates and this is why they're all so valued. Why Uber invested so big in Uber eats and these other vendors. And we've seen these growth rates the same, and this is going to be amazing in the next 10 years, we're going to have this adoption. That five, 10 years happened overnight, right? We were so desperate to hold onto the things that are what mattered to us. And the things that make us happy on any given day. We're seeing that acceleration, like you said. It's all of that, the future got pulled forward, like you had said. >> Yeah. >> That's remarkable, but were you prepared for it? Many people were absolutely not prepared for it, right? They were on a steady state growth plan. And we have been very lucky because we built an architecture that is truly distributed and dynamic. So, scaling and adding more resilience to a database is something we all learned to do over the last 20 years, as data intensive applications matter. But with a distributed SQL and things like containerization on the stateless side, we know we can just truly elastically scale, right? You need more support for the application of something like Cockroach. You literally just add more nodes and we absorb it, right? Just like we did with containerization, where you need more concurrency, you just add more containers. And thank goodness, right, because I think those who were prepared for those things need to be worked with one of the large delivery services. Overnight, they saw a jump to what was their peak day at any point in time now happening every single day. And they were prepared for that because they already made these architectural decisions. >> Yeah. >> But if you weren't in that position, if you were still on legacy infrastructure, you were still trying to do this stuff manually, or you're manually sharding databases and having to increase the compute on your model, you are in trouble and you're feeling it. >> That's interesting Peter to bring that up and reminds me of the time, if you go back in history a little bit, just not too far back, I mean, I'm old enough to go back to the 80s, I remember all the different inflection points. And they all had their key characteristics as a computer revolution, TCP IP, and you pick your spots, there's always been that demarcation point or lions in where things change. But let's go back to around 2004 and then 2008. During that time, those legacy players out there kind of was sitting around, sleeping at the switch and incomes, open-source, incomes, Facebook, incomes, roll your own. Hey, I'm going to just run. I'm going to run open-source. I'm going to build my own database. And that was because there was nothing in the market. And most companies were buying from general purpose vendors because they didn't have to do all the due diligence. But the tech-savvy folks could build their own and scale. And that changed the game that became the hyperscale and the rest is history. Fast forward to today, because what you're getting at is, this new inflection point. There's going to be another tipping point of trajectory of knowledge, skill that's completely different than what we saw just a year ago. What's your reaction to that? >> I think you're exactly right. We saw and I've been lucky enough, same like you, I've been involved in the web since the very early days. I started my career at the beginning. And what we saw with web 1.0 and the shift to web 2.0, web 2.0 would not have happened without source. And I don't think we give them enough credit if it wasn't for the lamp stack, if it wasn't for Linux, if it wasn't for this wave of innovation and it wasn't even necessarily about rolling around. Yeah, the physics of the world to go hire their own engineers, to go and improve my SQL to make it scale. That was of course a possibility. But the democratization of that software is where all of the success really came from. And I lived on both sides of it in my career, as both an app developer and then as a software executive. In that window and got to see it from both sides and see the benefit. I think what we're entering now is yet another inflection point, like you said. We were already working at it. I think, the move from traditional applications with simple logic and simple rules to now highly data intensive applications, where data is driving the experience, models are driving the experience. I think we were already at a point where ML and AI and data intensive decision-making was going to make us rewrite every application we had and not needed a new infrastructure. But I think this is going to really force the issue. And it's going to force the issue at two levels. First is the people who are already innovating in each of these industries and categories, were already doing this. They were already cloud native. They were already built on top of very modern third generation databases, third generation programming languages, doing really interesting things with machine learning. So they were already out innovating, but now they have a bigger audience, right? And if you're a traditional and all of a sudden your business is under duress because substantial changes in what is happening in the market. Retailers still had strength with footprint as of last year, right? We don't be thinking about e-commerce versus traditional retail. Yeah, it was on a slow decline. There were lots of problems, but there was still a strength there, that happened changed overnight. Right now, that new sources have dried up, so what are you going to do? And how are you going to act? If you've built your entire business, for example, on legacy databases from folks like Oracle and old monolithic ways of building out patients, you're simply not adaptable enough to move with changing times. You're going to have to start, we used to talk about every company needed to become a software company. That mostly happened, but they weren't all very good software companies. I would argue that the next generation used to to be a great software company and great data scientists. We'll look at the software companies that have risen to prominence in the last five to 10 years. Folks like Facebook, folks like Google, folks like Uber, folks like Netflix, they use data better than anyone else in their category. So they have this amazing app experience and leverage data and innovate in such a way that allow them to just dominate their category. And I think that is going to be the change we see over the next 10 years. And we'll see who exits what is obviously going to be a jail term. We'll see who exits on top. >> Well, it's interesting to have you on. I love the perspective and the insights. I think that's great for the folks out there who haven't seen those ways before. Again, this wave is coming. Let's go back to the top when we were talking about what's in it for the developer. Because I believe there's going to be not a renaissance, cause it's always been great, but the developers even more are going to be called to the front lines for solutions. I mean, these are first-generation skill problems that are going to be in this whole next generation, modern era. That's upon us. What are some of the things that's going to be that lamp stack, like experience? What are some of the things that you see cause you guys are kind of at a tail sign, in my opinion, Cockroach, because you're thinking about things in a different construct. You're thinking about multicloud. You're thinking about state, which is a database challenge. Stateless has kind of been around restful API, stateless data service measures. Kubernetes is also showing a cloud native and the microservices or service orientation is the future. There's no debate on that. I think that's done. Okay, so now I'm a developer. What the hell am I going to be dealing with for the next five years? What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think the developer knows what they're already facing from an app perspective. I think you see the rapid evolution in languages, and then, in deployment and all of those things are super obvious. You need just need to go and say I'm sure that all the DockerCon sessions to see what the change to deployment looks like. I think there are a few other key trends that developers should start paying attention to, they are really critical. The first one, and only loosely related to us, is ML apps, right? I think just like we saw with dev and ops, suddenly come together so we can actually develop and deploy in a super fast iterative manner. The same things now are going to start happening with data and all of the work that we do around deploying models. And I think that that's going to be a pretty massive change. You think about the rise of tools like TensorFlow, some of the developments that have happened inside of the cloud providers. I think you're seeing a lot there as a developer, you have to start thinking as much like a data scientist and a data engineer as simply somebody writing front end code, right? And I think that's a critical skill that the best developers already building will continue. I think then the data layer has become as important or more important than any other layer in the stack because of this. And you think about once again, how the leaders are using data and the interesting things that they're doing, the tools you use matter, right? If you are spending a lot of your time trying to figure out how to shard something how to make it scale, how to make it durable when instead you should be focused on just the pure capability, that's a ridiculous use of your time, right? That is not a good use of your time. We're still using 20 to 25 year old open-source databases for many of these applications when they gave up their value probably 10 years ago. Honestly, you know, we keep all paper over it, but it's not a great solution. And unfortunately, no SQL will fix some of the issues with scaling elasticity, it's like you and I starting a business and saying, "okay, everyone speaks English, "but because we're global, "everyone's going to learn Esperanto, right?" That doesn't work, right? So works for a developer. But if you're trying to do something where everyone can interact, this is why this entire new third generation of new SQL databases have risen. We took the distributed architecture SQL. >> Hold up for a second. Can you explain what that means? Cause I think a key topic. I want to just call that out. What is this third generation database mean? Sorry, I speak about it. Like everyone sees it. >> I think it's super important. It's just a highlight. Just take a minute to explain it and we can get into it. There is an entire new wave of database infrastructure that has risen in the last five years. And it started actually with Google. So it started with Google Spanner. So Google was the first to face most of these problems, right? They were the first to face web scale. At least at the scale, we now know it. They were the first to really understand the complexity of working with data. They have their own no SQL. They have their own way of doing things internally and they realized it wasn't working. And what they really needed was a relational database that spoke traditional ANSI SQL, but scaled, like there are no SQL counterparts. And there was a white paper that was released. That was the birth of Spanner. Spanner was an internal product for many, many years. They released the thinking into the wild and then they just started this way with innovation. That's where our company came from. And there were others like us who said, "you're right. "Let's go build something that behaves," like we expect a database to behave with structure and this relational model and like anyone can write simple to use it. It's the simplest API for most people with data, but it behaves like all the best distributed software that we've been using. And so that's how we were born. Our company was founded by ex Googlers who had lived in this space and decided to go and scratch the itch, right? And instead of doing a product that would be locked into a single cloud provider, a database that could be open-source, it could be deployed anywhere. It could cross actual power providers without hiccups and that's been the movement. And it's not just us, there were other vendors in this space and we're all focused on really trying to take the best of the both worlds that came before us. The traditional relational structure, the consistency and asset compliance that we all loved from tools like Oracle, right? And Microsoft who we really enjoyed. But then the developer friendly nature and the simple elastic scalability of distributed software and, that's what we're all seeing. Our company, for example, has only been selling a product for the last two years. We found it five years ago, it took us three years just to rank in the software that we would be happy selling to a customer. We're on what we believe is probably a 10 to 15 year product journey to really go and replace things like Oracle. But we started selling the product two years ago and there is 300% growth year over year. We're probably one of the fastest growing software companies in America, right? And it's all because of the latent demand for this kind of a tool. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'm a big fan of this third wave. Can I see it? If you look at just the macro tailwinds in the industry, billions of edged devices, immersion of all kinds of software. So that means you can't have one database. I always said to someone, in (mumbles) and others. You can't have one database. It's physically impossible. You need data and whatever database fits the scene, wherever you want to have data being stored, but you got to have it real time. You got to have actionable, you have to have software intelligence into how to manage the data. So I think the data control plane or that layer, I think it's the next interoperability wave. Because without data, nothing really works. Machine learning doesn't really work well. You want the most data. I think cybersecurity is a great early use case because they have to leverage data fast. And so you start to see some interesting financial services, cyber, what's your thoughts on this? Can you share from the Cockroach Labs perspective, from your database, you've got a cloud. What are some of the adoption use cases? Who are those leaders? You can name names if you have them, if not, name the use case. What's the Cockroach approach? Who's winning with it? What's it look like? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you nailed it, right? The data volumes are so large and they're so globally distributed. And then when you start layering again, the data streaming in from devices that then have to be weighed against all of these things. You want a single database. But you need one that will behave in a way that's going to support all of that and actually is going to live at the edge like you're saying. And that's where we have been shining. And so our use cases are, and unfortunate, I can't name any names, but, for example, in retail. We're seeing retailers who have that elasticity and that skill challenge with commerce. And what they're using us for is then, we're in all of the locations where they do business, right? And so we're able to have data locality associated with the businesses and the purchases in those countries. And however, only have single apps that actually bridge across all of those environments. And with the distributed nature, we were able to scale up and scale down truly elastically, right? Because we spread out the data across the nodes automatically. And, what we see there is, you know, retailers do you have up and down moments? Can you talk about people who can leverage the financial structure of the cloud in a really thoughtful way? Retail is a shining example of that. I remember having customers that had 64 times the amount of traffic on cyber Monday that they had on the average day. In the old data center world, that's what you bought for. That was horrendous. In a cloud environment, still horrendous, even public cloud providers. If you're having to go and change your app to ramp every time, that's a problem with something like a distributed database. and with containerization, you could scale much more quickly and scale down much more. That's a big one for streaming media, is another one. Same thing with data locality in each of these countries, you think about it, somebody like Netflix or Hulu, right? They have shows that are unique to specific countries, right? They haven't have that user behavior, all that user data. You know data sovereignty, you know, what you watch on Netflix, there's some very rich personal data. And we all know how that metadata has been used against people. Or so it's no surprise that you now have countries that I know there's going to be regulation around where that data can live and how it can. And so once again, something like Cockroach where you can have that global distribution, but take a locality, or we can lock data to certain nodes in certain locations. That's a big one. >> There's no doubt in my mind. I think there's such a big topic. We probably do more interviews just on the COVID-19 data problem that they have. The impact of getting this right, is a nerd problem today. But it is a technology solution for society globally in the future. Zero doubt in my mind on that. So, Peter, I want you to get the last word and to give a plugin to the developers that are watching out there about Cockroach. Why should they engage with you guys? What can you offer? Is there anything new you want to share about the company to the audience here at DockerCon 2020? Take us home in the next segment. >> Thank you, John. I'll keep the sales pitch to a minimum. I'm a former developer myself. I don't like being sold, so I appreciate it. But we believe we're building, what is the right database for the coming wave of cognitive applications. And specifically we've built what we believe is the ideal database for distributed applications and for containerized applications. So I would strongly encourage you to try it. It is open-source. It is truly cloud native. We have free education, so you can try it yourself. And once you get into it, it is traditional SQL that behaves like Postgres and other tools that you've already known of. And so it should be very familiar, you know, if you've come up through any of these other spaces will be very natural. Postgres compatible integrates with a number of ORM. So as a developer, just plugged right into the tools you use and we're on a rapid journey. We believe we can replace that first generation of technology built by the Oracles of the world. And we're committed to doing it. We're committed to spending the next five to 10 years in hard engineering to build that most powerful database to solve this problem. >> Well, thanks for coming on, sharing your awesome insight and historical perspective. get it out of experience. We believe and we want to share the audience in this time of crisis, more than ever to focus on critical nature of operations, because coming out of this, it is going to be a whole new reality. And I think the best tech will win the day and people will be building new things to grow, whether it's for profit or for societal benefit. The impact of what we do in the next year or two will determine a big trajectory and new technology, new approaches that are dealing with the realities of infrastructure, scale, working at home , sheltering in place to coming back to the hybrid world. We're coming virtualized, Peter. We've been virtualized, the media, the lifestyle, not just virtualization in the networking sense, but, fun times it was going to be challenging. So thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much, John. >> Okay, we're here for DockerCon 20 virtual conferences, the CUBE Virtual Segment. I want to thank you for watching. Stay with me. We've got stream all day today and check out the sessions. Jump in, it's going to be on demand. There's a lot of videos it's going to live on and thanks for watching and stay with us for more coverage and analysis. Here at DockerCon 20, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching >> Narrator: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is the CUBE conversation.