>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I. F. S. >>We're back at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. This is a cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our coverage of I f s World 2019 Matt Smith. This year. He's a global chief architect. Paul Dylan and I are happy to have you on Matt. Great >>pleasure to be here. Thanks very much. >>Filing. You're welcome. So business value engineering is a concept that you're a fan of on one that you've sort of promoted and evolved. What is business value? Engineering. >>So business value engineering is quite a common term in the industry, but here I affects it's a little different. Fundamentally, it's, ah, collaborative process that we use working with our customers on our partners to make sure that what we do with those customers delivers financial value to their business. So it's fundamentally about making sure what we deliver delivers value. >>So I wanna ask you a question about this because your philosophy is a company seems to be the Let the customer define value. Um, it's in their terms, not your terms, not trying to impose a value equation on them. At the same time, it's nice to be able to compare across companies or industries and firm level on DSO forth. So how do you reconcile that? Is it like balanced Scorecard is sort of pay you can tailor to yourself versus some kind of rigid methodology. How do you How do those two worlds meet in >>TV? Yes, so obviously, benchmarking across industry is really important. And there are lots of people that do that kind of work, and that's part of business value engineering. Fundamentally, it's about mutual collaboration. So it's not just about using the customers framework or that all their language is about agreeing the language. One of the challenges when you're trying to build a business relationship with with one or more parties is you have to have a common shared understanding, a common vision on a common value system so that when I say something to you, it means the same thing when you say it to me. And so part of that collaborative process requires that you worked together on business value, engineering facilitates that it's not just about producing a business case. It's really more about the process and steps that you go through to get to that business case that allows you to establish trust and understanding and clarity. >>How does this enter into the customer discussion? >>And so it enters as early as you can possibly make it. Answer rights? A. Right at the beginning, you asked the very first question, which is fundamentally, what are the business initiatives that you're trying to achieve with this potential change program? And then you have a deep discussion about what they mean. So you understand and they understand, and everybody really agrees firmly what we're trying to achieve before you get anywhere near solution. And it's really difficult as technical people. I've got a technical background to stop yourself from hearing a problem and going. I've got a solution for that on it puts that a more disciplined approach to make sure that you don't straight away go to solution to help. You really understand where you're going, how you're gonna get there and therefore what the financial benefits and metrics would be to do it. Who >>were >>the ideal stakeholders when you're doing a collaboration like this in terms of getting them involved in getting their >>implements. So you might expect the answer to be C level executives on Dove course. They're important from, ah, leadership in a direction perspective. But as it turns out from a human psychological behavior perspective, there are three personality types that are really, really suitable for this kind of engagement work that's focused around change. And if you find those three personality types and quite well understood types of people, they're the ones that tend to cause change. To happen more successfully doesn't mean there any more valuable than anybody else inside an organization, but the other right kinds of people to establish this sort of work with, and it's important you have the right number of those people in a change program. >>So change agents. So I would think like a PL manager here. She's controlling a big portion of the budget. Has thousands of people working for them would be important. Maybe not a sea level executive, but a line of business executive, the son of the field General. Could that be an example of a change agent? Not necessarily because they're trying to protect their turf, >>so not necessarily right When it comes to change, change is always hard in any company you've ever been in in all of our careers. Change is difficult, right? >>Wake up in the morning. >>Let's change. It s it's more about who were the people that lay the groundwork for that change that you follow. You listen to the influences. Now, of course, you'll have people that own the budget the financial controllers on Absolutely. They're important. Of course they are. But they may not be the personality type that causes change to happen. Business value engineering is about making sure you harness the right talent, the right skills, the right people at the right time. Thio help organizations realize the benefit off change. >>If you'll excuse me, this is not seem like a typical role for a software company to take on. Yeah, change management. What? How do you Why do you put yourself in that role? >>I think this is something that all software companies are gonna have to do. And you will see the subject of business value engineering in many software vendors. Now it's true. It's a fine line between being a business analyst and being a software vendor. they were a software provider. I think software providers that don't deliver the context on the value that they are trying to achieve with software they buy in the customers are poorer supplies because they're just trying to push technology on its fun. Technologists like myself enjoy the technology, and I'd buy technology all day long. But is it really the right thing to do? So I think it's about being morally right. You have to take the high ground and conduct that engagement in a way which in some cases, and this has certainly been true in my career, you do the business value work and you realize that you probably shouldn't do the project on. You have to have that that fortitude to say to the customer. This is actually not a great idea because the financial case doesn't support this. I think it is. Taking that moral high ground is a really important stance and software companies that do that generally those customers will come back to you in a future dark time when they've got a different problem. That perhaps does fit you. So I think it's about recognizing there's a both a short medium and a long term engagement with with with the customers that you have to maintain that >>in 2019. Given all the discussion on data digital transformation A. I cloud, I would think that data plays a crucial role in these discussions. So what role does data played? Companies understand the importance of data as it relates to the business value discussion. >>Absolutely. I think I think that data driven decision making is is pretty fundamental. A lot of people say the numbers don't lie. Maybe some statistics might be bent, but numbers don't really like, so you've got to be a capture numbers and make decisions based on those numbers. Eso One of the difficulties, though, is that for many, many years in many industries, we've been using very simple terminology and simple mathematical calculations to do these value calculations. Everybody's aware of Years ago, the software industry was awash with phrases like return on investment calculators, >>R o i N P V I R R. Even >>some of those numbers of valid right for >>a business case for sure, >>for sure, but just sticking with simple things like are always is not enough >>salad. If you treat the software as an asset. A zey expense? Essentially, >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But then it comes to the engagement's more than your software I like. I like Thio, I think, as a human being, the software is considerably less than half the game in any change program where you're trying to achieve value and the people they're human beings they're going to do with work are the ones that are going to generate the value. The software's a tool, and the years are very important tool. But it's a tool. So you have to think about how do you build teams that can collaborate around value, achieve the value, measure the value, capture that data but at the same time physically collaborate properly to do the work? >>So how have you apply this methodology for your customers? >>So we've done a number of things, so we've established practice inside. If s, we've made sure that every country has the capability to do business value engineering. We've hired some specialists, people who do this for a living. Andi, we are working with lots and lots of customers now on this as a Maur methodical disciplines approach. But we've also recognized that we needed to measure our existing customers benefits. So what you are existing customer base achieved with our software. So we commissioned Ah, pretty big and important study. And that was anonymous. We weren't involved other than inviting the company to go and do this work on, then unleashing them on our customer base for six months across all industries, all products on asking them to go and find out and measure what our customers really achieve with the software. >>So how was that anonymous? How it was in that you weren't doing the survey. >>We weren't doing the survey and any, um, numbers that came back. Where were anonymous? Dhe. So we couldn't say. Oh, it was this company that gave this feedback with these numbers. So it gave them a sense of freedom to be other express and share that data. >>And so you were specifically asking about the business impact of of I f s software throughout some kind of life cycle, like a before and an after? Yes, Exactly. Isn't it to be or what happened? Okay, so what'd you find >>so as a couple of surprises in the results, actually eso firstly >>tell us who did the study or is that >>yes, So the study. That's a good question, because the the choices are many. There are lots of analyst firms out there that you could use A ll do this sort of work and do it very well. The team that I worked with, we would personally had a previous relationship with I. D. C. Now we really liked I. D. C. And I've done some of this work previously with I D. C. Because they arm or they're an analyst. That has more statisticians as well as analysts. So they take a really very methodical mathematical approach. A scientist. I very much appreciated that. So we we picked them to do this work, and they take it really very, very seriously. And there were a lot of strict processes they have for how we are allowed to engage with them and talk to them during this process. On that rigor, I think, allows us to be comfortable with the numbers and for our customers to be comfortable with the numbers that they obtain because of this anonymity and the rigor they put behind. That's why we picked I. D. C. That work in terms of what we found out where they found on we now just see the report on our customers can go and see this report. We published it last week. So you're just gonna free download and look at the material from I. D. C. The first thing that was interesting about the study. It was human productivity focused. So not things like, how much inventory you hold in supply chain on. Was it reduced? It was more about how did the workers get on? What kind of mistakes did I made? L. A. Faster doing their work and more successful. And they looked at lots of different categories on the returns. The improvements ranged from just a 10% improvement. So not not a huge improvement all the way up to a 94% improvement in productivity. Human productivity. If you averaged it all out, it worked out just shy of of 19% 18 and a bit percent productivity improvement across all of the different teams from the finance function, the supply chain function, human resource functions, sales team, productivity function. So we saw a range. What was good was it pretty much didn't matter. Which category of customer or size of customer or industry. They all saw pretty similar productivity improvements, which means we can extrapolate the numbers. The second thing we saw, which was a surprise, a very pleasant surprise was that usually when you see these kinds of benefits studies, most of the value is in cost. Saving on only cost saving tends to be where asset management resource planning service management happens. Just under half of the value that the I. D. C study showed was net new revenue. The customers were finding that nearly half of the benefit was new money coming to the company. Top Line benefit. That's a little unusual. >>So let me pick. Probe Adept so productivity When I when you're saying productivity, I think revenue per employee has a simple list measure of productivity. But then you're saying there was incremental revenue, a swell independent. It first of all is is revenue per employee the right measure? Or was it more like Do we think's faster or sort of more generic measurements and specific to a task? Or was it kind of boil down to a revenue per employee? And and then how did that relate to the the incremental revenue. >>Yeah, so it was done by function by by team type. So if you look to finance and auditing and human resources and supply chain and so on so that the metrics on the you'll see in the white paper are specific to the team's specifically that role specific to that, >>right, You're not really big in insurance, but a claims adjuster could, you know, get more claims done exactly, or something like >>exactly example. So you'd find, for example, one of the statistics was around filled service engineering on how many jobs per day they couldn't do. It was reasonably specific, >>and they would attribute that directly to your software Direct. Now, as a result of installing I f s, how much would you increase your etcetera per day? >>That's why it took them six months to do the study. I mean, this is quite an in depth piece on >>how many customers that the interview. >>And so it was a cross on dhe. We gave them a challenge to do this. So it was a set of about 17 fairly large customers, which sounds like a small time. >>No, no, no, >>no. But when you do these kinds of studies, >>that's a totally legitimate number. And then thes air in depth surveys. Yeah, so it's not like it's not trivial. And and as well, revenue increases specific, too. The software. So that would have been what, like cohorts sales or service, you know, follow on sales things of that nature. >>Absolutely. And that's why we were so delighted with the report when it came back, because it was it was a really nice pleasant finding. So most companies that all the companies reported the revenue increase, but some are bigger than others. On average, it was a pretty sizable chunk, nearly half of all of the benefit. Um, and when we asked, I D C well, can you give us some kind of glimpse as to why we see such a large chunk of improved