(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. My name's Paul Gill, I'm your host. With me, Dave Nicholson, my co-host. And one thing that struck me about this conference arriving here, was the number of universities that are exhibiting here. I mean, big, big exhibits from universities. Never seen that at a conference before. And one of those universities is Indiana University. Our two guests, Dave Jent, who's the AVP of Networks at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, Deputy CIO at Indiana University. Welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I've always thought that the CIO job at a university has got to be the toughest CIO job there is, because you're managing this sprawling network, people are doing all kinds of different things on it. You've got to secure it. You've got to make it performant. And it just seems to be a big challenge. Talk about the network at Indiana University and what you have done particularly since the pandemic, how that has affected the architecture of your network. And what you do to maintain the levels of performance and security that you need. >> On the network side one of the things we've done is, kept in close contact with what the incoming students are looking for. It's a different environment than it was then 10 years ago when a student would come, maybe they had a phone, maybe they had one laptop. Today they're coming with multiple phones, multiple laptops, gaming devices. And the expectation that they have to come on a campus and plug all that stuff in causes lots of problems for us, in managing just the security aspect of it, the capacity, the IP space required to manage six, seven devices per student when you have 35,000 students on campus, has always been a challenge. And keeping ahead of that knowing what students are going to come in with, has been interesting. During the pandemic the campus was closed for a bit of time. What we found was our biggest challenge was keeping up with the number of people who wanted to VPN to campus. We had to buy additional VPN licenses so they could do their work, authenticate to the network. We doubled, maybe even tripled our our VPN license count. And that has settled down now that we're back on campus. But again, they came back with a vengeance. More gaming devices, more things to be connected, and into an environment that was a couple years old, that we hadn't done much with. We had gone through a pretty good size network deployment of new hardware to try to get ready for them. And it's worked well, but it's always challenging to keep up with students. >> Aaron, I want to ask you about security because that really is one of your key areas of focus. And you're collaborating with counties, local municipalities, as well as other educational institutions. How's your security strategy evolving in light of some of the vulnerabilities of VPNs that became obvious during the pandemic, and this kind of perfusion of new devices that that Dave was talking about? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we we did several years ago was establish what we call OmniSOC, which is a shared security operations center in collaboration with other institutions as well as research centers across the United States and in Indiana. And really what that is, is we took the lessons that we've learned and the capabilities that we've had within the institution and looked to partner with those key institutions to bring that data in-house, utilize our staff such that we can look for security threats and share that information across the the other institutions so that we can give each of those areas a heads up and work with those institutions to address any kind of vulnerabilities that might be out there. One of the other things that you mentioned is, we're partnering with Purdue in the Indiana Office of Technology on a grant to actually work with municipalities, county governments, to really assess their posture as it relates to security in those areas. It's a great opportunity for us to work together as institutions as well as work with the state in general to increase our posture as it relates to security. >> Dave, what brings IU to Supercomputing 2022? >> We've been here for a long time. And I think one of the things that we're always interested in is, what's next? What's new? There's so many, there's network vendors, software vendors, hardware vendors, high performance computing suppliers. What is out there that we're interested in? IU runs a large Cray system in Indiana called Big Red 200. And with any system you procure it, you get it running, you operate it, and your next goal is to upgrade it. And what's out there that we might be interested? That I think why we come to IU. We also like to showcase what we do at IU. If you come by the booth you'll see the OmniSOC, there's some video on that. The GlobalNOC, which I manage, which supports a lot of the RNE institutions in the country. We talk about that. Being able to have a place for people to come and see us. If you stand by the booth long enough people come and find you, and want to talk about a project they have, or a collaboration they'd like to partner with. We had a guy come by a while ago wanting a job. Those are all good things having a big booth can do for you. >> Well, so on that subject, in each of your areas of expertise and your purview are you kind of interleaved with the academic side of things on campus? Do you include students? I mean, I would think it would be a great source of cheap labor for you at least. Or is there kind of a wall between what you guys are responsible for and what students? >> Absolutely we try to support faculty and students as much as we can. And just to go back a little bit on the OmniSOC discussion. One of the things that we provide is internships for each of the universities