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Well welcome back to the Sands, day two, AWS re:Invent 2019, lot of buzz still going on here Dave Vellante. >> It's all buzz. >> Yeah, a jam-packed show floor, second day in a row, day two of our coverage here on theCUBE, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Paul Cheesbrough, who's the CTO and president of digital at the Fox Corporation. Paul, good to see you, sir. >> Thanks for having me on. >> Thanks for being with us, we appreciate that. >> Paul: I'm a big fan of theCUBE. >> So what brings you here, about your partnership with AWS, and let's just start with that, characterize a little bit about what that relationship's all about. >> Yeah, well I think re:Invent's become the go-to show for cloud computing generally. I think it's its eighth season, and certainly for my team and myself, it's the place to discover the latest product evolutions and talk to other people in my position and peers in the industry and see what's going on, so it's a great opportunity to do a bit of fact-digging and see what's going on in the industry. >> So what fact-digging are you doing right now that applies to your world, what have you seen here, maybe in the past day or two, that you said "Yep, I can see where that's playing "into the entertainment world." >> Yeah, I'd say the first thing is the ecosystem, you can see from around here the buzz and the vibe. I mean this is at a different level to what I've seen before, and that's always really good to see, so it's not just an AWS story, it's kind of the companies that they're enabling, and a lot of the innovation comes out of these smaller startups that are building on top of the platform, so spending a ton of time on that front. I'd also say Andy Jassy's keynote yesterday, really very impressive on how they've kept the foot down on new releases on the data front. So SageMaker and Redshift are two technologies we use heavily and they've continued to innovate on that front, and just getting time with the top table of AWS and the deep technical engineers who can kind of give you a view of where the company's going and where the services will be in a year or two's time is, you don't get that any other kind of place. >> You know when we first started doing theCUBE at re:Invent seven years ago, lot of tire kickers, certainly from the enterprise, lot of developers, no question, but you're way beyond kicking tires, so what are some of the things that you're doing in the cloud, you mentioned Redshift and SageMaker, what are you doing with those tools? >> Yeah, so, I mean you're a media company, so you'll understand how technology's kind of carved up, and on the enterprise side, which is all of our internal IT and networks, we've pretty much migrated all of that over the recent years into the cloud, and largely running on AWS, so storage, compute, we've retired all of our data centers bar one. All of our applications that our employees use are software as a service based, so we don't really run our own infrastructure, and on top of that we've really put a very deep data infrastructure in place where the consumer trend, the way our content's consumed these days, we've got a very direct relationship with the consumer. We stream more and more content to them, and that throws off a data trail that you've got to capture and manage, and we use Redshift and SageMaker to analyze the data on top of Redshift on that front, so the enterprise piece, we've done pretty holistically. On the digital side of our business, our products and services and our apps, they're almost entirely built natively on AWS services. Our engineers, the innovation that they're driving there, they couldn't do it without partners like AWS. And then the third and final piece to a media company's the media and the broadcast piece, how you move video around the production organization, the creative organization. And that's the bit that we're announcing here today, that partnership with AWS to kind of solve that issue. >> Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about, a big part of your transformation was data. And so you got rid of, they always talk about the heavy lifting, you got rid of that for the most part, all except one data center. What did you do with the people that were doing all of that stuff, did they just sort of go through retraining, or attrition, did they get excited about learning new tooling, how did that all go? >> Well I've been on the journey around cloud computing since 2006 in my career, so-- >> Dave: Day one, I guess it's still day one. >> In fact I purchased S3 from Werner Vogels back then. >> That was the first product, wasn't it, the first service. >> And then I met Andy soon after, and in those days, and I think some organizations experience this, the technology team were the most risk-averse, and they put every blocker in the way from moving to the cloud, 'cause they saw it as a threat, and frankly didn't understand it, so, it took a lot of pushing to get things going in those days, I think it's slightly different now, but once you're through that barrier, and people get momentum and, anyone in my position as a CTO will tell you there's no shortage of work to throw people at, so the resource that we've got within the team, I'd much rather they were building software than managing servers and pipes and doing upgrades, so we've released a ton of talent to do what I would call the value add piece, that consumers touch and feel, and moved it really kind of front of store, and that's made a big difference, some people didn't make the journey and we brought new talent in, I think that's inevitable. But yeah. >> So it's almost like you get to practice a little less and play a little more, is about what it comes down to. >> And sort of rearchitected your business around data and software, it sounds like, as opposed to, like you said, pipes. >> Yeah, but everything starts with the consumer in our business, so if you work backwards from that, they've changed their behaviors and they expect content in different forms on different devices. They expect the traditional channels of cable, they expect the new channels of mobile and streaming, and that places a lot of stress internally on how you create and produce and distribute that content, so to some degree in our industry, we had no choice, we had to change, and that's been, as a technologist driving transformation, it's been a fun ride. >> You're almost on this parallel track a little bit, you talk about the transformation you're going through with live streaming right now, that's a must, must do, must have, that's how consumers bring in their media, and yet you have to transform technologically speaking to provide this consumer transformation as well, so you have these two tracks going down that you've got to answer to, I mean what kind of complexity does that create for you, because your business is fundamentally changing, and the technology is fundamentally changing. >> And you know, I think historically, the solution to that problem was to put parallel infrastructure in place and your digital team would have their own infrastructure, your enterprise team would have their own infrastructure, and then your media and broadcast team would be on a completely different network doing their own thing, and they would all coexist, and I think the convergence at the consumer end has rippled back into a convergence within the organization as well, where, our technology teams play across those three different fields, and someone like AWS, and other partners like that are now capable of being partners across those three different fields together, so the convergence at the consumer end really does apply within the organization as well. >> So you mentioned some things you're doing with AWS, maybe you could talk about that initiative and talk about the tech, and we could talk about the outcome for the consumer. >> So I think the last bastions within any media organization in terms of transforming, you think about the media and broadcast operation, everything from the trucks and the cameras through to the edit suites, through to master control, through to the way that you play out and distribute, not only do we have a national network, but we've got local stations as well, and you overlay the digital products on top of that. It's a very complicated set of partners and direct access points at the end, and the technology that's been operating in that space hasn't changed since the 90s, genuinely hasn't, it maybe got a minor upgrade when HD came along in 2001, but it really hasn't changed, so, what we have decided to do is really re-engineer that, it's the only piece of our business that doesn't run natively on the cloud, and we're pleased to announce this week the deal with AWS as the strategic partner to really lift our video workflows in terms of how we produce, create, and really importantly distribute our video to all of those partners, in a way that really transforms the way our creatives can work as well, so, it was a pretty long process going through how you do that safely, because if you get it wrong, you go off the air, and that's really, you cannot do that, you're TV guys, you know that, and so we've been very careful. So AWS have stepped up with some great technologies, but really important they have great vision as well for it. >> So what specifically have you done, you created a new platform in the cloud? >> Yeah, so we were very very fortunate, we've just completed this deal with Disney to sell some of our assets there. It meant that actually we had a greenfield approach to this part of our business, so, for the first time ever we were unencumbered with a legacy, so a blank sheet of paper, and we came at it with the attitude of, if you were a large broadcaster starting your business today, how would you do it? And with that mindset, it takes you into a very different space, so we're working with AWS, and their media services team, and the elemental team within that, to encode our video within our sports news entertainment and local stations, we're using them to move the video from studio locations and football stadiums, and news gathering locations, remote locations, straight into the cloud, to be both managed and produced, and then it stays natively within the cloud, to be published out to distribution partners, whether it's Comcast for cable, whether it's Hulu for live TV, whether it's Apple for the VOD stuff that they do, or whether it's our own services, but that natively stays in the cloud, that workflow, and that just really enables a very different way of thinking. >> And the move is obviously a big challenge, right? I mean it's video, and it's big data. How are you solving that problem, what are the components of that that enable you to do that? >> So I think it would've been very difficult to achieve this vision if some of the products like Outposts and the local zones that AWS have announced at the show, we had early visibility and testing of those. If you're in an edit suite, editing 4K content, you can't necessarily, in a truck, you can't necessarily go back and forth to the cloud all the time, so we had the ability to kind of put a piece of the cloud on-prem or into a truck or into a studio to reduce the, eliminate the latency, and to manage that, so that's one thing. We also have architected it in a way where resilience is core and key, so if for whatever reason one part of the architecture goes down, then other bits of it can pick up the slack, and again, the way that we work with AWS on that front, they've really helped us architect something robust there. >> Yeah, how much does live come into this, I mean you can't afford a slip-up, right, I mean it's one thing to have down time, your point is, you can't go black, but just in terms of what you deliver, whether it's live news, live sports, live entertainment, it's real time. >> So we're predominantly a live company now, and it's the heart of our business, it's what we're great at doing, it's what our creative teams have done all of their lives, and if you take an NFL game on a Sunday, number of cameras, feeds, data, stats, the number of teams you've got both on location and back in the production facility, the number of games you're actually producing at the same time, on a complicated day it can be multiple games, and then the complexity around who you get the signal out to, in effect. Live is difficult, and I think that's why you haven't seen too many broadcasters go in this direction, quite yet, so we know we're an early adopter. We're being very careful and cautious around how we're kind of ramping this up, for example, we're still alongside the fiber connectivity into the cloud, we're also using satellite, so some of those decisions we've put in place as near term. >> You got some redundancies in place just as a risk management. >> Exactly, so we can slowly dial it up, and we're building new facilities around this to help make it happen as well, but the number one thing is giving the consumer a great experience. I'll give you some examples, actually, of how this'll transform the consumer experience, so, we'll be able to do both 4K and 8K natively through this infrastructure with AWS, we can't do that today. Latency will be reduced heavily, so we effectively encode the video once, and the device at the end decodes it, so that really compresses that level of latency that you'll see in a football game. And when you think about things like 5G, I don't know whether you saw Hans and the Verizon team in their announcement yesterday. Things like betting services and other things that we're getting into, you have to have close to zero latency to make those things work, so in the current broadcast chain, we encode and decode and re-encode, and all of these compression chains, and at the end of it, you've got a fairly decent quality signal, but by no means 4K or 8K, and that's one aspect, so the consumer will see a difference. The other thing is, we never want to be in a position again where we use infrastructure from 30 years ago, I mean we, no company in 2019 can afford to be in that position, so, by plugging into AWS, we kind of get that constant drip feed of innovation as it comes, and a very software-focused sort of architecture, as opposed to hardware and cables, which is, you see a lot of in broadcast. So we're pivoting not just the business, but the way we do business as well. >> So the consumer experience is much improved. As well, you mentioned live, of course the mainspring is live, that's where the content is created, but there's also an on-demand experience as well, is that, I presume compressed, so I can get to the best highlights if I miss the game, get the little mini game that I can watch and get a good flavor for it, that is compressed as well? >> Absolutely, so I mean going back to your data question earlier, so this infrastructure natively, as we're putting video through it, Amazon and AWS have the technologies to index the video in real time, to do scene detection, face recognition, a lot of those very forward-leaning technologies that I think for the last 10 years have been more science than fact, but now they're really coming to their own, so all of the video that goes through the pipes in a live form gets really in real time indexed. All of the consumption information about how the video's being consumed on the device comes back in in real time, and we can combine that into an experience, so if you're joining the live feed or coming at the video on demand asset later, you've got a much much richer experience, whether that's searching and finding the bit that you want or whether that's us curating a package of content automatically, using that metadata, so, we're excited about that. >> Talk a bit more about the search, how does that all work? >> Well I think search on a TV experience is still pretty clumsy. >> John: Amen. >> Yeah, it's definitely, and part of that's the user interface, I mean hats off to Comcast and their Xfinity product, a lot of the search now is done by voice through the remote and they're seeing a transformational difference there, but even in some of the OTT streaming services, the search and discovery, I'd use discovery in the same context, it's still clumsy, and that's entirely driven by the data, there's a reason Google are the best in the marketplace at search, because of the level of indexing that they do to create the, and I think AWS and their approach to video will be game-changing for us on this front, and they've obviously got the search technologies on the front end to enable that as well as the indexing technologies on the back end. >> How do you keep up with all the innovation, you mentioned up top that, citing Andy Jassy announce all this stuff, how do you keep up with it all, does it sometimes feel like it's going too fast to be able to absorb it all? >> No, this is a great time to be a CTO, because there's no way, we could complain about it, but the consumer's not going to stop changing the way that they demand content from us, so for me it's a combination of picking the right partner, speaking to them frequently and coming to events like this to meet my peers. I also spend a lot of time with venture capital companies, and very early stage startups to really get an idea around what's coming next over the next three to five years, and getting in early with those customers. I kind of have a mantra with my team internally, where I don't reward them necessarily for just doing business with the old incumbent legacy technology providers. I'd much rather we experiment with the next generation of companies, that's actually how we began our very early relationship with AWS and Amazon, and it's served us well. >> Well, the next time you see Joe or Troy, please give 'em our best. All right, if you will, they're always welcome on theCUBE, as are you, Paul. Paul Cheesbrough from Fox, joining us here on theCUBE, we'll be back with more coverage here live, AWS re:Invent 2019, you're watching theCUBE from the Sands. (techno music)