revenue? I. D. C. Said, Well, you're improving the productivity of the sales teams so they can quote faster. There's more accuracy and those quotes. The service quality is improved the speed and to get a product to market is faster, so their ability to respond to bids and tenders is better. So is actually a combination of lots of things speed error quality improvements that led to their ability to bid and win faster and better business net revenue. >>Did you attempt Thio factor in less tangible factors, such as customer satisfaction, that promoter score perceived value, customer perceived value. >>So the folk note that the focus of the study was human productivity on. And it's something that I d. C do particularly well on that that's what we gave them a target. Obviously, when we doing business value engineering, you then have to take way more than just that. Things like the benchmark dated find from a study like I. D. C. Have conducted where you take into account those soft factors on other factors outside of human productivity. So value engineering is way more than just human productivity, which is why it's an engagement model. It's something you have to do mutually together. That kind of transparency, really, is what most customers are now demanding. You know, I'm not buying technology unless I know what business outcome I'm going to obtain from this. It's just the way of the world these days. >>It could take away that so it's not just your software's not just operational impact in nature. It's more strategic. It has productivity impact, revenue impacts and obviously cost savings as well. Congratulations. That's good. How did we get this study >>out of people? You said customers can download it. Can anybody down? >>Anybody can download this U S So we've published it on our website. It's very easy to find on it. Sze freely available. We obviously have to comply with the I. D. C's. They owned the rights for the report because it was their material, but we've oversee purchased the rights to the other, distribute that material. We think it's super valuable for our customers. >>What a business model >>and super well, you know, And and if I was to write business case for it, I'd be delighted with the work that was done and I'd be happy with the outcome on. I'm sure our customers will make use of the information to be a benchmark, their own work and also hold my effects on our partners to account to help build business cases. >>Well, I you know, I know it's anonymous ized anonymous to protect the customer, but I bet you some of the customers would be willing to go public with some of this information. So hit him up. Bring him on the cube, you know, well distributed for free. If you want to charge for them. Reprint rights. Great to have you on. Thank >>you. Thank you. >>All right. Thank you for watching Paul Gill and I will be back with our next guest to wrap up I f s World 2019. You're watching the Cube from Boston?

>>Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cube covering ifs world conference 2019 brought to you by ifs. >>Well going back to Boston and everybody, this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here day one at the ifs world conference at the Hynes convention center in Boston. Cindy shutdown is here. She's the president of America's at ifs and she's joined by to my right, K in Blackwell, who's a controller at PPC partners, one of the divisions of PPC Metro power. And rod is the CIO of PPC partners. Welcome folks. Good to see you. I said, let me start with you. So you were on last year in the cube down at Atlanta. You still kind of set some, set some goals, you're a little competitive with your other brethren within then ifs. We love it. You know, we're Americans. Okay. So how's it going in North America? >>Um, well it's, it's growing well. We've had fantastic growth and it's been, you know, a little bit of competition within ifs, but you know, certainly we were very proud. We were named region of the year last year. So we won the coveted cup, which, uh, means, uh, we, uh, we want to keep that cup. So that's some of the, some of the competition that we've got going, right? >>Yeah. Well, of course, most of us based companies, they'll do, they'll start up 79, you know, 90% of their businesses, U S if not 100%, and then they'll slowly go overseas as some of the opposite. Right? >>Very much. I mean, ifs is a European based company. We've been in the, in the U S for quite awhile and, but we've really been investing in our growth and we've had fantastic growth over the last few years. And I think, you know, one of the reasons for that growth is our customer satisfaction in the fact that we really want to listen to our customers. You know, I, um, I, I travel quite a lot as you can imagine. And when I travel, I always try to make sure I can visit customers and hear what they have to say, you know, and of course we love to hear the good things, but I also like to hear when they can give us some ideas for improvement and um, you know, then that gives us something to work on and to, you know, to keep moving forward. Um, I also think that, you know, the good thing about that is, um, it gives us a chance to listen and um, you know, I heard something really great from one of our customers, they went live two weeks ago and they called up and said, Hey, can we do a customer story? I love things like that. Yeah. >>I always love that. Uh, let me think about it. I'll get back to you. Okay. What's your relationship between ifs and PPC part? >>Well, PPC partners is one of our newer customers in there in the middle of an implementation and they're doing some great things around digital transformation. And when I had this opportunity to be here on the cube, I thought it would be great to invite rod and can with me and to, you know, tell some of the things that they're doing. >>Cool. So I kind of recruited Cindy as my cohost, your, they're going to be the defective coho. So welcome to the queue and then we're going to show you right to the fire. Okay. So, uh, can you describe your, your role, your when one of the divisions of PPC partners, right? So maybe maybe set up sort of PPC partners and then your role. >>Right. Okay. So PPC is a specialty contracting company and we have four subsidiary companies that operate in the upper Midwest and then also the Southeastern United States. And we provide, um, um, customers within a base innovative, innovative solutions in the electrical and mechanical contracting. So there are those four companies. I was one of the controllers, um, of those four companies for a lot of years. And now I'm on the core team. There's four of us, five of us now, um, that are involved in the implement. >>Okay. So you got all the numbers in your head. And then rod, you're the CIO and you guys are a service organization for all the divisions. Is that correct? That is correct. >>We sit at the holding company and we're responsible for technology across all four of those specialty contractor companies that can just mention. >>So I love these segments, Cindy, because you know, we, here you go, we go to a lot of conferences in the cube and um, you hear a lot about digital transformation, but, so I'd like to ask the practitioners, what does that mean for you guys? We've got somebody who's very close to the line of business, like I say, knows the numbers, but at the end of the day you've got to deliver the technology services. So what does digital transformation mean to you? What's the company doing in that regard? So a great question actually. >>Um, you'll find companies like ours that have been on the same platform for quite a while, uh, 50 plus years, uh, five zero five, six, zero, uh, probably North of five zero, but we'll go with five zero. Uh, and what happens over time is just, you know, with the system can't grow with the organizations, you resort to a lot of manual paper pushing a lot of file flinging, lots of Excel. And so there's just a ton of duplication of effort and those types of things going on. So from a technology standpoint, that's really the stuff that I come in and see and go, you know. Um, but overall I think that getting to the ifs platform, getting a lot of those redundant processes, a lot of the file flinging out of there, it's just going to be beneficial for all of them. >>Okay. So you guys have had to make the business, you're in the middle of the implementation, right? Is that correct? So she had to go through the business case. Um, it sounds like the business case was, you know, we're, we're basically struggling with running our business because, you know, data's all over the place. We don't have a single view of our business, our customers, et cetera. So we have to come to grips with that. But, but, so what was the business case like? I presume that you were involved as well. >>Right. So I've was really involved in building the software that we've used for that 40 plus years though I haven't used it all of them two years. Um, and, and it was really. It was built by accountants. We, you know, intended for it to meet the needs of the whole, the whole organization. But really it was built by accountants. So, um, we've found that we just really weren't able to keep up with meeting the needs of all of the users. Um, so when we started looking at that, we also had, we were running on a couple of different, um, I'm going to call them boxes. We run it on IBM. So, um, we were not able to look across the entire organization and see a consolidated view of the whole organization. So that was one of the things that we were looking to do, was to really bring all four companies under one umbrella and be able to get a picture of the whole mainframe or, yes, we had a couple of mainframes and all of that software was internally written. Um, and it was good. It was, it was good, but it met, you know, just the needs that those of us within the company saw. Um, so I think we were missing a whole lot of opportunity, um, to really, you know, see what else was out there and see new things and really get outside of our sphere of understanding, you know, >>so PPC, >>no, I was going to say as SKM pointed out and the sort of running joke within the companies is the system we have today does numbers really well. Words not so much because it was designed by accountants for accounting, tracking the financials primarily. Yeah. >>In PPC you do construction of course, or construction club, but you also do some service as well, right? You've got people out in the field that are, that are doing, doing service. So when you were looking, um, I'm assuming that you were trying to find a system that could do both, both solutions. Yeah. Did. >>Absolutely. Uh, one of the things that's been concerning to the entire core team is it's great to go out and find a system and there's plenty of them that can handle your back office. Most systems do that fairly well. But what about you feel services, uh, any in our particular industry, electrical contracting, you might have residential, you know, we could very well be working on the buck stadium or a military installation or even the school, you know, those folks have to be able to process invoices, do all sorts of things from a handheld, et cetera, et cetera. That was a big, big driving factor for us. So has a lot of COBOL code running? Is that, is there right here? So you said 50 years, I mean, um, so now I'm interested in the, in the, in the migration and, and you know what that looks like. >>Yeah, I'll bet. So do you, do you have to freeze the existing sort of systems and then sort of bring the other ones up to speed? Is this cloud-based? What does that all look like? That great question. So, uh, we are, uh, we subscribe to the managed cloud solution. Um, you know, for most construction companies, electrical contracting companies like ours, you know, technology is important, but it is not what really makes our wheels turn. It's a con. It's a competitive advantage if you use it wisely. And so, um, you know, for us it was very important to think about this holistically and try to figure out if we're gonna bring in a solution, what does that solution need to look like and will it work for all of our companies, not just one, not just residential, commercial, et cetera. Okay. All right. So, so w w what's that journey look like? I mean, um, when did, when did it start? What's your >>sort of timeline? So about two and a half years ago, we really started looking at what we had in on hand now and what we had in place and thinking about did we really want to make a move? And so, um, we had a team that came together about 15 people across the organization from operations and also the back office to really evaluate what we had evaluated our needs. Um, we decided, yes, we needed something new. And then we actually brought in a second team, um, that started looking at what that new thing would be. We had a consultant assisting us with that and uh, we kinda narrowed it down to two players if you will. And ifs was one of those. Um, and we, even though, um, one of the things that we liked was the fact that that ifs had, um, a broad reach over different types of industries and we felt like that would give us, um, something in addition to a construct and centric view know domain expertise. Yeah, >>exactly. You know, and you know, with our core industries, you know, construction is a big part of that. But one of the things that we're seeing in the construction industry today is the trend to go to what we call prefabrication. The fact that you know, you can really speed up a project if you aren't trying to build everything on site and you can also do it much more cheaper. McKinsey has a study out and they believe that over time if, if of comp of construction company will engage with prefabrication, they can reduce the project timelines 20 to 50% and lower the cost up to 20% and with ifs is heritage in manufacturing. It's really a perfect marriage for construction companies because construction companies need the project management, the installation, you know, the change management that goes along with some of those back-office things. They also a lot of time have to do service. But if you really want to get that competitive advantage, if you can take advantage of the prefab, which is really manufacturing high, if this is heritage, he could really have a, a full, complete S, you know, solution from one supplier. >>There's a huge trend in home-building actually. You would, you see, you know, modular homes and kind of the future of it. But uh, so how does that affect you guys? I mean you, you prefab something that resonates with you, is that sort of more of a generic statement across the customer base or >>it's certainly an area where we're focusing on more. Um, we also have an automation, uh, division that really focuses on, um, automation for industries. And that's an area that it's kind of a manufacturing type of thing. They build panels and those sorts of things. So we're definitely seeing it >>well. So, okay. So I got to ask you, so when you pulled out the Gartner magic quadrant, I said, okay, it always is. Ifs isn't the leader that, that, that, that might've helped. Right. Okay. So you don't get fired now, but choose the leader, but then you started peeling the onion. He had to do due diligence. So what kinds of things did you look at? What kind of tires did you kick? Piers, did you talk to and be, I'm interested in what your, what you learned. Well, I'll touch on one key element and >>we can get in as many sub elements as you like. The selection process for us took several months. Um, I think initially we really pared it down to about eight packages that we were seriously considering. Then down to four and then eventually down to two. And what really, really intrigued us about ifs was the fact that they are not construction centric. So we really had a big decision to make internally, which was do we want to just get on the bandwagon and do what everyone else in construction is doing or do we really wanna you know, risk versus reward and go after something special. So ifs, they are in, you name it, manufacturing is obviously key. Aerospace engineering, race cars I saw today, I didn't know that. So that was a big selling point for us. And the plan is to retire your mainframe and go into the cloud. >>Yes, yes, yes. So IBM got you in a headlock. >>We've been friends for a long time. Good company. Um, w what's that been like just to sort of, uh, that the thought of, you know, going to the cloud. W how, how is, you know, the it folks you know, responded to that. Um, how has that changed their sort of role brokers versus all? Again, I think in construction organizations, technology is important, but it is not what makes the wheels turn. So I'm trying to bring in all of that iron and infrastructure and build it out and configure it ourselves and then maintain it for the long haul. Just not something that was value added for us. In addition, um, if you've ever worked with Oracle, which is a close partner of ifs, but there is a lot of licensing caveats and a lot of things you've got to worry about if you're going to go it alone by going with the managed cloud solution, we're sort of partnering and trusting ifs to take that on for us so we can focus on taking care of our companies, our customers, and doing what we do best. Right? So, okay, so you're still going to be an Oracle. You just won't be, it won't be as visible. We use Oracle too. We're a Salesforce customer, so Hey, Oracle is behind there, but no offense. >>Ah, I know you guys did >>for the distinction as well, right? Because even if you are going to have portions of Oracle that are running your system, you've got to have some Oracle experts on staff. You know, if you're going to have all of the infrastructure, you gotta have infrastructure folks who understand how it all ties together. So on the surface it could seem like a simple decision to do it in house or go to the cloud. Far from it. >>Yeah. You know, I think certainly one of the things that we see in a lot of different industries, but certainly in construction, the plant had always been that you bring together different, different solutions and you try to both and together and then some of that becomes a lot more concerning. You know, some of the technology behind it. But one of the things that with the ifs solution is the fact that from one provider you can do, you know, do the whole life cycle. So then some of the have it in the managed cloud where we take care of it for you. So then that takes away some of those technology issues and then you can focus on your core competencies. So Rhonda would agree generally >>with what you're saying. I mean some probably say that for most companies that you know, the technology is not the core differentiator. Obviously this for Google, sure. For Amazon, for Facebook, but for CIO is I talked to, they go people process, technology, technology is the least of my problems. It's like I was going to come and go, it's going to change. I can deal with that. It's the, if the people in the process issues. So having said that, I'm still interested in how concerned you were about peeling the onion on the cloud, what's behind it, the security model, all that stuff in terms of your due diligence, you know, with any cloud based solution, there's some concern obviously. But, but in working with ifs, we, we asked a ton of questions and they gave us a ton of answers. So the comfort level was there. Um, the industry's been going to the cloud now for quite some time. And to be brutally honest, if you're not going there, um, you need to be strongly considered >>in Microsoft is our partner with the cloud. We're on, you know, using Microsoft Azure. So it's not like, you know, it's one of the largest cloud provider. So it's not like, you know, it's, it's something that you have to worry about. You've got the, you know, the backstop of Microsoft behind you as well. You know, I'm sorry, go, go, go. I was going to say, I think one of the things that's interesting is you talk about all your different divisions and you're really trying to bring a lot of different companies together on one system. And one of the things that I, you know, as I've seen the things that's change management becomes really something that you really have to consider. I mean, how have you seen that part of the implementation going? Has there been stepping in the easy piece for you? It's not been an easy piece and that's one of the pieces that we're still working on. >>Um, I don't know if any organization that says that they're really, really good at change. Um, but we've recognized that really the, our organization is a group of entrepreneurs and we've encouraged people to have their own business, but we're really trying to streamline and get some consistency across the organization. That's a little bit of a culture shift for us. So that change management piece is a piece that we're really trying to get our arms around now and prepare, um, the organization for that team. Just trying to get my head around your software still. You guys do change management? I TSM. Well, you'll change management is really some of the, um, consulting that goes along with it and certainly ifs and AR, we've got many partners who can, you know, help our customers go through that. Because when you're going through a digital transformation, you know, you're taking people who have been using something for 50 years, being out, especially out in the field doing those things. And now you're trying to figure out what are the right processes to put in place to get what the business needs. And in some cases they might have to do things differently. So you really have to think that through and how you're going to roll those out. >>So now, is this your first ifs world? Yes, it is. It is. What final thoughts, you know, things you've, you've taken away or you're going to bring back to your teams? >>Well, yeah, Boston is a favorite city of mine. I was just glad to be here just for that. But, and we've just been here a little bit. I've already picked up some things on leadership. I was involved the um, >>Oh, the women's leadership breakfast this morning. So there's already been some things that I think we can take back to users and share with them, particularly around change management and trying to get people comfortable and understanding why they're uncomfortable with change. You know? So it, rod, you're next on the line. So I'm sure you were taking notes, pretty attentive in the sessions and just getting started, right? >>No, you know, I have, and one of the things for me that was most, I guess rewarding is, is the partner network. All of the vendors. There's a number of things with our implementation that we're still trying to sort out OCR for example, being one of them. Are we going to go there or are we gonna wait until later? Just different technologies and maybe add ons that we may want to take advantage of. All you've got to do is walk down the hallways and there's, there's people ready to talk to you about it. So that's, that's been kind of intriguing. >>Okay. Excellent. Well yeah, I said earlier I was, I was surprised and impressed at the sort of size of the ecosystem and its great. Well good luck to you guys. Really wish you the best and thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your story Cindy. Great to see you. Always pleasure. All right, take care. Thank you for watching everybody. We're back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube from Boston ifs world 2019 right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2019. Brought to you by IFS. >> We're back at IFS World 2019 from the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. I'm Dave Volonte, with my co-host, Paul Gillen. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, get the best guest, Christian Peterson is here. He's the chief product officer at IFS. Christian, great to see you. >> All right, thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> Your first IFS World Conference, so ... >> It is mine ... >> Mine too, so ... >> Yeah, I'm happy to be here. It's just like getting an injection of customer input and feedback in a very short amount of time So, that's uh, that's awesome. I really love it. >> Yeah, these events are great to connect with customers its one to many conversations. But, give us a sense of your background and why you were attracted to IFS. Why did you join? >> Well from a background perspective, I've always been in the effects of business and technology and uh, you know my passion has always been what we can actually do with technology for businesses to innovate, to differentiate, to do new things to automate things. Really, really a strong believer in the promise of software. Because that's what software is all about. Um, so, um, I have a past with Starbucks, I've started ELP companies, I've been with Microsoft. Uh, for fifteen, sixteen years. Um, have been with SAP for a number of years. So I joined, I joined IFS last year, um, really because of the transformation and the uh, the journey I just was on and the passion that IFS has always had for the customers. And the outcomes we've created for customers. It's just a perfect environment to, to uh to realize the dream of providing value to customers, outcomes for customers, and leveraging technology in the process. >> Yeah, so see you're a challenger, hashtag for the challenger. A hashtag is started. >> Really, really I mean you were at the giant uh, SAP and going to a smaller, not much smaller, but a smaller company, What were they doing that you thought that excited you so much? >> Well the exciting thing again is the focus on the customer and the close proximity to customers in everything I.. >> Wouldn't SAP, sorry to interrupt, wouldn't SAP be the same thing though? >> Let me just, let me put it this way, I went to IFS because I (intelligible) really, really brilliantly. So, is that a, is that a nice way of saying it. (laughter) >> (laughing) Okay. >> So were here for your keynote today you sort of laid out a roadmap, a little vision uh, talked a little bit about digital transformation. But, I wanted to talk about, the, you made a big big emphasis on your API platform. Open API's, embracing that, uh its been somewhat a criticism of you guys in the past. And so, maybe it's a response to that or a response to customers, but why the platform, why, to explain it, its importance and how it fits into your roadmap going forward. >> Well the API enablement is important for many different perspectives. First of all, we use API's ourselves. To create user experiences and drive a lot of the innovation where they are merging technology and so forth. That's one aspect of it. So just for our own, our own level of innovation and the pace at which we can innovate with, going forward on the API platform, is, is, is is dramatic. The second area is really again back to the digital transformation that customers are really driving out there um, a lot of that involves, um, really most companies becoming software companies themselves. So now we have a lot of our customers that actually have developers, they're writing software they're driving new offerings to their customers. And to get value out of these offerings for their customers They really need to get access to a a lot of the capabilites that lives inside of the IFS models. They need to get access to data, to get access to processes because, on of the keys in digital transformation regardless in what shape or form it comes is, you need data, you need massive amounts of data. And you need data from within your firewall you need data from third party, and you need structure data all structure data. And participating in that world is absolutely essential that you have that open API philosophy where you expose yourself and your own data and API's. But, also so we can turn the other way and we can consume data and API's from others so we can create similar scenarios. So it's really about being apart of the ecosystem of, uh, of technologies and solutions that customers rely on. And that's why we joined also, the open API foundation. >> You also demonstrated this morning, uh Orena, your new customer experience platform. Talk about what that is and why it's important. >> Well, so it's, it's important of course again because we, um, um, we have this generational shift in people that are coming into the workforce that expect and want to work differently. And, um, if you think about how people actually work, to do and get things done today, or think about ourselves. Now, we're no spring chickens anymore, right, we've been around... >> Speak for yourself. >> We've seen DOS, we've seen DOS systems. >> Yeah my hand went up in the 3.1 question. >> When the three point, did you put the mouse on the screen as well? (laughing) I've literally seen that. So we've been through that, but the people we are getting into the workforce now they have a different mentality. They are not thinking about what they do. Like, we are thinking about, "how does the system work?" "Where do I click? Where do I go next?" The intuition that people now apply to the system when they start working with them, the systems just have to reflect that intuition. It has to be intuitive, it has to be immersive as well. And the immersive part is really based on what the users see, what they do. The contextual information, the contextual intelligence they get in the context of what they do should want them to do more. Because they can, so they get dragged in and the new type of users, they just have that natural intuition, because that's how you browse the web. You go to one place on the web, go to the next thing, You get inspired by this, you go there. And there's no reason why the systems that you get your work done, why they shouldn't be the exact same thing. Orena is a huge step in that direction, together with our mobile enablement on multiple form factors and devices. >> So you, you mentioned you know saw everybody's becoming a software company, every company is becoming, you've been in the software business for awhile you work for a software company now. You're talking about Orena, you're talking about API integration, I showed you our software. My point is, software is hard. (laughs) There's a talent war for employees, we talked about that off camera. Um, so, as you see these companies digitally transforming, becoming software companies, Mark