>> Of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube, covering Comcast innovation day brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's a really cool space right off of Buffet. And they're doing a lot of new technologies here. It's not the only Innovation Center in the country but it's one here in our backyard. And we're excited to be here. Comcast is having a special event talking about really CX, customer experience. They brought together a bunch of super smart people invited us to stop by and we're going to share some of that with you. And we're excited for our very first guest he's Preston Smalley, the VP of product management of Comcast, Preston great to meet you. >> Good to meet you too, Jeff. >> So really cool event today. We talked about a lot of different things about customer experience and really all the applications that are on the front edge that define that customer experience. And you guys are doing a ton of innovation there. >> No, we are I mean I think it's, we were talking just this morning about all the different ways that we're trying to meet customers, where they're at and building products really around those needs, right? >> Yes, so I think the one of the ones that doesn't get enough credit not enough conversation is the voice. And I've got the voice remote at home. And it's really fascinating, especially in the context of there's so many places that what I'm looking for might be and I don't really know what the licensing and arrangements are that you guys have set up with Hulu or with Netflix or with HBO or if it's on HBO on demand or HBO live. So to be able to have kind of a single point of reference to just push that button and say, "Stanford football," and have it show up, it's amazing. >> No, it really is and I think you know, the voice remote has been one of those big hits where you know, people always love their TV remote but, you know, a number years back we started exploring, could we put a voice you know, search capability directly into that remote. And I think what's great is people they're really leaning into it. So we're seeing a billion voice commands happening a month, >> Billion? >> A billion, one b. Through the remote and I think it's just become a part of their life. Right? And I think it's everything from the simple to saying NBC into the remote to the more complicated things like Notre Dame football or what's my WiFi password? or whatever the things they might be asking out of their device. >> So curious on the development side was like about features, but what were some of the real hurdles that you guys knew you had to overcome? And what were some of the surprise hurdles that you didn't necessarily anticipate? >> Sure. I mean, I think the ones you knew about were we've got to be able to translate speech to text and you know, there's there's existing infrastructure that allows for that and doing that with high accuracy. But the good news is we actually had a head start in organizing the content. And so we already had dealt with text based searching of all the different TV shows and movies and such. And so we had all that base of knowledge that we could then tap into. We're now at a stage where that kind of covers the basics but we're trying to understand how do you both increase the breadth and depth of the kinds of commands that you will do through the voice remote. And so you mentioned some at the beginning things like being able to search, not just the content that we bring but things like Netflix or Amazon Prime or soon Hulu. And so partnering with those companies, you get all that information in a way that works very well with the voice remote. >> Right and then you even have it bilingual, right? You even have Spanish and English. >> That's right. >> And it can flip it can switch back and forth on the fly. >> That's right, yeah, so we support both those languages, including a combo a mixed mode where in households where you're seeing both Spanish and English be interwoven, it'll actually even work in those contexts. And then recently, we've also introduced Canadian French and so we license our technology to Rogers and video Tron up in Canada. And so we've now introduced that capability as well. >> That's great, So a long time ago we interviewed Domino's and it's when they first introduced app ordering. And at first you think well app ordering but there was all this like second order benefits that Domino's replied in terms of accuracy of the orders and supply chain impact. So I'm curious if there's some, you know, kind of second order benefits that you guys are realizing with voice that maybe you didn't think, you know, what are some of the surprises that have come out of that? >> Well, that's a good, good question. I think in terms of surprises, it's the types of things that people are looking for you now have, you now have the ability to figure out what kinds of things people are interested in which you wouldn't have been able to know in a typical browse setting. So for example, we support now over 150 apps on X1 as far as third party streaming apps but we know the ones that we don't support because people are saying and into the remote, whereas we wouldn't have got that information prior. >> Right. >> And so now we can actually go and try and meet those needs. >> Now ,it's interesting. You talk about meeting people where they are and you know, one of the things that's happening today is people have all these options, right? They can get it through their Comcast service if they're doing that but you know they may want to have a direct relationship with Hulu is one that you picked out or with Netflix or this historical ones, you guys now are enabling an option for those people that choose to directly engage with those content providers and just use Comcast, as an internet provider. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing there. >> Yeah, sure. So obviously, we've had strength in the, in the TV space, and being able to organize and aggregate all that streaming content with your traditional television content. What we've done now is take that investment in X1 and pivot it into a new product this year, we call Xfinity flex. And what that product does is it's a streaming device that should be comfortable for an internet only subscriber that they hook up to their TV. It's 4K, HDR, wireless. And through that device, they're able to aggregate all of that streaming content in one place. So whether it's app content that they may already have an existing subscription from or it's ad supported internet content or maybe they want to buy some more content from us right? And so we'll bundle and sell those subscriptions directly and include that as well. And we've actually been pretty surprised, you know, you take something like Netflix which is highly penetrated in the United States we're pretty surprised how many people are still signing up new as a Netflix subscriber in our service and so by just making it easy and just one click away we found that people are they're opting to do that. >> Right, I'm sure they're happy to hear that in Los Gatos just down the road >> Exactly. No, they're a great partner and either way we're helping them >> Right, right >> They're trying to reach what they call kind of the Netflix nevers people that maybe just hadn't gotten Netflix prior, right? And so we're helping them with that. >> Well, it's really interesting, you know, kind of the you know, kind of TV versus computer you speeding the TV's kind of your passive experience, you're sitting on the couch and you just kind of watching where the computer was more two way and then there was dual screen kind of activity, but you guys are bringing a lot of the stuff that was only available on your pc or your phone now directly into the Comcast experience, you know whether it's YouTube or whatever. So it really it's kind of blurring those lines. But I want to shift gears a little bit about, you know, kind of the role of the internet in homes today, has now expanded beyond entertainment. It's expanded beyond information and IoT now is entering the home probably the biggest one is nested, connected thermostats and connected door bells and ring and you know, we're seeing videos from people's rings all over the place. You guys are sitting again, right in the middle of that ecosystem. So how does IoT and connected devices and thermostats and refrigerators and doorbells impacted the way you guys think about delivering internet into the home? >> Well, I think it's really been a watershed moment for the company, moving from, if you go years back to bringing internet to the wall and making it available in the home to saying look, we've got to actually really control the coverage of that WiFi in the home and make sure that it reaches all the corners of the home but then also providing the control that people want of the devices in there we know that for power users we're seeing today, 20 connected devices on the home network. And I know my house, I'm up to 50, right? And I think what customers don't have and don't want is an IT person directly in their home. They want it to just work naturally and easily. >> Right. >> And so one measurement of success that I know is how often my mother in law gives me a call saying, "Hey, Preston, yeah, this thing's not working in my house." It's got to be really easy and straightforward. >> Right and then just in terms of just being a backhauler and the internet traffic that you guys are hearing because all those connected device or your kids devices, they all want 4k streaming, they're watching movies, you know, come down and watch TV on the big screen, no, no, no, you know, I'm watching it in the room. How does that kind of change the way you guys think about delivering bandwidth cause 4K is a lot more, go to NAB, you're just going to soon be 8K's and 12K's and all kinds of crazy stuff. So your role in actually just delivering bandwidth has changed significantly over the last over a year. >> Absolutely, I mean, there was a stat on bandwidth that surprised me even just to look at it, which is in, in the last 18 years, Comcast has increased bandwidth 17 times. And it's just every, you know, we just keep increasing that because the demand is there, you know, 4K takes, you know, more than your 1080p then did your SD and the more streaming that's happening, it's just, it's requiring more bandwidth, so we're happy to provide that. You know, we now offer one gig internet across all of our homes, we reached 56 million homes, I think it's the most in the United States as far as one gig availability. And so regardless of how much bandwidth you want to take, we're going to bring that to you. And I think recognizing that we also need that coverage in the home and out of the home through Xfinity WiFi hotspots, just trying to bring that there. But you mentioned kids too, I wanted to build on that which is, you know, I'm a parent and being able to control how and where my kids go in the internet is important. And so, you know, being able to put limits, whether it's bed time limits on their devices or we've recently introduced in our testing app base limits. So you could say they can't use Instagram or they can only use it 30 minutes a day. And so being able to have that kind of control puts you in the driver's seat as the parent of kids in the home. >> Preston, I think you're going to be busy for a little while here at the innovations center. >> We are for sure. >> All right, well, thanks for spending a few minutes we could talk all day but we'll have to leave it there. >> All right, thanks Jeff. >> Thanks a lot. He's Preston, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (distinct music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering Boomi World 19. Brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin, John Furrier is my co-host, and we are at Boomi World 2019 in Washington, D.C. Very pleased to be joined by the founder of Boomi and the co-founder and CEO of Guru, Rick Nucci. Hey, Rick. >> Hello. >> Lisa: Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, this is very cool setup. >> Lisa: Yeah, isn't it?! >> Rick: Yeah. >> So this is a founder of Boomi. It's pretty cool to have a celebrity on our stage. >> Rick: I'm not a celebrity. (laughs) >> (laughs) Talk to us about all that back in the day back in Philadelphia when you had this idea for what now has become a company that has 9,000+ customers in 80+ countries. >> Yeah, I'm beyond proud of this team and just how well they have done and made this business into what it is today. Yeah, way back in 2007, we were really looking at the integration market, and back then, cloud was really an unknown future. It was creeping up the Hype Cycle of the Gartner. Hype Cycle's my favorite thing they do. A lot of people were dismissing it as a fad, and we were early adopters of cloud internally at Boomi. We were early users of Salesforce and NetSuite and just thought and made a bet and a lot of this stuff is luck as any founder will tell you, any honest founder will tell you. And recognize that, hey, if the world were to move to cloud, how would you actually think about the integration problem? Because it would be very different than how you would think about it in the on-prem days when you have everything in your own data center behind your own four walls. In this world, everything's different. Security's a huge deal, the way data moves and has to mediate between firewalls is a big deal. And none of these products are built like this and so, really wanted as a team, and I remember these early conversations and had the willingness to take a big bet and swing for the fences and what I mean by that is really build a product from the ground up in this new paradigm, new cloud, and take a bet and say, hey, if cloud does take off, this will be awesome for Boomi. If not, well, we'll be in the line of all the other startups that have come and gone. And I think we ended up in a good spot. >> Yeah, that's a great point, Rick, about the founders being honest. And a lot of it is hard work, but having a vision and making multiple bets and big bets. I remember, when EC2 came out, it was a startup dream, too, by the way. You could just purchase a data center. But it wasn't fully complete, it was actually growing very fast. More services were coming on, they were web services, so that was API-based concepts back then. When was the crossover point for you guys going, "okay, we got this, the bets are coming in. "We're going to double down, we're going to double down on this." What were some of those moments where you started to get visibility that was a good bet? And what did you do? >> Yeah, what it really was was the rise of SaaS, very specifically, and the rise of business applications that were being re-architected in the cloud. And everybody knew about Salesforce, but there weren't a lot of other things back then. And there was NetSuite and a handful of others, but then, you started to see additional business units start to build cloud, and you had, in the HR space, with success factors in Taleo and marketing automation space with Eloqua and Marketo. CRM space, we all know that story, e-commerce space procurement, and you start to see these best-of-breed products rise up which is amazing, but as that was happening, it was proliferating the integration problem. And so what became really clear to us, I think, as we were going through this and finding product market fit for Boomi, again, back in 2007, 2008, that was the pattern that emerged, like hey, every time someone buys one of these products, they are going to have to integrate 'cause you're talking about employee data, customer data. You have to integrate this with your other systems and that was going to create an opportunity for us and that was where we were like, okay, I think we're onto something. >> You know, to date, we've been doing theCUBE for 10 years. We made a big bet that people, authentic conversation would be a good bet, turns out it worked. We love it, things going great, but now, we're living in a world now that's getting more complex and I want to get your thoughts that Dave Vellante, myself, Stu who have been talking about how clouds changed and we were goofing on the Web 2.0 metaphor by saying, Cloud 1.0, Cloud 2.0. But I want to get your thoughts on how you might see this because, if you say Cloud 1.0 was Amazon, compute storage, AtScale, cloud NATO, all started there. Pretty straightforward if you're going to be born in the cloud, then you could work with some things there, but to bring multicloud and for enterprises to adopt with this integration challenge, Cloud 2.0 unveils some new things like, for instance, network management now is observability. Configuration management is now automation (chuckles). So you start to see things emerge differently in this Cloud 2.0 operating model. How do you see Cloud 2.0? Do you believe that, one, there's a Cloud 2.0 the way I said it, and if so, what is your version of what Cloud 2.0 would look like? >> Yeah, I think, yes, definitely think things are changing and the way that I think about it is that we're continuing to unbundle, and what I mean by unbundle is we're continuing to proliferate... Buyers are willing to buy and, therefore, we're continuing to proliferate relatively narrower and narrower and deeper and deeper capabilities and functionalities. And one big driver of that is AI, specifically, machine learning, and not the hypey stuff, but the real stuff. It's funny, man, when you compare, right now, AI, and what I was just talking about, it's the same thing all over again. It's Hype Cycle crawling up the thing, okay. But now, I think the recipe for good AI products that really do solve problems is that they're very intentionally narrow and they're very deep because they're gathering good training data and they're built to solve a very specific problem. So I think-- >> Like domain expertise, domain-specific-- >> Exactly, industry expertise, domain expertise, use case. If you're gathering training data about a knowledge worker, the data you'll gather is very different if you're a salesperson or an HR professional or an engineer. And I think the AI companies that are getting it right, are really dialed in and focused on that, so as a result, you see this proliferation of things that might be layered on top of big platforms like CRM's and technologies like Slack, which is creating a place for all this to come together, but you're seeing this unbundling where you're getting more and more kind of almost microservices, not quite, but very fine-tuned, specific things coming together. >> So machine learning, I totally agree with you, it's definitely hype, but the hardcore machine learning has a math side to it and a cognition side, cognitive learning thing. But, also, data is a common thread here. I mentioned domain-specific. >> Rick: All about the data. >> So, if data's super important, you want domain expertise which I agree with, but also there's now a horizontal scalability with observation data. The more data you have, the better at machine learning. It may or may not, depending on what the context is, so you have contextual data, this is a (chuckles) hard thing. What's your view on this because this is where people maybe get caught around the axis of machine learning hype and not nearly narrowing on what their data thinking is. >> Rick: 100%. >> What's your--? >> 100%, I think people will tend to fall in the trap of focusing on the algorithms that they're building and not recognizing that, without the data, the algorithms are useless. Right? >> Lisa: Right. >> And that it's really about how, as a ML problem that you're trying to tackle. Are you gathering data that's good, high-quality, scalable, accurate, protected, and safe? Because now, for different reasons, but again, just like when we were moving to cloud, security and privacy are utmost important because, for any AI to do its job well, it has to gather a lot of data out of the enterprise and store it and train off of that. >> It's interesting a lot of the cloud play. I mean sales was just a unicorn right out of the gate and they were a pioneer, that's what it is. They were cloud before cloud was cloud as we know it today. But you see a lot of things like the marketing automation cloud platform. It's a marketing cloud, I got a sales cloud. Almost seem too monolithic and you see people trying to unbundle that. I think you're right. Or break it apart 'cause the data is stuck in this full-stack model because, if you agree with your sets, horizontal scalability and vertical integration is the architecture. Technically, that's half-stack. (chuckles) >> Yes, yes. >> John: So half-stack developers are evaluable now. >> Totally, and yes, I like that term. The other problem that I think you're getting at is tendency isolation of that data. A lot of things were built with that in mind, meaning that the best AI you're going to build is only going to be what you can derive from one customer's set of data. Whereas, now, people are designing things intentionally such that the more customers that are using the thing, the better and smarter it gets. And so, to your point about monolithic, I think the opportunity that the next wave of startups have is that they can design in that world and that just means that their technology will get better faster 'cause it'll be able to learn from more data and-- >> This hasn't been changing a lot in cloud. I want to get your thoughts because you guys at Boomi here are on a single-tenant instance model because the collective intelligence of the data benefits everybody as more people come in. That's a beautiful fly, we'll feel a lot like Amazon model to me. But the old days, multi-tenancy was the holy grail. Maybe that came from the telcos or whatever, hosting world. What's your view on single-tenant instance on a SaaS business versus, say, multiten... There's trade-offs