Endrese's, "software is eating the world", Mark Beneoff, "Everybody is becoming a software company", How are they doing? And what role can you play, IFS, in terms of helping them become a software company. Because it's, it's so damn difficult. >> Yeah, I think that the role of being a software company I think the absolute differentiation they want to create through software and differentiate the offerings or other things that they really want to do, We can't really help them there, because they're differentiated. Like if you're differentiated, you can't find something standard and use for that. But we can enable it and um, as we're looking at it, a lot of the emerging technologies that we can enable them with to achieve it, that's a number of things we can do. And, we are introducing a notion of an application, of application services here, where we really, enable these emerging technologies in the context of what we do. So, while you hear about technologies or augmented realities, mixed realities, artificial intelligence and robotics and IOT and artificial intelligence, all the stuff that you have, we take that and put into context of the focus industries that we focus on and the solution categories that we focus on. So EAP, enterprise asset management, service management. And in that way our customers can focus on what they actually need to do with it, versus focus on the, on the technologies. >> And the API platform allows those customers to, whatever the build to integrate to their ERP system if in fact... >> That's correct, that's correct. And as I mentioned, we also use API's not only on the front end of what we provide and expose all we have, but we also consume on the back end. So the way we actually consume the application services and drag them in and embed them is through API, these application services. >> I understand you're working on an entirely new architecture that you will be debuting in the spring of 2020. How is that going to change the game? >> We don't really think about it as a new architecture. We think about it as a natural evolution that includes some of these things. Uh, so for instance, the introducing, uh the introduction of the application services layer that I mentioned, is more a new layer in our architecture that we introduced. So we don't think about it as a new architecture, we're just evolving what we have. And because of that evolution, that is something that our entire product portfolio will benefit from. Um, and, I already mentioned today how we are aligning the product portfolio from an experience perspective. We are bringing the arena experience through our FSM product to our um, PSO product, to our customer engagement product and so forth. So we are aligning that front end experience on the same design patterns, so forth, because you know, a good experience is a good user experience. >> You talk about Orena bot and this, this gentleman here, who's given us this talk, just through out a gardner status. That, that by, I don't know, by whatever year 2023, uh, more money will be spent on bots than mobile integration. Which is, you know, quite a prediction. Your thoughts. >> Well, I, you know, there's, there's always all kinds of interesting predictions. I think actually, um, I actually think, um, there, amount of money may go down but I think the number of bots will go up dramatically. And, I think we will actually get to a situation where, bots will be creating bots. (laughs) Right? So, That's when you get, when we talk about intelligent and autonomous systems, I really believe it. Because there is no reason why we should not begin to see autonomy in software. >> Dave: Right. >> Um, we see it, uh, I use the example this morning, that we put our lives in the hands of technology everyday, when you go in your car and you use adaptor to cruise to control, you're trusting technology. Like, when you are driving your Tesla. I mean there was an example in San Francisco, uh, I think, uh, in December last year, where the police had been following a driver for 17 miles. And the car wouldn't stop because it was driving itself, and the driver was sleeping. So, they had to, they had to, you know, call up Tesla and say like how can we manipulate this technology so the car actually stops, so the police gradually got the car to stop. And, uh, you know, finally the guy woke up and uh, he'd probably had one too many. But he claimed he wasn't driving, so they shouldn't charge him, but, they did. (laughter) >> Of course, yes. Well bots are getting better, but I still, I still often know when I'm talking to a bot, but it's getting better, wouldn't you say? >> Christian: Yeah, it's getting reallly good. >> Paul: I know, last year I was completely fooled by a fundraising bot. But, I got a phone call from a bot that I spoke to for ninety seconds before realizing it was a bot. (laughter) So it's, its getting pretty good. As you look at, at the technology that excites you, about what you're bringing with your product, you talked a lot this morning about different kinds of technology and how you want to be a leader. What technologies excite you the most about the markets you are serving? >> I tell you what excites me the most is to work through the different levels of, of, uh, digital transformation that I talked about. I'm excited about the reflection between businesses and technology. I'm excited about the reflections between people and experiences, and I'm excited about the reflections between automation and efficiency. We have a lot of technology at our hands, That can help us achieve these different things. But, at the end of the day, it's the outcomes that matter. The technologies are exciting and you know, I can get super geeky about a lot of different technologies. But if it doesn't relate to any, any, not technical vision of product, but any business vision you have on what you actually want to do with it as a business, then I think it becomes dangerous. But, of course we have our geek sessions, where we geek out on all these different things. But, we try to separate that from when we actually, uh, you know, designing and building things directly into the product. But we need the geek sessions to get inspired. And understand what is available, so we can put it in the context of what our customers need today and also what they'll be needing in the future. >> Since you have some decent observation space and digital transformation, I want to ask a question. Uh, uh, our partner ETR, they have a data platform. And I was down in New York last week just talking to them and, one of the theories is, is so spending is starting to slow down a little bit overall on the macro. One of the theories is that digital transformation in the last two years, there's been a lot of experimentation. So a lot of try and, you know, everything. And now they're going into the production with, with what they, what they feel will delivery business value. And two things are happening is their premise. One is, they're narrowing down the focus on new technologies and make, making bets for all the disruptive technologies. The other is, a lot of the legacy stuff, they are pulling out. Saying, "okay, we're moving on." Um, are you seeing that, are you seeing this sort of... That, the bell weathers anyway going heavy now into production with digital transformation. What are you seeing? >> I think its a progression. >> Dave: Uh huh. >> I think it's scenario based. I don't see, I don't see companies making like, an all out bet from one day to another. >> Dave: Just mixed. >> It's mixed and I think you need to take a cautious approach because, you know, you don't, you... When you're in the technology world, you don't always get it right in the first go, we certainly don't get it right, the first time all the time, right? So, often times its important to get something out there. Learn from it, innovate, fail fast sometimes. Um, the worst thing you can do is not acknowledge when you have mad a mistake, And I think that is a risk that some companies also, bear with digital transformation is... If you need to adjust what you, what you thought was the right thing to do, make the adjustment as quickly as possible. >> Dave: You talked in your keynote about tailoring solutions and I want to understand your philosophy. How dogmatic are you, uh, uh, about, uh, not making customizations versus allowing your customers to make those, those tailored? And, and how do you manage that from a, you know cloud and SaaS delivery, evergreen, I think you call it stand point? >> Christian: We, we, absolutely believe that customers should have solutions that match exactly what they need and so forth. We also heard from stage today that, a good philosophy, I really subscribe to that philosophy, that if you're doing things that, you know, is not really differentiating you as a company or something just use a standard process. Why do something custom if it doesn't mean anything. Then you can adjust your processes to that. But if you have things that really differentiate you as a company, you obviously want to have the technology that supports that. And since that is differentiated, you're not likely to have a standard package file. So in that process, what we need to enable is, we need to enable these scenarios where you can extend, uh, we call it extend on the inside, extend on the outside, but you can achieve what you want but, do it in a way where, you do it in a declarative way. Not by creating or modifying code. So instead we want to make sure that our, the code that we have, that is part of the standard product, can actually interpret declarative code. And that means when we have upgrades and all that stuff, we upgrade the core but the declarative code that the customer has that is, specific to them, remains there and stays there. >> Dave: And that's why the API platform is critical. >> Paul: Right. >> You said no product will be announced or shipped without API enablement, period the end. >> That's correct, We can not because, we can not create a use of front end to anything that doesn't, that isn't API enabled. So, it's very simple. >> Paul: That's a modern architecture. I am curious about you said that one of the reasons that you're at IFS is because it's so customer focused. What is it that this company does differently from companies you've worked at in the past, that exemplifies that customer focus? >> Christian: I think it goes deep um, not only into the culture but also how we actually have people in, all the way in to the individual development teams. Um, I've been in other software companies and the development teams you have developers, you have QA's, you have, you know...testers, you have, you know... Programming just to write the specifications, so forth. We actually have industry solution specialists embedded into the development teams. So, we are, we are, probably our own, you know, worst critic um, and of course then working hand and hand with customers in their processes is essential. But again, if we don't provide the out...if we don't provide the value and the output from what we create for our customers, then it's worth nothing. And that's really the philosophy. If we do not provide value, technology means nothing. >> Dave: So the intersection of domain expertise and software development. Uh Chris, the last question is sort of, what do you hope to get out of this event? Things that you hope to, to take away, or learn or convey to your customers? >> Well I always, I always, look to get feedback. I'm a sucker for feedback and input and learning. Uh, so first of all, I can't wait to walk the expo floor here and really see what all our partners are bringing to the table of innovation. Because they're doing amazing things, so I always enjoy spending a few hours on the, on the expo floor. In the process, get to meet a lot of people, uh and then during the sessions if we can or I'll always end any presentation with an email address. Any, anybody, any customer, any partner will always be able to email me, uh directly, and I, you know... Sometimes a little hard to keep up, but I will respond to every single request. >> Dave: Feedback is a gift. Christian, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great to see ya. >> Thank you. >> Alright, thank you very much. >> Alright, thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. We're at IFS World, Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin. We're here at ZertoCON 2018, Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The final day of ZertoCON, and a lot of talk about partnership at this conference, and one of Zerto's key partners is IBM. Daniel Witteveen is a vice president of resiliency services portfolio at IBM, and I guess the manager of the Zerto relationship from IBM's perspective, is that so? >> Yeah, so I have responsibility for IBM's Resiliency Portfolio. Which includes disaster recovery as a service, backup as a service, data migration services. As well as we do a lot around site and facilities design, construction, and build. So specifically around DRaaS and what you heard today going into the backup world, our backup-as-a-service offering, Zerto's been a partner of ours since 2016. >> Now DRaaS, I think of, is certainly, has been around, disaster recovery has been around for a long time. How much of that business has moved into the cloud now and become a service? >> There's still a very large segment of the population that's doing traditionally DR, but that is moving rapidly to a more automated function. Now, the challenge our customers are faced with is not all workload is cloud ready. So we have a partnership with Zerto for all that cloud-ready workload, using them, but we also combine the Zerto technology into our orchestration software, which handles the full recovery of non-cloud workload IT. So, think about multiple platforms, think about multiple clouds, think about multiple data movers and replicators. We can orchestrate that entire recovery process using Zerto for the virtual environment. >> Talking to executives here today, we don't hear a lot about recovery, we hear a lot about resilience. How ready, how many of your customers are really in that position where they're thinking resilience is never going down as opposed to recovery from a failure? >> So, the goal is to be as close to no outage as possible. But in lieu of recent cyber incidents in cyber-related attacks, the conversation for our clients has shifted to true business resilience. Right, so we have a business resilience conversation verse an IT resilience conversation. Business resilience clearly includes IT, but when you talk about a malicious cyber-related attack, which will cause disruption which'll cause outage, which'll cause data corruption, you're always-on-never-be-out-age viewpoint changes a bit. So, our clients are having a lot of discussions with us around changing the way we think about IT resilience in light of a cyber-related incident. >> Well security, the fastest growing business at IBM is security, how closely do you work with these people in that group? >> Very closely, we've combined, if you're familiar with the NIST Framework around cyber resiliency, you know that there's a lot of effort from our security services around identification and prevention. But what happens when it gets through all that and actually causes and outage, right? So we've partnered very close together on how do you recover and restore, right, using technologies from resiliency services while you try to prevent and detect for true resiliency. >> Talk about the history of the relationship. It's only been a couple years, but how did you first become aware of Zerto and why were they chosen as part of the portfolio? >> Yeah, that's a very good question. So, Zerto started relationship with IBM Cloud. I think at the time it was probably called SoftLayer or Bluemix, right? >> Paul: Yes, it Was probably. >> And that started right as a mechanism to provide DRaaS in a very simple version on IBM Cloud. And the benefits IBM Cloud provided at that time, and still do today, is true hypervisor access to Zerto. And that's been very attractive to Zerto clients because a version of Zerto on-prem is the same as in the cloud, and that's a unique capability for us. But also, another value point was that the data replication between our data centers is free to the customer, so think about the cost structure when it comes to bandwidth. If the customer's moving production in one cloud, in one data center of IBM Cloud, and wants to do recovery out of region, another IBM data center, all that data transfer is included. Right, that's an amazing value prop. But when we're having those discussions with our clients, it expanded to, well, that's nice, that answers this section of my workload. What about all this? And that's really where the relationship blossomed with our integration of orchestration to handle the full IT estate really focusing on hybrid IT. >> Of course, hybrid IT is really the sweet spot for IBM-- >> Daniel: It is. >> How does resilience fit into. The sweetest services that you're offering customers now, is this sort of a core service? Resilience, is a core service of the IBM Hybrid Solution? >> Yeah, absolutely, so within global technology services, it's one of three key plays, resiliency. And if you think of us as a very large outsourcing firm, clients are dependent on us providing these services to them, so it is very significant, as the nature of all of our conversations, any kind of managed service, the default expectation of our client is that it's resilient. >> And, would you say that the clients have understand and really internalized this idea of resilience? Or are they still not quite sure what it all means? >> I would say there's, clients vary brainly. The regulatory clients and the clients that are most potentially exposed to negative publicity as a result of a cyber attack are much more aware and in tune. I will tell you also in lieu of cyber, and it was part of the conversation on that panel yesterday, you're talking about a very different way to respond to an outage. Which is creating a lot of dialogue within our clients of what does it truly mean to be resilient. So it's driving a conversation. They used to be siloed: maybe in IT, maybe in the risk officer or maybe in the CISO. It is bringing them now altogether, and say, we've got to work much stronger together to be resilient. >> We hear a lot of talk about multi-cloud. Is it mostly talk or are you seeing customers really adopt? Are they excited about adopting multiple public clouds? >> I would probably draw a parallel to, did a client ever use one platform, right? And they do. And so clients are very in tune to want to have multiple options. It is very rare today that I go into a client that's single cloud oriented. They'll start single cloud, but they're going to want the flexibility to be multi-cloud. And we want to make sure when we orchestrate their disaster recovery, or even their backup or any of our other offerings, that that can be seamless, that they can move from one cloud to another cloud for whatever reason, maybe it's financial, maybe it's location, maybe it's capability. We want to be able to seamlessly provide that interaction. >> Now AWS and Azure are never going to play nicely together, Where does IBM fit into that matrix? Are you a Switzerland between all these public clouds? >> Well, so we have our own. >> Yes, of course. >> Within IBM Cloud, we'll talk about our strength and our size in the enterprise relative to those providers. But as a services entity, we will continue to be (mumbles). Our shareholders great to be using IBM Cloud. But certainly if a solution or a customer dictates another solution, we would be fine with that. >> Paul: What do your customers ask you about backup these days? Where is backup going? >> How can you do it for me, so I don't have to do it? >> Because it's so painful. (laughing) >> That's our probably biggest use case is customers recognize it's not a core competency. The data explosion has just, they can't handle it anymore. They're buying storage everyday. And they're going there's got to be a better way. And our conversation with customers around backup is let us be your better way. We will provide the infrastructure. We'll provide the label. We'll provide the software. We'll provide the architectural positioning. And we'll focus on providing you the business outcome that you need relative to that offer. >> Would you say the backup is rapidly going to move to the cloud or do you think on-prem backup is going to be around for a long time? >> It's a good question. Unfortunately, as it depends the answer is. For the smaller companies and the remote offices, going directly to cloud makes complete sense. When you have a high-change rate and you have a lot of storage volume, your decision will become where do I need to recover or how do I need to access that data? And maybe that's best suited on-prem. Once (mumbles) in the cloud, maybe that's suited in cloud. I think long term, they'll ultimately sit in the cloud, but there's still a massive amount of storage and customers prefer a massive amount of that to be on-prem. >> In a multi-cloud world, is resilience more difficult to ensure? Or is it easier? >> Way more complex. Way more complex, because if you think about, what 10 years ago, you had site A and site B, site A went down, you're worried about site B. Very easy. One failure case. Now our clients have not only multi-cloud, they have multiple locations, remote offices, back offices. They have multiple software-as-a-service providers. And so our view is, you have to look at the business process resiliency. If you have one system that goes down in a software-as-a-service provider, how does that impact you business process? Can it still work? And how do you make it work in the event that one of those components fail? So it's a lot more complex because you're not just thinking about A and B, you're thinking about 10 different failure scenarios, 20 different scenarios, and making sure that doesn't interrupt the business process. >> The quest for simplicity, IT always seems to become more complex. >> What's interesting is every evolution of technology, which increases redundancy, reliability, the first sense is, well, then I don't need as much resiliency, and every change of technology consolidates that risk, and therefore resiliency becomes that much more important. >> Good job security. Daniel Witteveen, thanks very much for joining us from IBM. >> Excellent, as always, I appreciate being here. Thank you. >> I'm Paul Gillin. That's it for us here at ZertoCON 2018. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the CUBE. Covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is the CUBE, I'm Paul Gillin. We're here at ZertoCON 2018. Final day of ZertoCON here in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center and on the stage this morning with John Morency from Gartner was my next guest Jayme Williams, Senior Systems Engineer at TenCate talking about your experience with Zerto. Jamie, welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Jamie: Thank you very much. >> I'm sure a lot of people haven't heard of TenCate although it's a very big company, tell us what the company does. >> We are a multi-national company, we are developers, processes that produce, one business entity, protected fabrics, we also are in artificial turf, also advanced composites, things like the Mars Lander, so TenCate actually has material on the planet Mars right now. So, we're a multi-national, diverse company, based using in textiles and textile processes. >> Very cool and you're also a multi cloud company from an IT perspective. One of the things you talked about this morning was moving to a current federation of seven different cloud providers I think you said you use. What is the strategy and the thinking behind that. >> So, we're shifting our model right now, we call it disentanglement, we're going from regional setups to where we were the AMERS the EMEA and APAC, rather than regional, we are shifting each business entity to a global, so each one of those global business units, we had to disentangle, move from our current infrastructure to a new infrastructure. We guide them, we try and help them and tell them what would be best suited to them, but some of them went with private cloud, some of them are using public clouds and we have to disperse that infrastructure amongst whatever they so chose and help them along their journey to become a stand-alone business entity across the globe. So, that could be a AWS, it could be Azure, all of them are going to Office 365, but leveraging the technology to best serve the purposes of that specific business unit globally rather than regionally. >> And then it's your job at the back end to federate all these services that many companies are just now beginning to think about adding a second cloud to their portfolio. What advice would you give a company that's looking at moving to multi-cloud? >> Very strong, knowledgeable partners that you can actually become friends with and have them on speed-dial on your hip. Conferences like this is where you meet those people, so that if you come to something here you're going to to run into somebody who has the same struggle as you or you can help someone who's going to to have the same struggle as you along the pathway. So, I think we should disseminate the information amongst ourselves in IT to help each other. It's a community of people, we've got to keep ourselves motivated and vital and relevant and the only way to do that is by building up these partnerships, how did you do it, how did I do it, share that information so we don't all have to struggle through the same exact issues as we go along the journey or the path whatever the business dictates. >> A lot of talk at the conference about resilience. What is resilience mean to TenCate? >> So, it's gone from we can do without this data for 24 hours, that's acceptable, to 12 hours, that's acceptable, now it's an always-on world, it's more and more millennial spun into the workplace too, it's a given that I can do work from anywhere, anytime, anyplace, so you've got to be resilient in your infrastructure, in your processes to make those things available to them, so they're basically our customers as an IT organization saying, "Here's the services we're offering to you, whether it's Office 365, or an on prem business process, we've still got to guarantee that workers and people and colleagues can get to these services, so resilience is always having that service on whatever SLA that has to be implemented in order to meet those things and make them available to the workplace, the business flows, making money, we're profitable and we're on the goods with the P&L. >> Now, obviously Zerto has been important to your IT strategy, talk about your use of Zerto and what value it's delivered to your organization. >> So, we were an early adopter of Zerto, we weren't the first by any means, but we were an early adopter. When we started our cloud strategy we had a meeting, globally, TIO says we are going to the cloud, to the cloud and beyond. I called Zerto, who was implemented just for the Americas at that time and said, "What's the cloud? What do you recommend for the cloud?" And they actually came at that point in time and said, "We have some partners we're working with, one of them happens to be the data center that you're in." So, they got me linked up, that was my first step into talking about discovering what is the cloud using Zerto as the reference, those partners again, those friendships that say utilize these guys. That's how we started initial getting our feet wet with the cloud, it was private, it was more controlled, it also gave us a lot of comfort. We could go to the guys there and say, "How do you do this, what happens if", all of the what if scenarios that really are easy and simple to answer and it was put in front of us by Zerto and as their product evolved, they started supporting replication into Azure, let's go to Azure then, so we started replicating to Azure, we went to Office 365, we of course still used those third party private and Zerto partners and used resources in their data centers. I think I've tried about every offering that Zerto has come out with whether it be off-site backup, 30-day journaling, if not just to see what it is, when I find out that it works, I just keep it, why it's a value-add any time they come out with something. You key-turn it, you get additional benefits, they evolve, they're agile as a company, so they can provide and support us to be agile and pass that on down the line. >> Tell me about the journaling feature that you mentioned, how do you put that to use? >> So, we had all of our VPGs setup for 30-days, so I've got enough storage on-prem to give up to do 30-day journaling like Crypto-locker, unfortunately we were a recipient Crypto-locker, so with the journaling feature, >> Paul: Crypto-locker being a prominent form of ransomware, >> Absolutely. Unfortunately, it's not one I want to raise my hand to having been witness to, but with Zerto, going back into the journal, I recovered, I think it was first hit, 10 seconds before, bring the environment back up, everybody access your files, are you good to go, we're good to go, the end user doesn't know the technology, it's not their problem, but the feeling of morale, the team, the esprit de corps from being able to say, "We've just gotten hit by Crypto, let's fell back to ten seconds before it happened and let's go back to work. >> Paul: Phenomenal. How big was the attack? >> Jayme: So, it took out a file server, so we have a DFS file server infrastructure and it had rapidly worked its way all the way down through the DFS infrastructure, so we had to recover about a terabyte file server, scale it back, bring it back up. I won't say no one was the wiser, but when you say, "Let me reboot the server, try it now." It's back up, we're not calling for tapes, we're getting it back up instantly. >> Ransomware, of course, is the fastest growing malware of 2017, what have you done internally since then to prevent a recurrence of the attack? >> One thing that we absolutely did is go back and review who has access to what, so where did it come in at, where was the entry point, what can we do to remediate these things, do specific production machines need access to talk, needed but not now, we remediate those type things, you extend the use of a product like Zerto to say, okay, we thought this was relevant, with this new information, what happened to us as the scope widened, what else do we need to conclude that we can fall back on for journaling? And there's also a credibility hit and a morale hit to the team. So there's some PR that has to be done to the corporation, to the company, to say we are doing something, you know, we took a valid hit, but we are going to keep your confidence and this is how we are going to do it, we're going to use and leverage a product and the knowledge we gained and fix it. When you show what you are doing and keep their confidence in you from the corporation. So, it's not always just technical, there's PR, confidence that you can do your job, from the businesses, there's a lot of things behind ransomware than simply decrypting. >> I do understand that you spent eight years in the Marine Corps. >> Yes, sir. >> How did this prepare you for a job in IT. >> Oh, man, always charge towards the battle. (both laughing) I don't like to, to my detriment perhaps, I don't like the way, so if something new comes out, chances are, I'm going to try it and ask forgiveness rather than permission. But, I just like to get stuff done and if I can get it done and then move onto something else and find new and interesting things to do, I'm going to play with that, if that solves the business purpose, so be it, let's implement it, let's move to the next one. So, I like change, that's why I like IT. The job is never boring because as we speak right here it's changing, someone smart is thinking of something Germanic, something that's going to change and disrupt, next week I get to go home and discover that myself, play with it and implement it possibly. So, I don't want to be sitting there dormant, this is the job for me. >> Great attitude. Jayme Williams, thank you so much for joining us. >> Yes, sir, thank you very much. >> Jayme Williams from TenCate. We'll be back from ZertoCON 2018. I'm Paul Gillin. This is the CUBE.