and pros and cons. What's your opinion, where do you lean on this one? >> Yeah, I mean we, both Boomi and Guru, so two eras worth or whatever. You have to have some level of tenancy isolation for some level of what you do. And, at Boomi, what we did is we separated the sensitive, private data. Boomi has customers processing payroll through its product, so very, very sensitive stuff absolutely has to be protected and isolated per tenant, and Boomi and Guru is signing up for that, and the clauses that we sign to are security agreements. But what you can decouple from that is more of the metadata or the attributes about that data and that customer, so Boomi, you're referring to, launched way back when Boomi Suggest which basically learned. As all the people were building data maps, connecting different things together, Boomi could learn from all that and go, oh, you're trying to do this. Well, these however many other customers, let me suggest how these maps are drawn, and Guru, we're following a very similar pattern, so Guru, we store knowledge which also tends to be IP for a company and so, yes, we absolutely adhere to the fact that only a handful of our employees can ever see that stuff, and that's 'cause they're in devops, and they needed to keep things running, but all the tenants are protected from one another. No one could ever leak to another one. But there are things about organization and structure and tagging and learnings you can get that are not that sensitive stuff that does make the product better from an AI perspective the more people that use it. And so, I don't know that I'm giving you one or another, but I think it does come down to how you intentionally design your data to it. >> John: Decoupling is the critical piece. >> Absolutely. >> This is the cloud architecture. Decouple, use API's to connect highly cohesive elements, and the platform can be cohesive if shared. >> Absolutely, and you can still get all the benefits of scalability and elastic growth and, yeah, 100%. >> Along that uncoupling line, tell us a little bit briefly about what Guru is and then I want to talk about some of the use cases. I know I'm a big Slack user; you probably are too, John. Talk to us about what you're doing there, but just give our folks a sense of what Guru is and all that good stuff. >> Sure, I mean Guru's, in some ways, like Boomi, rethinking a very old problem, in this case, it's knowledge management. That's a concept we've talked about for a long time and I think, these days, it has really become something that does impact a company's ability to scale and grow reliably, so very specifically, what we do is we bring the knowledge that employees need to do their job to them when they need it. So imagine if you're a customer support agent and you're supporting Spotify, you're an employee of Spotify. And I write in and I want to know about the new Hulu partnership. As an agent, you use Guru to look up and give me that answer and you don't have to go to a portal, you don't have to go to some other place to do that. Guru's sitting there right next to your ticket or your chat as you're having it in real time, saying, hey, there's asking about Hulu. This is the important things you want to know and talk about. And then the other half of that is, we make sure that that doesn't go still. The classic problem with knowledge products is the information, when you're talking about something like product knowledge, changes all the time. And the world we live in is moving faster and faster and faster, so we used to ship product once a year, once every two years. Now we ship product every month, sometimes couple times a month. >> Can you get a Guru bot for our journalism and our Cube hosts? We can be real time. >> Hey! >> I would be happy to do that. >> That'd be great! >> (laughs) Guru journalist. >> Actually, you're able to set it right in there where your ears are-- >> Lisa: I'll take it. >> Just prompting you, exactly. So, and then you asked about Slack, that's a really great partner for us. They were an early investor in the company. They're a customer, but together, if you think about where a lot of knowledge exchange happens in Slack, it's, hey, I need to know something. I think I can go slack John 'cause I think he'll know the answer. He knows about this. And you're like the 87th person who's asked me that same thing over again. Well, with Guru being integrated into Slack, you can just say, "Guru, give them the answer." And you don't have to repeat yourself. And that expert fatigue problem is a real thing. >> John: That's a huge issue. >> Absolutely. >> And, as your company grows and more and more people are, oh, poor John's getting buried for being the expert, one of the reasons he got you there. Now he's getting burned out and buried from it. And so we seek to solve that problem and then, post-Guru, a company will scale faster, they'll onboard their employees faster, they'll launch products better, 'cause everyone will know what to talk about-- >> It's like a frequently asked questions operating system. >> Rick: Exactly. >> At a moment's notice. >> Technology, right? And making it living 'cause all those FAQ's change all the time. >> And that's the important part too is keeping it relevant, 24 by 7. >> Rick: Absolutely. >> Which is difficult. >> Contextual data analysis is really hard. What's the secret sauce? >> The secret sauce is that we live where you work. The secret sauce is that we focus very specifically on specific workflows like that customer support agent and so, by knowing what you're doing and what ticket you're working on and what chat you're having with a customer, Guru can be anticipatory over time and start to say, "hey, you probably "want to talk to him about this," and bring that answer to you. It's because we live where you work. And that was frankly accidental in a lot of ways. We were trying to solve the problem of knowledge living where you work, and then what we realized is, wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff that we can learn and give back to the customer about what problems they're solving and when they're using Guru and why, and that only makes the product better. So that's really, I think, the thing that, if you ask our typical customers, really gets them excited. They'll say, hey, because of Guru, I feel more confident when I'm on the phone, that I'm always going to give the right answer. >> That's awesome. >> I love hearing customers talk about or even have business leaders talk about some of the accidental discoveries or capabilities, but just how, over time, more and more and more value gets unlocked if you can actually, really extract value from that data. Last question, Rick, I need to know what's in a name? The name Boomi, the name Guru? >> Yes, well, I'll start with the less exciting answer which I always get asked about, which is Boomi, which is a Hindi word that means "earth" or "from the earth". And, sometimes, if you're ordering at the Indian restaurant, you'll see B-H-O-M-I and that might be the vegetables on the menu. That name came from an early employee of the company. I wish I could say that it had a connection to business (laughs). It really doesn't, it just was like, it looks cool, and people tend to remember the name. And honestly, there have been so many moments in the early, early days where we were like, should we change the name, it doesn't really. And we're like you know what? People tend to, it sticks with them, it's kind of exciting, and we kept it. Guru, on the flip side, one of our early employees came up with that name too, and I think she was listening to me talk about what we were doing and she's like, oh, that thing is like a guru to you. And so the brand promise is that you feel like a guru in your area of expertise within a company and that our product plays a relatively small role in you having that, feeling confident about that expertise. >> I love that, awesome. Rick, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE today, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> John: Thanks. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special Cube Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California with a special guest. Dialing in remotely Paul Martino, the founder of Bullpen Capital and also the producer of an upcoming film called The Inside Game. It's a story about a true story about an NBA betting scandal. It's really, it's got everything you want to know. It's got sports, it's got gambling, it's got fixing of games. Paul Martino, known for being a serial entrepreneur and then an investor, investing in some great growth companies, and now running his own firm called Bullpen Capital, which bets on high-growth companies and takes them to the next level. Paul, great to see you. Thanks for spending the time. Good to see you again. >> John, always good to see you. Thanks for having me on the show. >> So, you're a unique individual. You're a computer science whiz, investor, entrepreneur, now film producer. This story kind of crosses over your interests. Obviously in Philly, you're kind of like me, kind of a blue collar kind of guy. You know hot starters when you see it. You also were an investor in a lot of the sports, gambling, betting, kind of online games, we've talked about in the past. But now you're crossing over into filming movies. Which is, seems like very cool and obviously we're living in a date of digital media where code is software, code is content, obviously we believe that. What's this movie all about? All the buzz is out there, Inside Game. You get it on sports radio all the time. Give us the scoop. Why Inside Game? What's it about? Give us the 411. >> Yeah, so John, I mean, this is a story that picked me. My producing partner in this is a guy named Michael Pierce who made a bunch of great movies, including The Cooler, one of the best gambling movies, with William H Macy. And he says sometimes the movie picks you and sometimes you pick the movie. And I wasn't sitting around one day going wow I want to be a movie producer, it was just much more that my cousin is the principal in the story. My cousin was the go-between between the gambler and the referee. The three of them were friends ever since they were kids. And when they all got out of jail Tommy called me, Tommy Martino. He said hey Paulie, you're about the only legitimate business guy I know. Could you help me with my life rights? And that's how this started almost six years ago. >> And what progressed next? You sat down, had a couple cocktails, beers, said okay here's how we're going to structure it. Was it more brainstorming and then it kind of went from there? Take us through that progression. >> It was a pure intellectual property exercise, and this is where being a startup guy was helpful. I was like, Tommy, I'll buy your life rights. Maybe we'll get a script written, we'll put it on the shelf, so that if anybody ever wants to make this story they have to go through us. Almost like a blocking patent or a copyright. And he's like okay cool. And so I said I have no delusions of ever making this movie. I actually don't know that, I don't know anybody to make a movie. This is not my skill set. But if anybody ever wants to make the movie, they're going to have to come deal with us. And then the lucky break happens, like anything in a startup. I have this random meeting with a guy named Michael Pierce, who was at a firm called WPS Challenger out of London. And we're down in Hillstone in Santa Monica, and I say to him, I say I've got this script written about this NBA betting scandal, would you do me a favor? He literally laughs in my face. He goes a venture guy from Silicon Valley is going to hand me a script. What a bad, anyway, I was like look dude, I'm a good guy to have owe you a favor so just read this dang thing. About 8 hours later my phone rings, he says who the hell is Andy Callahan? This is the best script I've ever read in my entire life. Let's go make a movie. Andy Callahan was a friend of a friend from high school who wrote the script. He actually once beat Kobe Bryant when he was a center at Haverford when Kobe Bryant played at Lower Merion here in the Philly suburbs. So, it's kind of this local Philly story. I'm a local Philly blue collar guy, we put the pieces together, and I'll be danged and now six years later the film is in the can and you're probably going to see it during the NBA finals this year in June. >> All right, so there's some news out there it's on the cover on ESPN Magazine, the site is now launched. I've been hearing buzz all morning on this in the sports radio world. A lot of buzz, a lot of organic virality around it. Reminds of the Crazy, Rich Asians, which kind of started organically, similar kind of community behind it. This has really got some legs to it. Give us some taste of what's some of the latest organic growth here around the buzz. >> Yeah so, think about this. This happened in, primarily '06 and '07. They were sentenced in 2010 and were in jail in 2011. It is 2019 and the front page story on ESPN is What Tim, Tommy, and Jimmy Battista Did. Those were the three guys, the gambler, the ref, and the go-between. And this is a front page story on ESPN all these years later. So we know this story has tremendous legs. We know this movie has a tremendous built-in audience. And so now it's just our job to leverage all those marketing channels, places we pioneered, like Zynga and FanDuel to get people who care about the story into the theaters. And we're hoping we can really show people how to do a modern way to market a film using those channels we've pioneered at places like FanDuel and Zynga. >> You and I have had many conversations privately and here on the Cube in the past around startups disruption, and it's the same pattern right? No one thinks it's a great idea, you get the rights to it, and you kind of got to find that inflection point, that magical moment which comes through networking and just hard work and hustle. And then you've got everything comes together. And then it comes together. And then it grows. As the world changes, you're seeing digital completely change the game on Hollywood. For instance, Netflix, you've got Prime, you've got Hulu. This is, essentially, a democratization, I'm not saying, well first of all you've made some money so you had some dough to put into it, but here's a script from a friend. You guys put it together. This is now the new startup model going to Hollywood. Talk about that dynamic, what's your vision there? Because this, I think, is an important signal in how digital content, whether it's guys in the Cube doing stuff or Cube Studios, which we'll, we have a vision for. This is something that's real. Talk about the dynamic. How do you see the entrepeneurial vision around how movies are made, how content's made, and then, ultimately, how they're merchandised in the future. >> Right, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of buckets. There's the intellectual property bucket of the story, the script, etc. Then there's the bucket of getting the movie made. You know, that's the on the set and that's the director and that's post-production, and then there's the marketing. And what was really interesting is even though I'd never made a movie, two of those three buckets I knew a tremendous amount about from my experience as a startup investor. The marketing and the IP side I understood almost completely, even though I'd never made a film. And so all of the disruptive technologies that we learn for doing disruptive things like marketing a new thing called Daily Fantasy Sports, we were able to bring to bear to this film. Now, I had fun on the set and meeting all the actors, etc. But I had no delusion that I knew about the making of the movie part. So I plead ignorance there, but of the three buckets that you need to go make something in the media space 66% of what I knew as a startup guy overlapped and I think this is what the future of the media is. Because guys like me and you, John, we actually know a lot about this because we're startup people as opposed to we have to learn about it in terms of how to market and how to get an audience. I mean, my last company Aggregate Knowledge designs custom audiences for ad targeting. So we know how to find gamblers to go see this movie. That's literally the company I started. And so that's a thing that I'm very, very comfortable with and it's exciting to then work with the producer who did the creative and the director and I say hey guys, I've got this marketing thing under control, I know how to do it, oh by the way, the old Head of Marketing from FanDuel, he's a consultant to the project. Right, so, we got that. >> You got that, and the movie's being made. That's also again, back to entrepreneurship, risk. You got to take risks, right? This is all about risk management at the end of the day and you know, navigating as the lead entrepreneur, getting it done, there's heavy lifting and costs involved in making the movie, >> Right >> How did you, that's like production, right? You got to build a product. That is ultimately the product when it has to get to market. How did that go, what's your thoughts on your first time running a movie like this, from a production standpoint, learnings, observations? >> I learned a tremendous amount. I must admit, I was along for the ride on that piece of the puddle, puzzle. The product development piece of this was all new to me. But then again, I mean think about it, John, I started four companies, a social network, an ad targeting company, a game company, and a security company. I didn't know anything about those four companies when I started them either in terms of what the product needed to do. So learning a new product called make a movie was kind of par for the course, even though I didn't really know anything about it. You know, if you're going to be a startup person you got to have no fear. That's the real attribute you need to have in these kinds of situations. >> So I got to >> And so, witnessed that first-hand and, you know what, now, if I ever make a movie again I kind of know how to make that product. >> Yeah, well looking forward. You've got great instincts as an entrepreneur. I love hanging out with you. I got to ask you a question. I talk to a lot of young people, my son and his friends and I see people coming out of business school, all this stuff. You know, every college has an entrepreneurial program. Music, film, you know, whatever, they all have kind of bolted on entrepreneurship. You're essentially breaking down that kind of dogma of that you have to have a discipline. Anyone can do this, right? So talk about the folks that are out there, trying to be entrepreneurial, whether you're a musician. This is direct to consumer. If you have skills as an entrepreneur it translates. Talk about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, if you're a musician or someone who has, say, content rights or has content story. What do they do? What's your advice? >> We have lived through, perhaps the most awesome period of the last five to 10 years, where it got cheap to do a startup. You know, when we're doing our first startups 20 years ago, it cost 5 million bucks to go get a license from Oracle and go hire a DBA and do all that stuff. You know what, for 5 grand you can get your website up, you can build, you can use your iPhone, you can film your movie. That's all happened in the last five to 10 years. And what it's done is exactly the word you used. It's democratized who can become an entrepreneur. Now people who never thought entrepreneurship was for them, are able to do it. One of our great examples of this is Ipsy, our cosmetics company. You know, Michelle Phan was a cocktail waitress working in Florida, but she had this YouTube following around watching her videos of her putting her makeup on. And you know when we met her, we're like you know what? You're the next generation of what entrepreneurs look like. Because no, she didn't go to Stanford. She didn't have a PhD in computer science, but she knew what this next