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Dr. Nic Williams, CEO of Stark and Wayne. Dr. Nic, thanks for joining me >> Thank you very much. I think you must've come to the conference from a different direction than I came. >> I'm a local, and I'm trying to get more people to come to the Boston area. We've been doing theCUBE now for, coming up on our ninth year of doing it, and it's only the third time I've done something in this convention center, so please, more tech shows to this area, Boston, the Hynes Convention Center, and things like that. >> There's plenty of tech people. I was at the Nero Cafe, everyone seemed like they were a tech person. >> Oh no, the Seaport region here is exploding. I've done two interviews today with companies here in Boston or Cambridge. There's a great tech scene. For some reason, you and I were joking, it's like, do we really need another conference in Vegas? I mean really. >> Dr. Nic: Right, no, I like the regional. >> But yeah, the weather here is unseasonably cold. It was snowing and sleeting this morning, which is not the Spring weather. >> It is April, it is mid-April, and it's almost snowing outside. >> Alright, so Dr. Nic, first of all, you get props for the T-shirt. You've got Iron Man and Doctor Doom, and we're saying that there is a connection between the superheroes and Stark and Wayne. >> Right, so Stark and Wayne is founded by two fictional superheroes. The best founders are the fictional ones, they don't go to meetings, they're too busy making, you know, films. >> Yes, but everybody knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man, but nobody's supposed to know that Bruce Wayne was Batman. >> Nic: Right, right. >> But I've heard Stark and Wayne mentioned a number of times by customers here at the conference. So, for our audience that doesn't know, what does Stark and Wayne do, and how are you involved in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem? >> So Stark and Wayne, I first found Bosh, I founded Stark and Wayne. Earlier than that I discovered Bosh, six years ago, when it was first released, became like, I claimed to be the world's first evangelist for Bosh, and still probably the number one evangelist. And so Stark and Wayne came out of that. I was VMWare Pivotal's go-to person for standing things up and then customers grew, and you know. Yeah, people want to know who to go to, and when it comes to running Cloud Foundry, that's us. >> Yeah well, there's always that discussion, right? We've got all these wonderful platforms and these things that go together, but a lot of times there's services and people that help to get those up. Pivotal, just had a great discussion with a Pivotal person, talking about the reason they bought Pivotal Labs originally was like, wow, when people got stuck, that's what Pivotal Labs helps with that whole application development, so you're doing similar things with Bosh? >> Correct. No it's, we have our mental model around what it is to run operations of a platform, where you're running complex software, but you have an end user who expects everything just to work. And they never want to talk to you, and you don't want to talk to them. So it's this new world of IT where they get what they want instantly, that's the platform and it has to keep working. >> Dr Nic, is it an unreasonable thing for people to say that, yeah I want the things to work, and it shouldn't go down, and you know-- >> What is shadow IT? Shadow IT is the rebellion against corporate IT, so we want to bring back, well, we want to bring the wonders of public services to corporate environments. >> Okay, so-- >> That's the Cloud Foundry's story. >> Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about your users. We've watched this ecosystem mature since the early days, you know, things are more mature, but what's working well? What are the challenges? What are some of the prime things that have people calling up your team? >> So our scope, our users, or our customers, are people, they're the GEs and the Fords of the world running either as a service or internally large Cloud Foundry installations. And whilst Cloud Foundry is getting better and better, the security model is better, the upgrades seem to be flawless, it does keep getting more complex. You know, you can't just add container to container networking and it not get more complicated, right? So, yeah, trying to keep up-to-date with not just the core, but even the community of projects going on is part of the novelty, but also it's trying to bring it to customers and be successful. >> Yeah, I go to a number of these shows that are open source and every time you come there, it's like, "Well, here's the main things we're talking about "but here's six other projects that come up." How's that impact some of what you were just talking about? But, maybe elaborate as to how you deal with the pace of change, and those big companies, how are they help integrate those into what they're doing, or do they, you know-- >> So my Twitter is different from your Twitter. So my Twitter is 10 years worth of collecting of people who talk about interesting things, putting in a URL, just referencing an idea they're having, so they tend to be the thought leaders. They might be wrong, or like, let's put Docker into production, like, it doesn't make it wrong, but you've got to be wary of people who are too early. And you just start to peace a picture of what's being built, and you start to know which groups and which individuals are machines, and make great stuff, and you sort of track their work. Like HashiCorp, Mitchell Hashimoto, I knew him before HashiCorp, and he is a monster, and so you tend to track their work. >> So your Twitter and my Twitter might be more alike than you think. >> Nic: No maybe, right. >> I interviewed Armon at the Cube-Con show last year. My Twitter blowing up the show was a bunch of people arguing about whether Serverless was going to eradicate this whole ecosystem. >> Well, we can argue about that if you like, I guess. >> But love, one of the things coming into this show, was, you know, how does the whole Kubernetes discussion fit into Cloud Foundry? We've heard at this show, Microsoft, Google, many others, talking about, look, open source communities, they're going to work together. >> Well Windows is going to track things 'cause they think they need to sell them, right? But then Microsoft has Service Fabric, which they've owned and operated internally for 10 years, and so, I think some really interesting products may be built on top of Service Fabric, because of what it is. Whereas, you know, Kubernetes will run things, Service Fabric may build net new projects. And then Cloud Foundry's a different experience altogether, so some people, it's what problems they experienced, comes to the solution they find, and unless you've tried to run a platform for people, you might not think the solution's a platform. You might think it's Kubernetes, but-- >> Yeah, so one of the things we always look at when we talk about platforms, is what do they get stood up for? How many applications do you get to stand up there? What don't they work for? Maybe you could help give us a little bit of color as to what you see? >> I'm pretty good at jamming anything into Cloud Foundry, so I have a pretty small scope of what doesn't fit, but typically the idea of Cloud Foundry is the assumption the user is a developer who has 10 iterations a day. Alright, so they want to deploy, test, deploy, test, and then layer pipelines on top of that. You also get, you're going to get the backend of long, stable apps, but the value is, for many people, is that the deploy experience. And then, you know, but whilst, you're going to get those apps that live forever, we still get to replace the underlying core of it. So you still maintain a security model even for the things that are relatively unloved. Andthis is really valuable, like the nice, clean separation of the security, the package, CVEs, and the base OS, then the apps is part of the-- >> Yeah, absolutely, there's been an interesting kind of push and pull lately. We need to take some of those old applications, and we may need to lift and shift them. It doesn't mean that I can necessarily take advantage of all the cool stuff, and there are some things that I can't do with them when I get them on to that new platform. But absolutely, you need to worry about security, you know, data's like the center of everything. >> If you're lifting and shifting, there probably is no developer looking after it, so it's more of an operator function, and they can put it anywhere they like. They're looking after it now, whereas the Cloud Foundry experience is that developer-led experience that has an operations backend. If you're lifting and shifting, if it fits in Cloud Foundry, great, if it fits in Kubernetes, great. It's your responsibility. >> Yeah, what interaction do you have with your clients, with some of the kind of cultural and operational changes that they need to go through? So thinking specifically, you've go the developers doing things, you know, the operators, whether they're involved, whether that be devops or not, but I'm curious-- >> So the biggest change when it comes to helping people who are running platforms. And I know many people want to talk about the cloud transformation, but let's talk about the operations transformation, is to become a service-orientated group who are there to provide a service. Yes you're internal, yes they all have the same email address that you do, but you're a service-orientated organization, and that is not technology, that is a mental mode. And if you're not service-orientated, shadow IT occurs, because they can go to Amazon and get a support organization that will respond to them, and so you're competing with Amazon, and Google, and you need to be pretty good. >> Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, your typical client is kind of a large, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, the Fortune 1000 type companies, does this sort of-- >> We haven't got Berkshire. We haven't got Berkshire, and so if we're going to go Fortune 5, you know, we'd like, I've read my Warren Buffett biography, I reckon the FA are here to meet him I reckon. >> Right, so one of the questions, is this only for the enterprise? Can it be used for smaller businesses, for newer businesses? >> What's interesting is people think about Cloud Foundry as like, "Oh you run it on your infrastructure." Like, I did a talk in 2014, 15, when Docker was starting to be frothy, was, before you think you want to build your own pass, ring me on the hotline. Like, argue with me about why you wouldn't just use Heroku, or Pivotal Web Services, or IBM Cloud, like a public pass. Please, I beg of you, before you go down any path of running on-prem anything, answer solidly the question of why you just wouldn't use a public service. And yeah, so it really starts at that point. It's like, use someone else's, and then if you have to run your own. So, who's really going to have all these rules? It's large organization that have these, "Oh, no, no, we have to run our own." >> Well doctor, one of the things we've said for a while, is there's lots of things that enterprise suck at, that they need to realize that they shouldn't be doing. So start at the most basic level, there's like five companies in the world that are good at building data centers, nobody else should build data centers, if you're using somebody else that can do that. So as you go up and up the stack, you want to get rid of the undifferentiated lifting, things like that, so-- >> I like to joke that every CIO, the moment they get that job, like that's their ticket to get to build their own data center. It's like, what else was the point of becoming a CIO? I want to build my own data center. >> No, not anymore, please-- >> Not anymore, but you know, plus they've been around a little longer than-- >> So, what is that line? What should companies be able to consume a platform, versus where do they add the value, and do you help customers kind of understand that that-- >> By the time they're talking to us, they're pretty far along having convinced themselves about what they're doing. And they have their rules. They have their isolation rules, their data-ownership rules, and they'll have their level of comfort. So they might be comfortable on Amazon, Google, Azure, or they might still not be comfortable with public cloud, and they want the vSphere, but they still have that notion of we're going to run this ourselves. And most of them it's not running one, because that idea of we need our own, propagates throughout the entire organization, and they'll start wanting their own Cloud Foundry-- >> Look, I find that when I talk to users, we, the vendors, and those that watch the industry, always try to come up with these multi-cloud hybrid cloud-type discussion. Users, have a cloud strategy, and it's usually often siloed just like everything else, and right, they're using-- >> Developers-- >> I have some data service, and it's running on Google-- >> Developers just want to have a nice life. >> Microsoft apps. >> They just want to get their work done. They want to feel like, "Alright this is a great job, "like, I'm respected, I get interesting work, "we get to ship it, it actually goes into production." I think if you haven't ever had a project you've worked on that didn't go into production, you haven't worked long enough. Many of us work on something for it not to be shipped. Get it into production as quick as possible and-- >> So, do you have your, you know, utopian ideal world though as to, this is the step-- >> Oh, absolutely-- >> And this is how it'll be simple. >> Tell developers what the business problems are. Get them as close to the business problems, and give them responsibility to solve them. Don't put them behind layers of product managers, and IT support-- >> But Dr. Nic, the developers, they don't have the budget-- >> Speak for utopian-- >> How do we sort through that, because, right, the developer says they want to do this, but they're not tied to the person that has the budget, or they're not working with the operators, I mean, how do we sort through that? >> How do we get to utopia? >> Stu: Yeah. Well, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, they all solved utopia, right? So, this is, think more like them, and perhaps the CEO of the company shouldn't come from sales, perhaps it should be an IT person. >> Well, yeah, what's the T-shirt for the show? It was like running at scale, when you reach a certain point of scale, you either need to solve some of these things, or you will break? >> Right, alright look, hire great sales organizations, but if you don't have empathy for what your company needs to look like in five years time, you're probably not going to allow your organization to become that. The power games, alright? If everyone assumes that the marketing department becomes the top of the organization, or the, you know, then the good people are going to leave to go to organizations where they might be become CEO one day. >> Alright, Dr. Nic, want to give you the final word. For the people that haven't been able to come to the sessions, check out the environment, what are they missing at this show? What is exciting you the most in this ecosystem? >> Like any conference you go to, you come, the learning is all put online. Your show is put online, or every session is put online. You don't come just to learn. You get the energy. I live in Australia, I work from a coffee shop, my staff are all in America, and so to come and just to get the energy that you're doing the right thing, that you get surrounded by a group of people, and certainly no one walks away from a CF Summit feeling like they're in the wrong career. >> Excellent. Well, Dr. Nic, appreciate you helping us understand the infinity wars of cloud environments here. Stark and Wayne, thanks so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. >> Dr. Nic: Thanks Stu. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts this is the CUBE covering Spark Summit East 2017 brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to Boston everybody this is the CUBE. We're live here at Spark Summit East in the Hynes Convention Center. This is the CUBE, check out SiliconANGLE.com for all the news of the day. Check out Wikibon.com for all the research. I'm really excited about this session here. Al Essa is here, he's the vice president of analytics and R&D at McGraw-Hill Education. And I'm so excited because we always talk about digital transformations and transformations. We have an example of 150 year old company that has been, I'm sure, through many transformations. We're going to talk about a recent one. Al Essa, welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> So you heard my little narrative up front. You, obviously, have not been with the company for 150 years (laughs), you can't talk about all the transformations, but there's certainly one that's recent in the last couple of years, anyway which is digital. We know McGraw Hill is a print publisher, describe your business. >> Yeah, so McGraw Hill Education has been traditionally a print publisher, but beginning with our new CEO, David Levin, he joined the company about two years ago and now we call ourselves a learning science company. So it's no longer print publishing, it's smart digital and by smart digital we mean we're trying to transform education by applying principles of learning science. Basically what that means is we try to understand, how do people learn? And how they can learn better. So there are a number of domains, cognitive science, brain sciences, data science and we begin to try to understand what are the known knowns in these areas and then apply it to education. >> I think Marc Benioff said it first, at least the first I heard he said there were going to be way more Saas companies that come out of non-tech companies than tech companies. We're talking off camera, you're a software company. Describe that in some detail. >> Yeah, so being a software company is new for us, but we've moved pretty quickly. Our core competency has been really expert knowledge about education. We work with educators, subject matter experts, so for over a hundred years, we've created vetted content, assessments, and so on. So we have a great deal of domain expertise in education and now we're taking, sort of the new area of frontiers of knowledge, and cognitive science, brain sciences. How can learners learn better and applying that to software and models and algorithms. >> Okay, and there's a data component to this as well, right? >> So yeah, the way I think about it is we're a smart digital company, but smart digital is fueled by smart data. Data underlies everything that we do. Why? Because in order to strengthen learners, provide them with the optimal pathway, as well as instructors. We believe instructors are at the center of this new transformation. We need to provide immediate, real-time data to students and instructors on, how am I doing? How can I do better? This is the predictive component and then you're telling me, maybe I'm not on the best path. So what's my, "How can I do better?" the optimal path. So all of that is based on data. >> Okay, so that's, I mean, the major reason. Do you do any print anymore? Yes, we still do print, because there's still a huge need for print. So print's not going to go away. >> Right. Okay, I just wanted to clarify that. But what you described is largely a business model change, not largely, it is a business model change. But also the value proposition is changing. You're providing a new service, related, but new incremental value, right? >> Yeah, yeah. So the value proposition has changed, and here again, data is critical. Inquiring minds want to know. Our customers want to know, "All right, we're going to use your technology "and your products and solutions, "show us "rigorously, empirically, that it works." That's the bottom line question. Is it effective? Are the tools, products, solutions, not just ours, but are our products and solutions have a context. Is the instruction effective? Is it effective for everyone? So all that is reliant on data. >> So how much of a course, how much of the content in a course would you prepare? Is it now the entire courseware and you instrument the students interaction with it? And then, essentially you're selling the outcomes, the improved outcomes. >> Yeah, I think that's one way to think about it. Here's another model change, so this is not so much digital versus non-digital, but we've been a closed environment. You buy a textbook from us, all the material, the assessments is McGraw Hill Education. But now a fundamental part of our thinking as a software company is that we have to be an open company. Doesn't mean open as in free, but it's an open ecosystem, so one of the things that we believe in very much is standards. So there's a standard body in education called IMS Global. My boss, Stephen Laster, is on the board of IMS Global. So think of that as, this encompasses everything from different tools working together, interoperability tools, or interoperability standards, data standards for data exchange. So, we will always produce great content, great assessments, we have amazing platform and analytics capability, however, we don't believe all of our customers are going to want to use everything from McGraw Hill. So interoperability standards, data standards is vital to what we're doing. >> Can you explain in some detail this learning science company. Explain how we learn. We were talking off camera about sort of the three-- >> Yeah, so this is just one example. It's well known that memory decays exponentially, meaning when you see some item of knowledge for the first time, unless something happens, it goes into short-term memory and then it evaporates. One of the challenges in education is how can I acquire knowledge and retain knowledge? Now most of the techniques that we all use are not optimal. We cram right before an exam. We highlight things and that creates the illusion that we'll be able to recall it. But it's an illusion. Now, cognitive science and research in cognitive science tells us that there are optimal strategies for acquiring knowledge and recalling it. So three examples of that are effort for recall. If you have to actively recall some item of knowledge, that helps with the stickiness. Another is space practice. Practicing out your recall over multiple sessions. Another one is interleaving. So what we do is, we just recently came out with a product last week called, StudyWise. What we've done is taken those principles, written some algorithms, applies those algorithms into a mobile product. That's going to allow learners to optimize their acquisition and recall of knowledge. >> And you're using Spark to-- >> Yeah, we're using Spark and we're using Databricks. So I think what's important there is not just Spark as a technology, but it's an ecosystem, it's a set of technologies. And it has to be woven together into a workflow. Everything from building the model and algorithm, and those are always first approximations. We do the best we can, in terms of how we think the algorithm should work and then deploy that. So our data science team and learning science team builds the models, designs the models, but our IT team wants to make sure that it's part of a workflow. They don't want to have to deal with a new set of technologies, so essentially pressing the button goes into production and then it doesn't stop there, because as Studywise has gone on the market last week, now we're collecting data real-time as learners are interacting with our products. The results of their interactions is coming in to our research environment and we're analyzing that data, as a way of updating our models and tuning the models. >> So would it be fair to say that it was interesting when you talked about these new ways of learning. If I were to create an analogy to Legacy Enterprise apps, they standardize business transactions and the workflows that went with them. It's like you're picking out the best practices in learning, codifying them into an application. And you've opened it up so other platforms can take some or all and then you're taking live feedback from the models, but not just tuning the existing model, but actually adding learning to the model over time as you get a better sense for how effort of recall works or interleaving works. >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I do want to emphasize something, an aspect of what you just said is we believe, and it's not just we believe, the research in learning science shows that we can get the best, most significant learning gains when we place the instructor, the master teacher, at the center of learning. So, doing that, not just in isolation, but what we want to do is create a community of practitioners, master teachers. So think of the healthcare analogy. We have expert physicians, so when we have a new technique or even an old technique, What's working? What's not working? Let's look at the data. What we're also doing is instrumenting our tools so that we can surface these insights to the master practitioners or master teachers. George is trying this technique, that's working or not working, what adjustments do we need to make? So it's not just something has to happen with the learner. Maybe we need to adjust our curriculum. I have to change my teaching practices, my assessments. >> And the incentive for the master practitioners to collaborate is because that's just their nature? >> I think it is. So let's kind of stand back, I think the current paradigm of instruction is lecture mode. I want to impart knowledge, so I'm going to give a lecture. And then assessment is timed tests. In the educational, the jargon for that is summit of assessments, so lecture and tests. That's the dominant paradigm in education. All the research evidence says that doesn't work. (laughs) It doesn't work, but we still do it. >> For how many hundreds of years? >> Yeah. Well, it was okay if we needed to train and educate a handful of people. But now, everyone needs to be educated and it's lifelong learning rate, so that paradigm doesn't work. And the research evidence is overwhelming that it doesn't work. We have to change our paradigm where the new paradigm, and this is again based on research, is differentiated instruction. Different learners are at different stages in their learning and depending on what you need to know, I'm at a different stage. So, we need assessments. Assessments are not punitive, they're not tests. They help us determine what kind of knowledge, what kind of information each learner needs to know. And the instructor helps with the differentiated instruction. >> It's an alignment. >> It's an alignment, yeah. Really to take it to the next stage, the master practitioners, if they are armed with the right data, they can begin to compare. All right, practices this way of teaching for these types of students works well, these are the adjustments that we need to make. >> So, bringing it down to earth with Spark, these models of how to teach, or perhaps how to differentiate the instruction, how to do differentiated assessments, these are the Spark models. >> Yeah, these are the Spark models. So let's kind of stand back and see what's different about traditional analytics or business intelligence and the new analytics enabled by Spark, and so on. First, traditional analytics, the questions that you need to be able to answer are defined beforehand. And then they're implemented in schemas in a data warehouse. In the new order of things, I have questions that I need to ask and they just arise right now. I'm not going to anticipate all the questions that I might want to be able to ask. So, we have to be enable the ability to ask new questions and be able to receive answers immediately. Second, the feedback loop, traditional analytics is a batch mode. Overnight, data warehouse gets updated. Imagine you're flying an airplane, you're the pilot, a new weather system emerges. You can't wait a week or six months to get a report. I have to have corrective course. I have to re-navigate and find a new course. So, the same way, a student encounters difficulty, tell me what I need to do, what course correction do I need to apply? The data has to come in real-time. The models have to run real-time. And if it's at scale, then we have to have parallel processing and then the updates, the round trip, data back to the instructor or the student has to be essentially real-time or near real-time. Spark is one of the technologies that's enabling that. >> The way you got here is kind of interesting. You used to be CIO, got that big Yale brain (laughs) working for you. You're not a developer, I presume, is that right? >> No. >> How did you end up in this role? >> I think it's really a passion for education and I think this is at McGraw Hill. So I'm a first generation college student, I went to public school in Los Angeles. I had a lot of great breaks, I had great teachers who inspired me. So I think first, it's education, but I think we have a major, major problem that we need to solve. So if we look at... So I spent five years with the Minnesota state colleges and university system, most of the colleges, community colleges are open access institutions. So let me just give you a quick statistic. 