generation of content marketing was going to look like. She knew what it was to be a celebrity influencer. You know, that company Ipsy makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year now, and I don't think most people on Sand Hill would've necessarily given Michelle the chance because she didn't look like what the traditional entrepreneur looked like. So it's so cool we live in a time where you don't need to look like what you think an entrepreneur needs to look like or went to the school you had to think you'd go to to become an entrepreneur. It's open to everybody now. >> And the key to success, you know, again, we've talked about those privately all the time when we meet, but I want to get your comment on the record here. But I mean, there's some basic blocking and tackling that's independent of where you went to school that's being creative, networking, networking, networking, you know, and being, good hustle. And being, obviously good judgment and being smart. Do your thoughts on the keys to success for as those folks saying hey you know I didn't have to go to these big, fancy schools. I want to go out there. I want to test my idea. I want to go push the envelope. I want to go for it. What's the tried and true formula from your perspective? >> So when you're in the early stage of hustling and you want to figure out if you're good at being an entrepreneur, I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. Every meeting is a job interview. Now, you might not think it's a job interview, but you want to think about every meeting, this might be the next person I start my company with. This might be the person I end up hiring to go run something at my company. This might be the person I end up getting money for, from to start my company. And so show up, have some skills, have some passion, have a vision, and impress the person on the other side of the table. Every once in a while I get invited to a college and they're like well Paul, life's easy for you, you started a company with Mark Pinkus and you're friend with Reid Hoffman and this... Well how the hell do you think I met those people? I did the same thing I'm telling you to do. When I was nobody coming out of school, I went and did stuff for these guys. I helped them with a business plan. I wrote the code of Tribe, and then now all of the sudden we've got a whole network of people you can go to. Well, that didn't happen by accident. You had to show up and have some skills, talent, and passion and then impress the person on the other side of the table. >> Yeah >> And guess what? If you do that enough times in a row, you're going to end up having your own network. And then you're going to have kids come in and say, wow, how can I impress you? >> Be authentic, be genuine, hustle, do networking, do the job interview, great stuff. All right, back to final point I want to get your thoughts on because I think this is your success and getting this movie out of the gate. Everyone, first, everyone should go see Inside Game. Insidegamemovie.com is the URL. The site just went up. This should be a great movie. I'm looking forward to it, and knowing the work that went in, I followed your journey on this. It should be great. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Uh, digital media, um, your thoughts because we're seeing a direct to consumer model. You've got the big companies, YouTube, Amazon, others. There's kind of a, a huge distribution of those guys. The classic Web 2.0 search kind of paradigm and portal. But now you've got a whole 'nother set of distribution or network effects. Your thoughts, because you were involved in, again, social networking before it became the monster that it is now. How is digital media changing? What's your vision of how that's happening and how does someone jump on that wave and be successful? >> Yeah, we're in the midst of disruption. I mean, I'm in the discussions and final negotiations right now on how we're going to end up ultimately doing the film distribution. And I am very disappointed with the quality of the thinking of the people on the other side of the table. Because they come from very traditional backgrounds. And I'm talking to them about, I want to do a site takeover across Zynga. I want to do a digital download on FanDuel of a 20 minute clip of the film. And they're like what's FanDuel? Who's Zynga? And I'm sitting there, I'm like guys, this is the new media. Oh, by the way, there's a sports app called Wave and Wave is where the local influencers in the markets who want to write the stories are, and we want to do a deal with those guys. And oh, by the way, the CEO of that company is a buddy of mine I met years ago, right? One of those kids I gave advice to, and now I'm going to ask him for a favor from, right, that's how it works. But, it's amazing when you have these conversations with traditional old line media companies. They don't understand any of the words coming out of your mouth. They're like Paul, here's how much I'll give you for your film. Thank you, we'll go market it. I'm like, really? Seriously? I got the former CMO of FanDuel going to help out on this. You don't want to talk to him? >> Yeah >> And so this is where the industry is really ripe for disruption. Because the people from the startup world have already disrupted the apple cart and now we've just got to demonstrate that this model is going to continue to work for the future and be ready when the next new kind of digital transmedia thing comes along and embrace that, as opposed to be scared to death of it or not even know how to talk the language of the people on it. >> Well, you're doing some amazing venturing in your, kind of, unique venture capital model on Bullpen Capital. Certainly isn't your classic venture capital thing, so I'm sure people are going to be talking to you about oh, Paul, are all VCs going to be doing movies? I'm sure that's a narrative that's out there. But you're not just a normal venture capital. You certainly invest. So, venture capitals have reputation issues right now. People talk about, well, you know, they're group think. You know, they only invest in who they see themselves. You mentioned that comment there. The world's changing in venture. Your thoughts on that, how you guys started your firm, and your evolution of venture capital. And is this a sign that you'll see venture capitalists go into movies? >> Well, I don't know about that part. There have been a couple venture people who have done movies. But the part I will talk about is the you got to know somebody, it's an inside game, ha ha, we'll play double entendre on Inside Game here. You know, 20% of the deal we've done at Bullpen, we've done over 100. 20% of them were cold emails on something like LinkedIn or business plans at bullpen.com. 20%, now there's this old trope in venture if you don't get a warm intro I won't even talk to you. Well 20% of our deals came in and we had no idea who the person on the other side was. That's how we run the firm. And so if you're out there going I'm one of those entrepreneurs in the Midwest and no one, I don't know anyone. I'm not in a network, send me a plan. I'm someone who's going to look at it. It doesn't mean I'm going to be an investor, but you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you a shot. And I don't care where you're from or what school you went to or what social clique you're in or what your political persuasion is. Matter of fact, I literally don't care. I'm going to give you a shot. Come into my office and that, I think, is what was missing in a lot of firms, where it's a we only do security and we only look at companies that spun out of Berkeley and Stanford. And yeah, there can be an old boys network in that. But you know what, we like to talk to everybody. And the more blue collar the CEO is, the more we love them at Bullpen. >> That's awesome. Talk about the movie real quick on terms of how Hollywood's handling it. Um, expectations, in terms of reaction, was it positive, is it positive, what's the vibe going on in Hollywood, is this going to be a grassroots kind of thing around the FanDuels and your channels? What's your plan for that and what's the reaction of Hollywood? >> So it's going to be a lot of all of the above. But PR is going to be a huge component, I mean, part of the reason we're on today is there's a huge front page story on ESPN about Tim Donaghy and the NBA betting scandal of 2007. And so the earned media is going to be a huge component of this. And I think this is where the Hollywood people do understand the language we're speaking. We're like, look, we have a huge built-in audience that we know how to market to. We have a story. Actually, in the early days, you asked about risk? Back when I was thinking about if I would do this project I would do the following little market research. I'd walk into a sports bar, it didn't matter what town I was in. I could be in Dallas, I could be in Houston, I could be in Boston. I would literally walk up to the bar and say, hey, uh, six of you at the bar, ever hear of Tim Donaghy? It'd be amazing. About seven out of 10 people would go yeah he was the referee, crooked referee in the NBA. I'm like, this is amazing. Seven out of 10 people I meet in a bar know about the story I want to go tell. That sounds like a good chance to make a movie, as opposed to a movie that has no built-in audience. And so, a built-in audience with PR channels that we know work, I think we can really show Hollywood how to do this in a different way if this all works. >> And this comes back to my point around built-in audiences. You know, YouTube has got a million subscribers. That's kind of an old metric. That means they, like an RSS feed kind of model. That's a million people that are, could be, amplifying their network connections. It is a massive built-in audience. The iteration, the DevOps kind of mindset, we talk about cloud computing, can be applied to movies. It's agile movie making. That's what you're talking about. >> Yeah, and by the way, so we have a social network of all the actors and people in the film. So when it's ready, let's go activate our network of all the actors that are in the film. Each of them have a couple million followers. So let's go be smart. Let's, two weeks before the movie, let's send some screenshots. A week before the movie let's show some exclusive videos. Two days before the film, go see it, it's now out in the theaters. You know what, that's pretty, that's 101. We've got actors. We've got producers. Like, let's go use the influencer network we built that actually got the movie made. Let's go on Sports Talk, talk about the movie. Let's go on places like this and talk about how a venture guy made a movie. This is the confluence of all of the pieces all coming together at once. And I just don't think enough people in the film business or in the media business think big enough about going after these audiences. It's oh, we're going to take ads out on TV and I'm going to see my trailer and we're going to do this and that's how we do it. There's so many better ways to get your audience now. >> And this is going to change, just while I've got you here, it's just awesome, awesome conversation. Bringing it back to kind of the CMO in big companies, whether it's consumer or B to B or whatever, movies, the old model of here's our channels. There's certainly this earned media kind of formula and it's not your classic we've got a website, we're going to do all this instrumentation, it's a whole 'nother mechanism. So talk about, in your opinion, the importance of earned media, vis a vis the old other buckets. Owned media, paid media, well-defined Web 1.0, Web 2.0 tactics, earned media is not just how good is our PR? It's actually infrastructure channels, it's networks, a new kind of way to do things. How relevant and how important will this be going forward? Because there's no more website. It's a, you're basically building a media company for this movie. >> That is exactly right. We're building an ad hoc media business. I think this is what the next generation of digital agencies are going to look like. And there are some agencies that we've talked to that really understand all of what you've just said. They are few and far between, unfortunately. >> Yeah, well, Paul, this was theCube. We love talking to people, making it happen. Again, our model's the same as yours. We're open to anyone who's got signal, and you certainly are doing a great job and great to know you and follow your entrepreneur journey, your investment journey, and now your film making journey. Paul Martino, General Pen on Bullpen Capital, with the hot film Inside Game. I'm definitely going to see it. It should be really strong and it's going to be one of those movies like Crazy, Rich Asians, where not looking, not really well produced, I mean not predicted to be great and then goes game buster so I think this is going to be one of those examples. Paul, thanks for coming on. >> Love it, thank you! >> This Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California, bringing ya all the action. Venture capitalist turned film maker Paul Martino with the movie Inside Game. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (triumphant music)

(majestic music) >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We're here in our Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE talking about cloud computing and all the greatness around what's happening in tech. We're here with a practitioner who's also the CTO and lead engineering manager executive. His name is Dan Drew, he's with Didjatv. They're a hot startup that's growing doing a unique solution around changing the game and opening up TV for the masses. Great, great opportunity. Thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things I love about what you guys are doing is you guys are a start up that's challenging the status quo with TV, taking over the air in cities and having an app where you can watch TV without having to, literally cutting the cord. And so it's challenging, but there's some technical things that require cloud. You guys are growing, you're a user of cloud. How are you looking at building out the engineering team? Because you're DevOps, you've been doing DevOps from day one, but you have to have local presences in these markets. You have a data center in each market, plus you have cloud, you're a hybrid. >> Right, exactly. Well, I mean, for us, the cloud is essential because we have, even though we have to have a local presence for each of these markets, because we're obviously receiving local signals and we can only do that in the market, you can't receive an LA signal in Boston, right? So we have the local presence, but at the same time we want to have all of our central stuff managed in a much more effective way, in a central way that we can scale as we grow, right? So as we continue to add markets across the country, which we hope to do very quickly, we want to make sure that the central services that manage all the things that are common in the apps can grow and totally grow as automatically and as scalable as we can. And so we can most effectively accomplish that by leveraging cloud technologies. >> Just to get the idea straight now as we kind of get to the cloud stuff, is you guys are taking over the air TV, which is free-- >> Yes. >> The old antenna days without cable, and there's channels that are available for free. And then putting that into a local region, so LA, Phoenix, San Francisco, Boston, they have their local broadcasts over the air. You bring it in and it's digital and the user's access it via apps and all the things that connect in the edge in the home? >> That's right. >> That's pretty much the general concept? >> Yeah. So basically what we do is we allow you to get all those things without having to worry about an antenna in your house or if you're mobile or whatever. So a lot of people these days might just get a Roku and not want to worry about a physical antenna or whether you're pointing it in the right direction or whether there's some other house in the way. And so we allow them to get the over-the-air channels at high quality no matter where they are without having to worry about sort of the antenna part of the problem. >> It's a great mission, I love it. It's ambitious, a lot of moving parts. You have the content, you got transmission, but it really opens up freedom for people, whole new demographics, great stuff. So okay, how do you make this happen? You got to go deploy clouds. So you obviously want to use the most efficient. You guys are lean and mean. You don't have a huge IT staff. It's you and then a couple of people, basically you. >> Yes, we have a two person off staff and me and some engineers. But yeah, we're pretty lean. >> Yeah, there's not going to be a big data center in the future given what you guys got, but you've been successful with the cloud. Take us through how you guys laid this out with cloud and with the hybrid solution. What are some of the things that you've implemented? What's the architecture, how does it work? >> Well, as you can imagine a lot of our problem is managing sort of network architecture, make sure we have that laid out and that the data, one of the key things for us is the data centers and the cloud talking to each other, as with any hybrid solution. So we spend a lot of time with automation. One of the challenging things with cloud is your first instinct is just get things up. And so you immediately just start going into consoles and start spinning things up, and the next thing you know you've got a huge mess, right? And your ability to get things working or scale, you realize you have to kind of start again or you're constantly working around the problem you created. So we've invested a lot of time in ramping up for automation, make sure every part of the system is well-defined, well understood; that we have the networking set up the way we need to so the data centers can talk to each other. And then also a key part of the decision in a hybrid model is what's in the cloud and what's not? So for us, managing the TV signal, we're basically transcoding incoming signals 24/7. So that's one area where if you look at cloud pricing, that's not the most effective thing to do, is to have 24/7 content going in and out. So that's the type of thing we look at. Okay, we're going to do-- >> And plus you've got a geography challenge, so that's an easy check. >> Yeah, yeah. But you might be tempted to say let's put all the transcoding in the cloud because scale and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you really look at the other factors like how is that going to slow down your network, your ability to deliver streams, your cost effectiveness, that's just where you start to say okay, this offer's going to stay here, this offer's going to go there. >> And that's a latency concern and cost, both or-- >> Definitely latency. We pride ourselves on how quickly we go from over the air to someone's phone. I mean, if you compare-- >> That's table stakes for you, that's like the core app? >> Yes, yes. I mean, we're 30 seconds to a minute faster than Hulu or any of those people as far as our streams going live. And then the other table stakes, because we're lean, is managing our costs. And it's obviously, piping all of that into the cloud for us is not cost effective. And then we also looked at other third-party services like analytics. So our services that manage events and things like that that are core to your app of getting metrics or who's watching your app, how, are they watching it, what device are they watching it on, what time are they watching it? So we looked at different solutions, and that was again a place where the cloud solution ended up matching our requirements and, from a pricing perspective, just made a lot of sense for us versus some other third party or rolling our own, right? >> So cost is not an issue? If it's centralized, you put it in the cloud because you take care of the geography, that's key with the TV signals or whatnot. And then cloud prices, right, if it matches the requirements, manage it within Amazon? >> Yeah. >> And Amazon's your cloud, right? >> Yes, that's right. >> Okay. Okay, so stepping back for a second, you mentioned networking. Because I think one of the things I'm hearing in a lot of these conversations with friends and practitioners who are doing some cutting edge work is they're staying with the holy trinity of the three horsemen, if you will. Storage, compute and networking. The game doesn't change. No matter what people say about storage being dead, it's never going to be dead, right? Those things will change though. So the question I have for you, Dan, is what's the impact that cloud has had on network? I mean, compute's pretty straightforward. You know what compute is. You throw money at compute, you can spin up stuff so it scales, that's a beautiful thing. Storage, some visibility to add storage, some work to be done there; but network has always been a problem. Do you start with networking first? How does cloud and cloud native and those services impact networking? >> Well, it's one of those areas, naturally like all of those areas I guess, but network certainly, where there's really no replacement for expertise and really understanding how does this work? And then being able to apply that to, okay, what does, in our case, like Amazon, provide as far as how much bandwidth can we get in and out? And then planning, okay, how do I manage my hops if I'm going to go build my VPC and my network layout? And how that's all going to go from we're getting a signal over here and it's going to hop, hop, hop, hop, hop. What are those hops and how do we get the most bang for buck out of that? Make sure that that's a little latency between each of those as possible. And that's something where you just have to have the networking experience to understand what are all the variables because there's a lot of levers you can pull in the cloud. They give you a lot of options, which is a blessing and a curse. It's not just push a button and it's magically the perfect solution. You have to really go in and understand what are all those things you can tweak, including what type of instance you choose, which can affect your network bandwidth, as well as your processing power. I mean, you really have to dig into those things. But I would say, for most companies, Amazon or someone like that is still investing way more effort than you're ever likely to in making sure the network and the infrastructure is solid. And they're more invested in doing it because they have to support all these customers on it, and they all have to be happy. >> So they know they have to address it. It's just evolution. >> Exactly, exactly. And yeah, you may have special needs where there's options they provide where maybe you pay more to get higher performance if you need that, but I would say, certainly for some, a company like us, there's no way we're going to spend as much effort trying to get the data center up with the big pipes and everything else that you have. You just got to make sure that you don't shoot yourself in the foot by configuring it wrong. >> And that's really the key. I mean, provisioning, configuration, human error, these are all things. I mean, people also said about Amazon early on, oh securing the cloud sucks. Now it's better security. I mean, the head of the CIA said, on the record, my worst day of securing the cloud is better than my best day on premises. And so it is getting those kinds of scale of things. But at the end of the day, packets are packets and you go from point A to point B. Networking, that's never going to change. So your point about serviceability and programmability comes up, so you guys are living the DevOps ethos because you have to. And you're building that into your entire plan. And this is kind of where I see this next level of evolution where networks are programmable. So what does that look like? Is that configuring configuration management, things from these early trip wires, configuration management, monitoring, easy ones. What's next? What does programmable networking mean for cloud architect because that seems to be an open question right now. What's your thoughts to that? >> I mean, if you're talking about a system like Amazon or I assume like Azure or Google, a lot of that is there where you see like the security issues for example, or where people didn't really make the effort to understand how to lock that down or they couldn't figure it out, things weren't working and they said, all right, open the world, whatever. But if you look at managing security groups, we spent a lot of time managing security groups who can talk to who. Make sure only the people that can talk to each other are supposed to talk to each other. And that's really where I think a system like Amazon will again do that better than you can without a lot of effort, which is they sort of boil it down to just say this person can talk to this person on this port and we'll do the rest. We'll manage firewalls and make sure the ports can talk to each other, whatever. But you just have to tell us they can, and we'll worry about what happens underneath. And so I think you get a lot of that already. Again, it's one of those things where you can shoot yourself in the foot. You can bang your head against the wall a lot of why can't these things talk to each other, but at the end of the day, I'd rather they couldn't talk to each other than it was too open or-- >> Right, it's interesting. You look at the networking thing at the end of the day, if you make it programmable, it just has to work. And I think that brings up the trade offs operationally. And as you guys grow your operation, what are some of the operational factors that you, when you look at the the dots you're connecting with your business as you guys grow, on operations? Is it a trade off of cost and performance? Because obviously you have performance issues on the app because you're streaming to the TV, but you mentioned costs. How are you balancing those trade offs? And what do you look for operationally to evaluate the trade off? >> I think a lot of the time it comes from what do we want our core competencies to be? Is it worth it for us to build this ourselves or develop that skill set? And then you trade that off of what would it cost us to build it ourselves or use Amazon's solution or use some other third-party solution? And then it really comes down to, even if that's more expensive, do we really want to build it ourselves even though that might be cheaper? Is that really worth it to us? >> It's not a core competency. And if you can get it out in the web, why not? >> Yeah, so for example what's in our data centers are transcoding stack, all of that. Yes, we do that ourselves. We don't use Amazon's transcoders, all of that, because that's just key to our business and it's important that we manage that very tightly and it does what we want. And it's also much more cost effective because of what we're doing. We're not just transcoding it (overlapping dialogue)-- >> It's your competitive advantage. That's what you guys are banking on as IP. >> Exactly, but managing the network infrastructure? No. (chuckles) Spinning up Docker containers? No. We're happy to shell that off to Amazon and just-- >> I was talking to a network buddy the other day, and he says, John, what's the big thing with cloud? What's in it for me? I go, here's the modernization of cloud. You're a commandline guy. Commandline interface is over because if you want to go cloud, you're going to be dashboard driven. You're going to be looking at a much more operator role, less of a go in and do more commandline interface, configure these switches, do these things. Kind of connect the dots form. And he goes, okay. Then his next question, which I'll ask you, is he goes, how do you evaluate cloud providers? What's the criteria? Because Amazon's got the most services. They've been around the longest, but Google's got great AI and Azure's got Azure stuff. I'm trying to find some strengths here. (Dan chuckles) They've got Microsoft Office, okay, and some other things. But how would you evaluate, if you had a bank off again today, how would you advise friends in terms of what to look for in a cloud provider? >> I think obviously maturity. This is not something you change your mind about six months from now. If you're going to pick a cloud provider and start deploying on it, that's an investment. You have to be willing to live with that decision for years, likely, right? If you picked wrong and it was painful enough, you might make the switch. So I think you definitely have to do the due diligence on does it do what I need it to do? So for us, it's not just networking and infrastructure. That's, what other service do they have? So for example, the database supports we use. We use their eventing supports so we can send metrics. We use Redshift for big data storage. So you kind of have to look at what does your product need now or in the future? And what do we get? Is it worth it? And you're never going to get everything, but you may find that one gives you 80% and the other one gives you 60 and the other one give you 30. One gives you Office, whatever that, you know. And then also, like integration. You want to look at what else might I want to integrate with and what does that look like? For example, having done a lot of technology evaluations, that's a big key as, well, we're going to plop this not just by itself and it's going to solve everything. We're going to have 10 other things that integrate with it. And how mature is that ecosystem? >> Yeah, and then you have to tie it to the core competency, which you mentioned earlier. >> Core competency, and then you look at other higher level things like what a support looks like? If something goes down in the middle of the night, and I going to be able to talk to someone who can help me out? So there's a lot of things, if you get sort of the higher level of decision making, you really have to consider this is a bet for the product to be up 24/7 that people are going to rely on, and you want to take a real deep dive and look at it. >> Dan, we were talking before we came on camera here about Kubernetes and containers, and you had mentioned there's been some homegrown versions of containers. Containers have been around for awhile. But now, more than ever, you're seeing that as kind of a linchpin, a track towards micro services, which is the path towards server lists and all this greatness that the cloud can bring with cloud native, if you're ready for it. So the question I have for you is, for folks that are looking at containers and Kubernetes, what in those technologies, what should they look for there? Obviously, maturity is one. Kubernetes, I think, has kind of become a de facto standard, but you still can pull that down and run it in your own Kubernetes. Do you use Amazon? So what should folks, practitioners, look for in the technologies behind containers and Kubernetes? >> Well, at this point, like you said, there used to be about half a dozen different container management systems, and I'm sure they're still out there. But more less, Kubernetes has won. If you go to any cloud provider, they will have Kubernetes support. And then there's a pretty big ecosystem around Kubernetes now. So you're really looking at what's going to help me deploy my software the easiest? A lot of people are still using packages and things like that. And I think a lot of the reason for the adoption of containers is not just hey, it's another packaging system, but it has the advantages kind of like virtual machines. And I think everybody loved virtual machines for the right reasons, but where containers kind of took over is they're more lightweight. Virtual machines, because they're an entire hosted operating system, they have a lot of overhead. And you have to really reserve resources and things like that for that world. >> And they served a purpose at that time. >> Exactly, right? For the same concept of having an isolated package that I can just install on machines and it works, still holds true. And that's what container provides but with a much smaller footprint where you can run them without all the extra overhead and all the extra stuff that's in between a virtual machine and its host. So I think they serve that containers are just sort of the next evolution of the virtual machine. And then where something like Kubernetes comes in is sort of similar like where VMware would have been, where you can sort of put your services in a repository and then say, look, here's a bunch of hosts, go figure it out. Which, once you get to scale, that's really where you want to be. If you're still micromanaging how many instances you have, you're not going to scale. >> You're not ready for Kubernetes basically is what you're saying? >> No. >> So there's a tipping point for Kubernetes. What is that tipping point? What's the scale? What's the order of magnitude, general view on (overlapping dialogue) >> Well, I mean, if you're talking about containers, if you're already sort of in the container world, that tipping point for that, or say Amazon's container service is sort of day one, don't start deploying containers manually. That's just crazy. Figure this out. And even if you configure it to say you're only going to to two and I'll worry about autoscaling later, at least you have that foundation and you know where your containers go and you know someone's managing the host for you instead of you going I'm going to go to host X and tell it run container Y, and I have to do that all manually because now you're sort of gone back to the stone ages of operational deployment of where I'm going to log in and install a package and do everything manually. >> And nobody wants that by the way? >> Nobody, nobody should want that. If you do, please, please don't work. I don't know what to say. >> Don't show up. >> Don't show up. Don't show up. >> Or buy short stock, whatever company. >> Yes, exactly. So I think yeah, if you're going to go the container model, you want to go figure that out and get the expertise and get that set up. And again, even if you are not going to use all the bells and whistles right away, there's a lot of, like with any technology, a lot of quirks and challenges with managing containers like managing networking of how does this request go from someone's browser to this container running on this host inside a container? And that's not trivial. So having something like Kubernetes that just sort of handles that, not that Kubernetes doesn't have its own quirks and challenges to get it set up and running, but the whole point of that system is to deal with that, of give me a cluster of hosts and I will help you just load balance and deal with this stuff. >> So, Dan, final question for you. You've been in the industry a long time. You've seen the waves of innovation. You had a stellar career as Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering at Didja; VP of Engineering CTO, again, growing start ups and you're DevOps, you're lean and mean and growing, so that's cool. Not the big IT shop. But as the world changes, what are you most excited about now? Because you've seen the movie before. You've seen the old days, you saw the transition, you're seeing what cloud is bringing. I see you're on top of it here. What's exciting about this time right now? What are you excited about? >> Well, I think what's exciting is that you're seeing a lot more technologies that enable companies to scale and grow. I mean, the hardest thing in a company, like once you get past, geez, even like 30, 50 people, if your company is getting that big, you start to see the technology start to trip over. You really start to see the issues of, crap, we've got a spike and the whole service went down, or whatever that is, or a database failover. And so the fact that it's much easier and less effort to access technologies that allow you to scale, granted you have to make the effort to learn how to use them, but the fact that they exist versus go roll your own of everything, I think is exciting. And I think, on the same track, the availability of these scalable data stores like Aurora or Redshift or whatever, where you used to again just have to figure that out yourself, I mean, storage is the biggest pain for scaling. That's the first thing that dies horribly, right? So just the fact that things like those are available and managed for you, I think will help make a lot of companies be successful, where three, four, five years ago that wasn't available and you would have had to figure it out yourself and just falling over. >> And the upshot too is when you're a builder like yourself, when you're building stuff and deploying, you can do more with 20 people on a team. >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> I mean, just think about the productivity. I mean, think about what you do with 20 now with cloud that you'd have to ramp up to and fundraise for. Build out the data center, get the QA department, get the engineering. I mean, massive amounts of overhead and time loss. >> Well, you don't need 3 DBAs anymore, right? So absolutely. What we can do with a 10-person team today is massive compared to what we could do five years ago. >> All right, Dan Drew, CTO, Executive Vice President of Engineering at a completely called Didja. D-I-D-J-A-T-V, check him out. Hot startup doing a really amazing mission trying to bring over-the-air TV to local communities on an app with programming. Certainly guys, any CUBE content you want, feel free to use all of our free content. Happy to donate theCUBE content to the Didja mission. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Dan Drew here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with a CUBE Conversation here in our Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE, thanks for watching. (majestic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Manhattan it's the Cube. Covering AWS Summit New York City 2017. Brought to you buy Amazon Web Services. >> Hello and welcome to the Big Apple. AWS Summit kicking off here at the Javits Convention Center New York, New York. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, welcome to the Cube as we continue our coverage here. Really I feel like this is ongoing, Stu, as far as what we're doing with AWS (mumbles) public sector summit. AWS from the outside in for a very long time. So tell me what you make of this. I mean regional show, we probably have four or 5,000 folks here, good turnout. What's the vibe you got, what's the feeling? >> It's really interesting 'cause we've covered a few of the regional summits but it's the first one that I've attended. I'm actually already have been starting to plan for AWS reinvent, which is the big show in November. Expecting probably around 50,000 people at that show, but I think four years ago, four and a half years ago when I went to the first (mumbles) summit in Las Vegas, it was about the size of what this show is. So Adrian Cockcroft got up on stage, said there were about 20,000 people registered. Of course registered doesn't mean that they're all here. A lot of people I know watching the live stream as well as it's free to attend so if I'm in New York City, there's just a few people in New York that care about tech probably. So maybe they'll pop in sometime for today, but in the keynote there's definitely a few thousand people. It's a good sized expo hall here. This could be a five or 6,000 person event for the size of the expo hall that they have here, and the Javits center can really hold some big activity here. Impressive at scope because Amazon and the cloud is still in early days. As Jeff (mumbles) says, there is no day two, we're always day one and what's going on. Went through a lot of announcements, a lot of momentum, a lot of revenue in this big cloud thing. >> You talk about Adrian too, we'll get to his keynote comments in a little bit. Talking about revenue growth still in the uptick year to year 42%. So still going there, but then on the other side you do se some writing going on that maybe upticks slowing down just a hair as far as cloud deployment goes. >> Yeah that's a great thing, 'cause we're all staring at the numbers and it's no longer, Amazon right now is not growing 75, 80% as opposed to the companies trying to catch up to them, like Microsoft, is growing at more of that 75 (talking over each other) >> But Amazon if you look at infrastructured service, is the largest out there. What was it, it was a 16 billion dollar run rate looking at the last 12 months looking back. Still over 40% growth rate. So yes is the growth slowing down a little bit, but that's just because they're not at a big number so it's a little tougher, but they keep adding services, they keep adding users. Some big users up on stage, some new services getting announced because the way Andy Jassy puts it, I mean everyday when you wake up, there's another three services from Amazon. So it's not like they had to say, oh geeze, can we hold something off? I go to the typical enterprise show and it's like, oh we're going to have this bundle announcements that we do. Amazon could have one of these every week somewhere and everyday could be like, here's three new services and they're kind of interesting because everyday that's kind of what they have. >> Yeah and I don't mean to paint it like the wolf is at the door, by any means, but the competitors are at the door. So how much of that factors into this space (mumbles) you pointed everybody else has this huge market share. They're not even (mumbles) they're like the elephant and the gorilla in the room, but at the same time, you do, as you're coming on, Google's still out there looking. There's another player as well. >> Well if you talk to the Amazon people, they don't care about the competitors, they care about their customers. So they focus very much on what their customers are doing. They work on really small teams. If we want to talk about a couple of the announcements today, one of the ones that, at least the community I was watching, it's AWS glue, which really helps to get ETL, which is the extract, transform, and load really a lot of the heavy lifting and undifferentiated heavy lifting that data scientists are doing. Matt Wood, who was up on the keynote said 75% of their time is done on this kind of stuff, and here's something that can greatly reduce it. Few people in the Twitter stream were talking about they've used the beta of it. They're really excited. It was one that didn't sound all that exciting, but once you get into it it's like, oh wow, game changer. This is going to free up so much time. Really accelerate that speed of what I'm doing. Adrian Cockcroft talked about speed and flight freeing me from some of the early constraints. I'm an infrastructure guy by background and everything was like, and I've got that boat anchor stuff that I need to move along and the refresh cycles, and what do I have budget for today? And now I can spin things up so much faster. They give an example of, oh I'm going to do this on Hive and it's going to take me five years to do it as opposed to if I do it in the nice AWS service it takes 155 seconds. We've had lots of examples like this. One of the earliest customers I remember talking to over four years ago, Cycle Computing was like, we would build the super computer and it would have taken us two years and millions of dollars to build, and instead we did the entire project in two months and it cost us $10,000. So those are the kind of transformational things that we expect to hear from Amazon. Lots of customers, but getting into the nuance of it's a lot of building new service. Hulu got on stage and it wasn't that, they didn't say we've killed all of our data centers and everything that you do under Hulu is now under AWS. They said, we wanted to do live TV and live TV is very different from what we had built for in our infrastructure, and the streaming services that Amazon had, and the reach, and the CDN, and everything that they can do there makes it so that we could do this much faster and integrate what we were doing before with the live TV. Put those things together, transformational, expand their business model, and helps move forward Hulu so as they're not just a media company, they're a technology company and Amazon and Amazon support as a partner helps them with that transformation. >> So they're changing their mission obviously, and then technologically they have the help to do that. Part of the migration of AWS migration, we talked about that as well, one of those new services that they rolled out today. I think the quote was migration is a journey and we're going to make it a little simpler right now. >> Yeah we've been hearing for the last couple of years the database. So you know whether I've got Oracle databases, whether it was running SQL before. I want to migrate them, and with Amazon now, I have so many different migration tools that this migration hub now is going to allow me to track all of my migrations across AWS. So this is not for the company that's saying, oh yeah I'm tinkering with some stuff and I'm doing some test dev, but the enterprise that has thousands of applications or lots of locations and lots of people, they now need managers of managers to watch this and some partners involved to help with a lot of these services, but really sprawling all of the services that Amazon have every time they put up one of those eye charts with just all of these different boxes. Every one of them, when you tend to dig in it's like, oh machine learning was a category before and now there's dozens of things inside it. You keep drilling down, I feel like it's that Christopher Nolan movie, Inception. We keep going levels deep as to kind of figure it out. We need to move at cloud time, which is really fast as opposed to kind of the old enterprise time. >> We hit on machine learning. We saw a lot of examples that cut across a pretty diverse set of brands and sectors, and really the democratization of machine learning more or less. At least that was the takeaway I got from it. >> And absolutely. When you mention the competition, this is where Google has a strong position in machine learning. Amazon and Microsoft also pushing there. So it is still early days in machine learning and while Amazon has an undisputed lead in overall cloud, machine learning is one of those areas where everybody's starting from kind of the starting point and Amazon's brought in a lot of really good people. They've got a lot of people working on teams and building out new services. The one that was announced at the end of the keynote is Amazon Macie, which is really around my sensitive data in a global context using machine learning to understand when something's being used when it shouldn't and things like that. I was buying my family some subway tickets and you could only buy two metro cards with one credit card because even if I put in all the data, it was like, no we're only going to let you buy two because if somebody got your credit card they could probably get that and do that. So that's the kind of thing that you're trying to act fast with data no matter where you are because malicious people and hackers, data is the new oil, as we said. It's something that we need to watch and be able to manage even better. So Amazon keeps adding tools and services to allow us to use our data, protect our data, and harness the value of data. I've really said, data is the new flywheel for technology going forward. Amazon for years talked about the flywheels of customers. They add new services, more customers come on board that drives new services and now data is really that next flywheel that's going to drive that next bunch of years of innovation to come. >> You've talked a lot about announcements that we just heard about in the keynote. Big announcement fairly recently about the cloud data computing foundation. So all of the sudden they, I'd say not giving the Heisman, if you will, the Kubernetes, but maybe not embracing it, right? Fair enough to say. Different story now. All of the sudden they're platinum level on the board. They have a voice on how Kubernetes is going to be rolled out going forward, or I guess maybe how Kubernetes is going to be working with AWS going forward. >> And my comment, I gave a quote to SiliconANGLE. I'm on the analyst side of the media. This side had written an article and I said, it's a good step. I saw a great headline that was like, Amazon gives $350,000. They're at least contributing with the financial piece, but when you dig in and read, there was a medium blog post written by Adrian Cockcroft. He didn't touch on it at all in the keynote this morning. Which I was a little surprised about, but what he said is, we're contributing, we're greatly involved, and there's all of these things that are happening in the CNCF, but Amazon has not said, and here is our service to enable Kubernetes as a first class citizen in there. They have the AWS container service, which is ACS which doesn't use Kubernetes. Until this recent news, I could layer Kubernetes on top and there are a lot of offerings to do that. What I'd like to be able to hear is, what service is really Amazon going to offer with that. My expectation not knowing any concrete details is by the time we get to the big show in November, they will have that baked out war, probably have some announcements there. Hoping at this show to be able to talk to some people to really find out what's happening inside really that Kubernetes piece, 'cause that helps not only with really migrations. If I'm built with Kubernetes, it's built with containers. Containers are also the underlying component when I'm doing things like serverless, AWS Lambda. So if I can use Kubernetes, I can build one way and use multiple environments. Whether that be public cloud or private clouds. So how much will Amazon embrace that, how much will they use this. as well we're enabling Kubernetes so if you've got a Kubernetes solution, you can now get into another migration service to Amazon or will they open up a little bit more? We've really been watching to see as Amazon builds out their hybrid cloud offering. Which is how do they get into the customer's data center because we've seen that maturation of public cloud only, everything into the public cloud to now Lambda starts to reach out a little bit with the green grass, they've got their snow balls, they've got the partnership with VMware, which we expect to hear lots more about at VMworld at the end of this month. They've got partnerships with Redhat and a whole lot of other companies that they're working at to really expanding how they get all of these wonderful Amazon services that are in the public cloud. How do they reach into the customer's data centers themselves and start leveraging those services? All of those free services of data that are getting added. Lots of companies would want to get access to them. >> Well full lineup of guests, as always. Great lineup of guests, but before we head out, you said you're with Wikibon, you do great analyst work there and you've got that inquiring mind. You're a curious guy. What are you curious about today? What do you kind of want to walk away from here tonight learning a little bit more about? >> So as I mentioned, the whole Kubernetes story absolutely is one that we want to hear about. Going to talk to a lot of the partners. So we've seen a lot of the analytics machine learning type solutions really getting to the public (mumbles) so it's good to get a pulse of really this ecosystem because while Amazon is, we've said it's not only the elephant in the room, Dave Alante, the chief analyst at Wikibon said, they're the cheetah, they move rally fast, they're really nimble. Amazon, not the easiest always to partner with. How's the room feel, how are the customers, how are the partners, how much are they really in on AWS, how many of them are multi cloud and I'm using Google for some of the data solutions and Microsoft apps really have me involved. So Amazon loves to say people that are all in. We had one of the speakers that talked, Zocdoc, which one that allows me to set appointments with doctors much faster using technology. Analytics say rather than 24 days you could do 24 hours. They went from no AWS to fully 100% in on AWS in less than 12 months. So those are really impressive ones. Obviously it's a technology center company but you see large companies. FICO was the other one up on stage. Actually hopping to have FICO on the program today. They are, what was it, over a 60 year old company so obviously they have a lot of legacy, and how AWS fits into their environment. I actually interviewed someone from FICO a couple of years ago at an OpenStack show talking about their embrace of containers and containers allows them to get into public cloud a little bit easier. So I'd love to kind of dig into those pieces. What's the post of the customers, what's the post of the partner ecosystem, and are there chinks in the armor? You mentioned the competitive piece there. Usually when you come to an Amazon show, it's all Amazon all the time. The number one gripe usually is it's kind of pricing, and Amazon's made some moves. We did a bunch of interviews the week of the Google Next event talking about Google cloud and there was a lot of kind of small medium business that said Google was priced better, Google has a clear advantage (mumbles) I'm going away from Amazon. The week after the show, Amazon changed their pricing, talked to some of the same people and they're like, yeah Amazon leveled the playing field. So Amazon listens and moves very fast. So if they're not the first to create an offering, they will spin something up very fast. They can readjust their security, their pricing to make sure that they are listening to their customers and meeting them not necessarily in response to competitors, but getting what the customers need and therefore if the customers are griping a little bit about something that they see that's interesting, or a pain point that they've had. Like we've talked about the AWS Glue wasn't something that a competitor had. It was that this is a pain point that they saw a lot of time is on it, and they are looking to take that pain out. One of the line that always gets poked about Amazon is they say your margin is our opportunity and your pain as a customer is our opportunity too. So Amazon always listening. >> All right, a lot on the plate here this day we have for you at AWS Summit. We'll be back with much more as we continue here on the Cube and AWS Summit 2017 from New York City. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome to Pier 70 in San Francisco, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman, and this is Pure Accelerate 2017. Pure Storage in 2009 started a big wave of flash migrations, and the company's strategy was to specifically go after the large EMC Install base of older Symmetrix, mainframe class storage, and even to a certain extent VNX and Clariion, if anyone remembers those terms, the Install base. Pure's ascendancy was really a function of shifting from spinning disk to flash. Fast forward seven, eight, nine years later, and Pure is talking about big data and AI and machine learning and IoT, and is really trying to completely transform not only the storage industry but itself as a leading player. The last time an independent storage company hit a billion dollars is about 20 years ago, a company called NetApp. Pure is trying to be the next to be a billion dollar company. Stu Miniman, lot of action goin' on here, used to be back in the day, I bought EMC for block, NetApp for file. Pure is trying to change that. >> Yeah, and Dave, you know storage, we've talked about it when Dell bought EMC. What did that mean to the whole storage industry? I wrote an article when it happened and said it's the end of the storage industry as we know it. When I came in here, it was like, oh, we're going to be talking about storage. You mentioned NetApp; I was at a NetApp event last week, and they said, "Storing is boring." It's really about the data, it's about the new applications. I really liked in the keynote they were talking about new use cases, new applications, how do they fit into that multi-cloud world, really interesting to hear Scott Dietzen, who we've known since this company was in stealth, laying out where the company is. They've got over 33 hundred customers, lot of SaaS applications, they're talking a lot about the machine learning and the AI pieces that are in here, but at the end of the day, I mean Dave, this is their primary business is a storage array replaces, as you said, the traditional EMC boxes that used to be sold. So how much of this is still kind of an update on what the legacy is doing, how much are they ready for the future? I'm excited to dig in with some real customers here. Pure has a good movement, good customer base, I've always had some good smart people with good tech, the Puritans as they call them, all wearing orange here. So, a cool venue and excited to dig in. >> Well, it's one of the fastest-growing companies in the storage business and in the IT business, and the way that Pure has gotten there isn't, you know, in its early days it never really talked much about so-called software-defined, it just did it. One of the problems that Pure attacks is the problem of migration. David Floyer and Wikibon have written extensively about the cost of migration, the pain of migration. It was almost just assumed, well you know, if I'm buying storage I'm going to have to migrate, and I'm going to spend 50, a hundred, sometimes many hundreds of thousands of dollars migrating my workloads from older arrays to newer arrays. Pure Storage has this Evergreen concept, where through the use of software and software-defined technologies, it's able to upgrade new customers quote-unquote seamlessly, there's that overused word again, but it's able to deliver essentially storage as a service even though you're putting an appliance on their site. So it's a radically different model. They've announced some things today, for instance like three site data replication, which is very very complicated. Trying to simplify that, so a lot of really novel ideas. Again I come back to their ascendancy. It was really based, Stu, upon attacking the slow, expensive spinning disk using its data reduction technology to create parity between the cost of spinning disk and the cost of flash, something David Floyer predicted back in 2009 would happen by 2014 for the high-spin speed. Now with FlashBlade, which is essentially the file-based system that Pure has, they're going after that same mantra with higher-capacity spinning disks, really going after the NetApp base. >> Yeah, and Dave, you mentioned that Pure could be the most recent billion dollar storage company. The company that might actually beat them to that is Nutanix. Now of course, Nutanix sells more than just storage. They're hyper-converged infrastructure, which means the compute that they're also selling, that's being used there, so it's not quite apples to apples, but the last quoter Nutanix had, about 10 million dollars more in revenue than Pure did; they also had IPOed. In that hyperconverge trend, one of the things that I saw early on on that, Dave, was attacking that migration cost. Hyperconverge, like what Pure does, a software layer, you create a pool of architectures, I can add in nodes, I can change configurations, I can update without the traditional way that we used to do it in storage, which was buy that box, take months to get it in there, load it up, transfer it over, retest it, you know all of those things that really kept your time-to-value on storage down, and that's something that Pure and all the hyper-converged players have been attacking, that kind of legacy mindset that we had in storage for so long. >> Yeah, and of course Pure's approach to converged is in partnership with Cisco and presumably others, I'm not actually sure about that, but Cisco's the main partner there with FlashStack, that's