70% of students who enter community colleges are not prepared in math and english. So seven out of 10 students need remediation. Of the seven out of 10 students who need remediation, only 15% not 5-0, one-five succeed to the next level. This is a national tragedy. >> And that's at the community college level? >> That's at the community college level. We're talking about millions of students who are not making it past the first gate. And they go away thinking they've failed, they incurred debt, their life is now stuck. So this is playing itself out, not to tens of thousands of students, but hundreds of thousands of students annually. So, we've got to solve this problem. I think it's not technology, but reshaping the paradigm of how we think about education. >> It is a national disaster, because often times that's the only affordable route for folks and they are taking on debt, thinking okay, this is a gateway. Al, we have to leave it there. Awesome segment, thanks very much for coming to the CUBE, really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, my buddy, George and I will be back with our next guest. This is the CUBE, we're live from Boston. Be right back. (techno music) >> Narrator: Since the dawn of the cloud

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, this is theCUBE covering Spark Summit East 2017. Brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Everybody the euphoria is still palpable here, we're in downtown Boston at the Hynes Convention Center. For Spark Summit East, #SparkSummit, my co-host and I, George Gilbert, will be unpacking what's going on for the next two days. George, it's good to be working with you again. >> Likewise. >> I always like working with my man, George Gilbert. We go deep, George goes deeper. Fantastic action going on here in Boston, actually quite a good crowd here, it was packed this morning in the keynotes. The rave is streaming. Everybody's talking about streaming. Let's sort of go back a little bit though George. When Spark first came onto the scene, you saw these projects coming out of Berkeley, it was the hope of bringing real-timeness to big data, dealing with some of the memory constraints that we found going from batch to real-time interactive and now streaming, you're going to talk about that a lot. Then you had IBM come in and put a lot of dough behind Spark, basically giving it a stamp, IBM's imprimatur-- >> George: Yeah. >> Much in the same way it did with Lynx-- >> George: Yeah. >> Kind of elbowing it's way in-- >> George: Yeah. >> The marketplace and sort of gaining a foothold. Many people at the time thought that Hadoop needed Spark more than Spark needed Hadoop. A lot of people thought that Spark was going to replace Hadoop. Where are we today? What's the state of big data? >> Okay so to set some context, when Hadoop V1, classic Hadoop came out it was file system, commodity file system, keep everything really cheap, don't have to worry about shared storage, which is very expensive and the processing model, the execution of munging through data was map produced. We're all familiar with those-- >> Dave: Complicated but dirt cheap. >> Yes. >> Dave: Relative to a traditional data warehouse. >> Yes. >> Don't buy a big Oracle Unix box or Lynx box, buy this new file system and figure out how to make it work and you'll save a ton of money. >> Yeah, but unlike the traditional RDBMS', it wasn't really that great for doing interactive business intelligence and things like that. It was really good for big batch jobs that would run overnight or periods of hours, things like that. The irony is when Matei Zaharia, the co-creator of Spark or actually the creator and co-founder of Databricks, which is steward of Spark. When he created the language and the execution environment, his objective was to do a better MapReduce than Radue, than MapReduce, make it faster, take advantage of memory, but he did such a good job of it, that he was able to extend it to be a uniform engine not just for MapReduce type batch stuff, but for streaming stuff. >> Dave: So originally they start out thinking that if I get this right-- >> Yeah. >> It was sort of a microbatch leveraging memory more effectively and then it extended beyond-- >> The microbatch is their current way to address the streaming stuff. >> Dave: Okay. >> It takes MapReduce, which would be big long running jobs, and they can slice them up and so each little slice turns into an element in the stream. >> Dave: Okay, so the point it was improvement upon these big long batch jobs-- >> George: Yeah. >> They're making it batch to interactive in real-time, so let's go back to big data for a moment here. >> George: Yeah. >> Big data was the hottest topic in the world three or four years ago and now it's sort of waned as a buzz word, but big data is now becoming more mainstream. We've talked about that a lot. A lot of people think it's done. Is big data done? >> George: Not it's more that it's sort of-- it's boring for us, kind of pundits, to talk about because it's becoming part of the fabric. The use cases are what's interesting. It started out as a way to collect all data into this really cheap storage repository and then once you did that, this was the data you couldn't afford to put into your terra data, data warehouse at 25,000 per terabyte or with running costs a multiple of that. Here you put all your data in here, your data scientists and data engineers started munging with the data, you started taking workloads off your data warehouse, like ETL things that didn't belong there. Now people are beginning to experiment with business intelligence sort of exploration and reporting on Hadoop, so taking more workloads off the data warehouse. The limitations, there are limitations there that will get solved by putting MPP SQL back-ends on it, but the next step after that. So we're working on that step, but the one that comes after that is make it easier for data scientists to use this data, to create predictive models-- [Dave] Okay, so I often joke that the ROI on big data was reduction on investment and lowering the denominator-- >> George: Yeah. >> In the expense equation, which I think it's fair to say that big data and Hadoop succeeded in achieving that, but then the question becomes, what's the real business impact. Clearly big data has not, except in some edge cases and there are a number of edge cases and examples, but it's not yet anyway lived up to the promise of real-time, affecting outcomes before, you know taking the human out of the decision, bringing transaction and analytics together. Now we're hearing a lot of that talk around AI and machine learning, of course, IoT is the next big thing, that's where streaming fits in. Is it same line new bottle? Or is it sort of the evolution of the data meme? >> George: It's an evolution, but it's not just a technology evolution to make it work. When we've been talking about big data as efficiency, like low cost, cost reduction for the existing type of infrastructure, but when it starts going into machine learning you're doing applications that are more strategic and more top line focused. That means your c-level execs actually have to get involved because they have to talk about the strategic objectives, like growth versus profitability or which markets you want to target first. >> So has Spark been a headwind or tailwind to Hadoop? >> I think it's very much been a tailwind because it simplified a lot of things that took many, many engines in Hadoop. That's something that Matei, creator of Spark, has been talking about for awhile. >> Dave: Okay something I learned today and actually I had heard this before, but the way I phrased it in my tweet, Genomiocs is kicking Moore's Law's ass. >> George: Yeah. >> That the price performance of sequencing a gene improves three x every year to what is essentially a doubling every 18 months for Moore's Law. The amount of data that's being created is just enormous, I think we heard from Broad Institute that they create 17 terabytes a day-- >> George: Yeah. >> As compared to YouTube, which is 24 terabytes a day. >> And then a few years it will be-- >> It will be dwarfing YouTube >> Yeah. >> Of course Twitter you couldn't even see-- >> Yeah. >> So what do you make of that? Is that just the fun fact, is that a new use case, is that really where this whole market is headed? >> It's not a fun fact because we've been hearing for years and years about this study about data doubling every 18 to 24 months, that's coming from the legacy storage guys who can only double their capacity every 18 to 24 months. The reality is that when we take what was analog data and we make it digitally accessible, the only thing that's preventing us from capturing all this data is the cost to acquire and manage it. The available data is growing much, much faster than 40% every 18 months. >> Dave: So what you're saying is that-- I mean this industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades and what you're saying is that linear curve is actually reshaping and it's becoming exponential. >> George: For data-- >> Yes. >> George: So the pressure is on for compute, which is now the bottleneck to get clever and clever about how to process it-- >> So that says innovation has to come from elsewhere, not just Moore's Law. It's got to come from a combination of-- Thomas Friedman talks a lot about Moore's Law being one of the fundamentals, but there are others. >> George: Right. >> So from a data perspective, what are those combinatorial effects that are going to drive innovation forward? >> George: There was a big meetup for Spark last night and the focus was this new database called SnappyData that spun out of Pivotal and it's being mentored by Paul Maritz, ex-head of Development in Microsoft in the 90s and former head of VMWare. The interesting thing about this database, and we'll start seeing it in others, is you don't necessarily want to be able to query and analyze petabytes at once, it will take too long, sort of like munging through data of that size on Hadoop took too long. You can do things that approximate the answer and get it much faster. We're going to see more tricks like that. >> Dave: It's interesting you mention Maritz, I heard a lot of messaging this morning that talked about essentially real-time analysis and being able to make decisions on data that you've never seen before and actually affect outcomes. This narrative I first heard from Maritz many, many years ago when they launched Pivotal. He launched Pivotal to be this platform for building big data apps and now you're seeing Databricks and others sort of usurp that messaging and actually seeming to be at the center of that trend. What's going on there? >> I think there's two, what would you call it, two centers of gravity and our CTO David Floyer talks about this. The edge is becoming more intelligent because there's a huge bandwidth and latency gap between these smart devices at the edge, whether the smart device is like a car or a drone or just a bunch of sensors on a turbine. Those things need to analyze and respond in near real-time or hard real-time, like how to tune themselves, things like that, but they also have to send a lot of data back to the cloud to learn about how these things evolve. In other words it would be like sending the data to the cloud to figure out how the weather patterns are changing. >> Dave: Um,humm. >> That's the analogy. You need them both. >> Dave: Okay. >> So Spark right now is really good in the cloud, but they're doing work so that they can take a lighter weight version and put at the edge. We've also seen Amazon put some stuff at the edge and Azure as well. >> Dave: I want you to comment. We're going to talk about this later, we have a-- George and I are going to do a two-part series at this event. We're going to talk about the state of the market and then we're going to release our big data, in a glimpse to our big data numbers, our Spark forecast, our streaming forecast-- I say I mention streaming because that is-- we talk about batch, we talk about interactive/real-time, you know you're at a terminal-- anybody who's as old as I am remembers that. But now you're talking about streaming. Streaming is a new workload type, you call these things continuous apps, like streams of events coming into a call center, for example, >> George: Yeah. >> As one example that you used. Add some color to that. Talk about that new workload type and the roll of streaming, and really potentially how it fits into IoT. >> Okay, so for the last 60 years, since the birth of digital computing, we've had either one of two workloads, they were either batch, which is jobs that ran offline, you put your punch cards in and sometime later the answer comes out. Or we've had interactive, which is originally it was green screens and now we have PCs and mobile devices. The third one coming up now is continuous or streaming data that you act on in near real-time. It's not that those apps will replace the previous ones, it's that you'll have apps that have continuous processing, batch processing, interactive as a mix. An example would be today all the information about how your applications and data center infrastructure are operating, that's a lot of streams of data that Splunk first, took amat and did very well with-- so that you're looking in real-time and able to figure out if something goes wrong. That type of stuff, all the coulometry from your data center, that is a training wheel for Internet things, where you've got lots of stuff out at the edge. >> Dave: It's interesting you mention Splunk, Splunk doesn't actually use the big data term in its marketing, but they actually are big data and they are streaming. They're actually not talking about it, they're just doing it, but anyway-- Alright George, great thanks for that overview. We're going to break now, bring back our first guest, Arun Murthy, coming in from Hortonworks, co-founder at Hortonworks, so keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE we're live from Spark Summit East, #SparkSummit, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)