their converge play. They kind of do a knock on hyper-converged, kind of de-positioning it as sort of low-end, sort of contained, within small remote offices, whereas they're positioning FlashStack as the scalable internet infrastructure. Pure does very well with SaaS companies, they do, they're increasingly doing better with Fortune 500, they've still got a long way to go there. About 80% of their business is U.S., so there's a lot of upside internationally. We're talking about a company that'll be a billion dollars in their fiscal 2018, which is fundamentally the year we're in now, they've got about a 2.4 billion dollar market cap, they're growing at about 30% a year. And very interestingly, they had mid-60% gross margins at one point last year, they had like 69.6% gross margin, which is unheard of, you know, we haven't really seen this since back in the heydays of NetApp and EMC. The question is, is that sustainable? And of course the big question that we have today, and we're going to talk to Scott Dietzen, nickname Dietz, lot of nicknames here at Pure Storage, about is the concept of a large independent storage company. That concept is going away, it's like extinct except for one company really, NetApp is the only billion-dollar storage company left. It's been 20-plus years, maybe even 25 years since that's occurred. What are your thoughts on that, Stu? You know, I wrote a piece maybe eight years ago, Can EMC Remain Independent, recognizing that most of EMC's value was coming from Vmware and of course EMC could not remain independent. Do you think a company like Pure can unseat the leaders of Dell, EMC, HPE, IBM, and remain an independent storage company? >> Well, one of the things I always look at is what is, where are they going to hit their plateau? They're reaching towards billion dollars and they do continue to grow. I think that Pure still has plenty of headroom, but how long does it take them, Dave, to get to three or five billion dollars? The reason I throw out that number is that's probably how much storage Amazon's doing today. You know, look at Amazon, it's a 15 billion dollar company, somewhere between 15 and 30% of Amazon's business, and nobody in the storage business talks about that because it just ties to my applications. So I want to follow the applications, follow the data. It's good to hear that Pure is getting in with a lot of SaaS providers. From Wikibon data, 2/3 of the public cloud data, I'm sorry, of the public cloud revenue, is SaaS providers, so absolutely here come these like Pure, SolidFire sold, before when they were an independent company, sold to lots of service providers as well as SaaS providers. Kaminario, a Massachusetts-based flash company, sells to I believe it's about half of their business, is selling to the SaaS providers because these are companies that look at, okay I need to own how I scale my environment, own those economics, and need to grow that. And just one more piece on that economics, Dave. Look at that kind of multi- or hybrid cloud world. I bristle a little bit when I hear Scott Dietzen kind of almost say, public cloud, it's in the corner. about 20% of the use cases fit in that environment, yeah we'll do snaps to Amazon, we'll do some other things. But you don't put the public cloud in the corner and just say, oh, 20% of the market's there. 'Cause that's today, and it is still growing 50, 75, 100% depending on which public cloud you're talking about. We think that there's still plenty of upside, and when does that become a headwind that will slow the growth of what Pure's doing? You see a lot of the other software storage companies out there say how do they become software? When we were at the Veeam show, Dave, how did, they really were, we're going to live in Azure. We're going to partner with AWS, and they don't really care. Pure very much, their growth, their revenue, and their margins today are all built that they're going to be selling gear with that, yes they have the Purity 1 software and they have some cloud plays, but very much seems to be saying that public cloud's not the direction. I'm sure Scott will probably give us a little more nuance there, but you know, that legacy change to new distributed architectures has been a tailwind for Pure, and when will cloud be something that will push against their growth? >> Well, we're going to ask Scott Dietzen about that, and you're right on, I mean public cloud clearly is growing, I mean it's growing like crazy, particularly the SaaS component of that. Now of course, that can be a tailwind for Pure because they do sell to SaaS companies. They even, Scott even had a slide up there today showing Google, Uber, Facebook, AWS. Did you infer like I did that they were implying that they were selling to those companies, or? >> No, no no, I saw because in the last quarterly report they talked about basically the number four through a thousand. >> Dave: Four to a thousand. >> Dave: Right. >> So they're not selling to the top three, that they're clear on. >> So, okay, so the top three would be Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-- >> Right. >> But then there's Facebook, and Uber, possibly they could sell to those companies, Spotify is a SaaS company, so that SaaS part of the market is growing like crazy. Now the other point is, Wikibon released a study. We've been talking about it for the last couple of weeks in theCUBE around the true private cloud market forecast. True private cloud is an on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics the public cloud at a much lower cost. We came up with this notion of true private cloud because there was so much cloudwashing going on, which really was virtualization. Now, the true private cloud is growing actually faster than any other cloud segment, now from a smaller base, granted. But we see about a 230 billion dollar TAM over the next 10 years evolving. Now, the most important part of this, and Scott Dietzen touched upon this in the morning, as did Hat, using some nicknames again, that companies are really focused on lowering their IT labor costs, and we see 150 billion dollars, approximately, of IT labor moving out of nondifferentiated heavy lifting, into what we sometimes call vendor R&D. In the form of cloud, or on-prem products, appliances, and other software frameworks that can automate and eliminate this low-value provisioning and patching and LUN management. So, Stu, you were very much involved in that true private cloud report, that market's exploding. I mean, to me, it's all about TAM expansion for Pure. They're a billion dollar company, roughly, they're participating in a 30 or 40 billion dollar market, so they have a long way to go. >> Yeah, absolutely. Because really, Dave, it's about the application. It is not a winner-takes-all environment. When you look at multicloud, it's what applications, and even we start teasing apart pieces of my applications and where they live. So, I look at, there was a nice logo slide that Pure put up, and you say okay, Hulu is a customer. Well, is Pure helping with their CDN? I really doubt it. You know, you look at Workday. Workday, up on stage at Amazon Reinvent talking about how they partnered with Amazon. So what applications is Pure winning, which ones are their customers using the public cloud for, and how does all of that sort out? Absolutely, true private cloud is really that reinvention of the data center, that flipping, if you will, of I mean Dave, you probably know better than me, that saying that IT spends 80 or 90 percent of their budget on keeping the lights on. How do we flip that so we can spend money on innovating, driving the business forward, stop spending on one of our favorite terms, undifferentiated heavy lifting and move to innovate and drive the business, and have IT serving those applications and serving the things that help me differentiate from the competition and move faster. Because, absolutely I'm sure something we'll hear this show, is it's that agility and that speed is what companies need, and Pure with their six nines of availability and that if you buy it today you're future-proof, if you will, is going to help customers say that they can have a platform that they buy today and know it's going to serve them well in the future. >> Well, Mark Benioff I think was the first that I heard said it, or it might've been Peter Burns, I can't remember, but basically there're going to be many more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. That to me, Stu, is a big, big tailwind for a company like Pure who's software first, software-defined, knows how to sell to SaaS companies. The other thing is, Pure's the latest company. They didn't say this but they certainly, one could infer it, the latest company to basically say tape is dead. So it used to be offsite backup the tape, now they're talking the flash to flash to cloud as the long-term retention. So a lot of really interesting things going on here. The venue is actually quite amazing, it's at Pier 70, this place is going to get torn down right after this show, it's a place that used to be an old steel mill that used to make battleships here, about two battleships a year during World War II. >> Yeah, the new Warriors facility is going to be here in Dogpatch soon, and I know everybody's super excited about that. >> Yeah, well, yeah, a lot of purple hats here, a lot of excited Warriors fans. >> All right, we'll be back, we've got day-to-day all day, wall-to-wall coverage of Pure Accelerate, #PureAccelerate. This is theCUBE, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we'll be right back with Scott Dietzen right after this short break. (upbeat electronic chords)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, It's The Cube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back to NAB day three. I'm Lisa Martin. We are here live in Las Vegas very excited to introduce you to our next guest, Alan Hoff, VP of Market Solutions for Avid. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> You are an NAB veteran. This is your 21st year. >> Indeed, yes. >> You must have seen incredible transformation. >> Alan: It's true, yes. >> Tell us about just, you were saying before we went live that you've really been here at the start of digital transformation. Walk us through that kind of the evolution that you've witnessed? >> Yes, certainly. So when I first came here in 1996, the show was a little bit smaller and I came with a company that did non-linear digital video editing systems, not Avid but a competitor. And that was really the first link in the overall production chain that became digitized, and so that was really the forefront of the digital transformation that we're now seeing play out and ultimately culminating with all these cloud-based workflows that everybody's talking about. So I've been watching it as that digital production value chain has evolved all across knocking down one category after another, and as I say, it's really culminating now with the journey to the Cloud. >> Speaking of journey, this journey that you've been on in your seat, what are some of the things that surprise you still in yearr 21 for you at NAB? And what are some of the trends that you've seen go from maybe something buzzy to a real key value solution? >> Yeah, so I think Cloud was being hyped quite a bit a few years ago, and Avid was there. We announced some cloud-based workflows a couple years ago, et cetera, along with others. But it's really just now at this show that we're really seeing it come into a more pragmatic, broader workflow solution. The challenges that the industry is facing at all levels is that they need to create more content at higher quality that is more standout in nature and that is engaging and attention-grabbing than ever before, because there's so much more of it being created, and there are so many more outlets in which it can be consumed, and it's no longer on anybody's schedule but the consumer's schedule. So that has really thrown a wrench in the works in the traditional business models that people have gone through. And so Avid saw this a few years ago, and we developed something that we call the Media Central Platform. The goal of that platform was to standardize all the disparate different technologies and bits and standards that were out there into one unified whole to make it easier for individual artists or creative teams, like at post houses, or even the largest media enterprises out there, to get more efficient in the way they create their content and distribute their content. So what that's meant is Avid, which historically had been a very vertically oriented and closed company, had to learn how to play well with others. This is not unlike what we're seeing from other large players in the industry, Microsoft for example. These guys have realized that, in order to deliver what it is that the customers are looking for, again, regardless of their level of the segment, they have to be open and play well with the perhaps traditional competitors or folks that you never would have thought would have a solid workflow. So in the case of Avid, we, a year ago, announced that we were working with Adobe, which has always been a tool of choice for Avid customers. It's very common for them to have Avid products, Adobe products. But in some areas, we were directly competitive, and so what we ended up doing was we made it so that the Adobe Premiere products could work seamlessly within the Avid Media Central Platform. This year, we did something similar with-- >> You've got a big announcement at this show? >> Well, with EVS, we did integration. So EVS makes these, arguably, the world's best sports replay service, those great sports slomo replay, et cetera, that you see on sporting events. They have basically become the standard in that area. So we wanted to integrate the workflow. So we worked with EVS. They used our connectivity toolkit to create a flow-blown, certified membership in the platform so that an Avid user can have access to the EVS assets as if they were the Avid assets. So seamless workflow, all because that's what the customers need to be able to create this content faster and get it out to more devices. >> Speaking of the customer, you mentioned some alliance partners. In your role at Avid, you're responsible for product marketing alliances. Talk to us about what you're seeing, from the customer journey perspective, as they're transitioning media production to the Cloud. You mentioned some of the pain points. Walk us through kind of a typical journey, Whether it's a customer in sports or a customer in media and entertainment. >> Sure. Great, great. So our big announcement at the show here was the partnership with Microsoft and the fact that we were going to be moving the Avid Media Central Platform to Microsoft Azure Cloud. This is a really big watershed moment for the industry, if I may be so bold, because now, Avid with her big alliance ecosystem is going to be migrating to the Cloud. And the more gravity that the Cloud has, the more easy it will be for folks to have a peace of mind that that's a place they can trust and move to. We feel that we had a great advantage in moving to the Cloud, because we already had taken a platform approach. So when we say we're moving into the Cloud, it's obviously not to the exclusion of the typical terrestrial ways that people are accustomed to working. It's all meant to be complementary so that folks can take a hybrid approach. What I mean by this is, whether you're in sports production or in news production or in post-production, you're probably not just going to wake up one morning and say, okay, that's it. Everything I'm doing has got to be in the Cloud, because that's where everybody's going. I need to look in a very planful manner at the way I go about doing things and look at the benefits of what the Cloud brings and be selective in terms of what parts you want to migrate when. And with the partnership with Microsoft, what Avid is saying is you could continue to stay in your traditional on-premises approach here, if you want. You could being to migrate things into a private data center, either still in your own facility or maybe down the street in a data center. Or you could go fully into the public Cloud. And that last one, it's interesting how many people have reacted: oh, I don't know if I'm ready to put my assets, my gold bar equivalence-- >> Mission critical, right. >> into the Cloud, I don't know if I'm comfortable doing that. But the reality is this Microsoft Azure Cloud is trusted by every large banking institution on the planet. It's trusted by the United States Department of Defense. The biggest secrets and the largest assets in the globe are protected by Microsoft Azure. They've gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that data is going to be secure, and the same holds true for media and entertainment assets. And to really put a fine point on it, they went and got the Motion Picture Association, the MPAA, certification for security, so they have all that. So it's as good as being in Fort Knox when it's in the Cloud. So I really want to put that to rest. I mean, these guys, all they do is think about the security and denial of access to any sort of outside threat, whereas most media and entertainment companies, that's only one of the things they're thinking about. They've got a lot going on, you know. >> Lisa: Exactly, exactly. >> And they are actually more vulnerable, even in terra firma on promoli solutions than they would be going to the Cloud. So just a little editorial aside, because security is a big concern to people at all levels of the industry. >> It is. Certainly, those in the technology space understand is, it's a reducing of the concern, but it is a concern nonetheless. It sounds like what you just articulated customers have the choice of hybrid as a journey or hybrid as a destination. >> Correct, correct, right. They might never move beyond a hybrid state, although I would predict that in five years from now, most everything is going to be cloud-based, and once people start to see the scale and reach and productivity they can get, as well as the benefits of things like machine learning and artificial intelligence (mumbles), just going to help them speed the way that they go about doing what they do. It will be clear that that's the way they should probably be doing what they do, >> Exactly. >> And that's at levels. >> And finding more value from the digital assets that they already have. That's right, exactly. And so, that's the other thing is, once it's in the Cloud, it's easier for you to repurpose and distribute, say, to over the top services, et cetera. So we were talking before about Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Avid's role there. This may be-- >> Yeah, tremendous amount of content, 80% to 90% original content is produced with Avid. So in the last minute or so, tell us about that. >> Yeah, so Avid has grown up through the industry, we're almost 30 years old, and we understand the pains and challenges that the traditional broadcasters are facing by these insurgent and incumbent newcomers like the streaming services. But what I think is interesting is that those guys are using our tools, too, as you say, to a very large degree. So we're very privileged to have the streaming services as well as eleven of the largest international news organizations using us. Six of the largest Hollywood film studios are using us. We're very fortunate to have all that great diversity of customers that have embraced us across various parts of their workflow. >> Fantastic. Well, it sounds like not a dull moment for Avid or you. >> Right. >> I want to thank you so much, Alan, for stopping by The Cube. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> You are now a Cube alumni. I am, yes. It's great to have been here. Thanks for the invitation. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> We want to thank you for watching again. We are live at NAB from Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin. Stick around. We'll be right back.