that we work with. They have to sponsor at least three students every year and make that financial commitment. We bring them on site for three weeks. They learn us alongside the other analysts, information security analysts and work in a real world environment and gain those skills to be able to go back to their institutions and do an additional work there. So it's a great program for us to work with students. I think the other thing that we do is we provide obviously the infrastructure that enable our faculty members to do the research that they need to do. Whether that's through Big Red 200, our Supercomputer or just kind of the everyday infrastructure that allows them to do what they need to do. We have an environment on premise called our Intelligent Infrastructure, that we provide managed access to hardware and storage resources in a way that we know it's secure and they can utilize that environment to do virtually anything that they need in a server environment. >> Dave, I want to get back to the GigaPOP, which you mentioned earlier you're the managing director of the Indiana GigaPOP. What exactly is it? >> Well, the GigaPOP and there are a number of GigaPOP around the country. It was really the aggregation facility for Indiana and all of the universities in Indiana to connect to outside resources. GigaPOP has connections to internet too, the commodity internet, Esnet, the Big Ten or the BTAA a network in Chicago. It's a way for all universities in Indiana to connect to a single source to allow them to connect nationally to research organizations. >> And what are the benefits of having this collaboration of university. >> If you could think of a researcher at Indiana wants to do something with a researcher in Wisconsin, they both connect to their research networks in Wisconsin and Indiana, and they have essentially direct connection. There's no commodity internet, there's no throttling of of capacity. Both networks and the interconnects because we use internet too, are essentially UNT throttled access for the researchers to do anything they need to do. It's secure, it's fast, easy to use, in fact, so easy they don't even know that they're using it. It just we manage the networks and organize the networks in a way configure them that's the path of least resistance and that's the path traffic will take. And that's nationally. There are lots of these that are interconnected in various ways. I do want to get back to the labor point, just for a moment. (laughs) Because... >> You're here to claim you're not violating any labor laws. Is that what you're going to be? >> I'm here to hopefully hire, get more people to be interested to coming to IU. >> Stop by the booth. >> It's a great place to work. >> Exactly. >> We hire lots of interns and in the network space hiring really experienced network engineers, really hard to do, hard to attract people. And these days when you can work from anywhere, you don't have to be any place to work for anybody. We try to attract as many students as we can. And really we're exposing 'em to an environment that exists in very few places. Tens of thousands of wireless access points, big fast networks, interconnections and national international networks. We support the Noah network which supports satellite systems and secure traffic. It really is a very unique experience and you can come to IU, spend lots of years there and never see the same thing twice. We think we have an environment that's really a good way for people to come out of college, graduate school, work for some number of years and hopefully stay at IU, but if not, leave and get a good job and talk well about IU. In fact, the wireless network today here at SC was installed and is managed by a person who manages our campus network wireless, James Dickerson. That's the kind of opportunity we can provide people at IU. >> Aaron, I'd like to ask, you hear a lot about everything moving to the cloud these days, but in the HPC world I don't think that move is happening as quickly as it is in some areas. In fact, there's a good argument some workloads should never move to the cloud. You're having to balance these decisions. Where are you on the thinking of what belongs in the data center and what belongs in the cloud? >> I think our approach has really been specific to what the needs are. As an institution, we've not pushed all our chips in on the cloud, whether it be for high performance computing or otherwise. It's really looking at what the specific need is and addressing it with the proper solution. We made an investment several years ago in a data center internally, and we're leveraging that through the intelligent infrastructure that I spoke about. But really it's addressing what the specific need is and finding the specific solution, rather than going all in in one direction or another. I dunno if Jet Stream is something that you would like to bring up as well. >> By having our own data center and having our own facilities we're able to compete for NSF grants and work on projects that provide shared resources for the research community. Just dream is a project that does that. Without a data center and without the ability to work on large projects, we don't have any of that. If you don't have that then you're dependent on someone else. We like to say that, what we are proud of is the people come to IU and ask us if they can partner on our projects. Without a data center and those resources we are the ones who have to go out and say can we partner on your project? We'd like to be the leaders of that in that space. >> I wanted to kind of double click on something you mentioned. Couple of things. Historically IU has been I'm sure closely associated with Chicago. You think of what are students thinking of doing when they graduate? Maybe they're going to go home, but the sort of center of gravity it's like Chicago. You mentioned talking about, especially post pandemic, the idea that you can live anywhere. Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan or Santa Clara. And of course, technology over decades has given us the ability to do things remotely and IU is plugged into the globe, doesn't matter where you are. But have you seen either during or post pandemic 'cause we're really in the early stages of this. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing people say, Hey, thinking about their family, where do I want to live? Where do I want to raise my family? I'm in academia and no, I don't want to live in Manhattan. Hey, we can go to IU and we're plugged into the globe. And then students in California we see this, there's some schools on the central coast where people loved living there when they were in college but there was no economic opportunity there. Are you seeing a shift, are basically houses in Bloomington becoming unaffordable because people are saying, you know what, I'm going to stay here. What does that look like? >> I mean, for our group there are a lot of people who do work from home, have chosen to stay in Bloomington. We have had some people who for various reasons want to leave. We want to retain them, so we allow them to work remotely. And that has turned into a tool for recruiting. The kid that graduates from Caltech. Doesn't want to stay in Caltech in California, we have an opportunity now he can move to wherever between here and there and we can hire him do work. We love to have people come to Indiana. We think it is a unique experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis are great places. But I think the reality is, we're not going to get everybody to come live, be a Hoosier, how do we get them to come and work at IU? In some ways disappointing when we don't have buildings full of people, but 40 paying Zoom or teams window, not kind the same thing. But I think this is what we're going to have to figure out, how do we make this kind of environment work. >> Last question here, give you a chance to put in a plug for Indiana University. For those those data scientists those researchers who may be open to working somewhere else, why would they come to Indiana University? What's different about what you do from what every other academic institution does, Aaron? >> Yeah, I think a lot of what we just talked about today in terms of from a network's perspective, that were plugged in globally. I think if you look beyond the networks I think there are tremendous opportunities for folks to come to Bloomington and experience some bleeding edge technology and to work with some very talented people. I've been amazed, I've been at IU for 20 years and as I look at our peers across higher ed, well, I don't want to say they're not doing as well I do want brag at how well we're doing in terms of organizationally addressing things like security in a centralized way that really puts us in a better position. We're just doing a lot of things that I think some of our peers are catching up to and have been catching up to over the last 10, 12 years. >> And I think to sure scale of IU goes unnoticed at times. IU has the largest medical school in the country. One of the largest nursing schools in the country. And people just kind of overlook some of that. Maybe we need to do a better job of talking about it. But for those who are aware there are a lot of opportunities in life sciences, healthcare, the social sciences. IU has the largest logistics program in the world. We teach more languages than anybody else in the world. The varying kinds of things you can get involved with at IU including networks, I think pretty unparalleled. >> Well, making the case for high performance computing in the Hoosier State. Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for joining you making a great case. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back right after this short message. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to you by spunk. >>Okay, welcome back. Everyone secures live coverage in Las Vegas response dot com. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. We're here for three days is a spunk. Spunk dot com 10 anniversary of their end user conference way Got some great guests here. They talk about diversity, inclusion breaking the barrier. Women in tech We got some great guests. Jane Heights, I add Si io National government service is Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Carol Jones, CEO Sandy and National Labs from Albuquerque Think coming on to CEOs of excited Suzanne McGovern. Diversity and inclusion talent leader for Splunk Thanks for guys joining us. Really appreciate it. I want to get into a panel you guys discuss because this is the area of really important to the workforce. Global workforce is made up of men and women, but most of the software text built by mostly men. But we get that second. I want to get in, find out what you guys are doing in your rolls because you guys, the journey is breaking through the barrier. Start with you. What's your role. What do you do? Their CEO. >>So I am CEO for National Government Service Is we do Medicare claims processing for the federal government. We also have a number of I t contracts with CMS. And, um, I organ. I have an organization of 331 people. Very different organization, Data center, infrastructure security gambit of I t, if you will. A great group of people divers were in Baltimore. Where? In Indianapolis. We're out of the kingdom office. How >>long have you been in 19 >>My career. So yes. Yeah. The waves. Yes. I have seen the waves have Daryl >>Jones and I'm c i o same National Laboratories. It's a federally funded research and development center. So we do research and development from on behalf of the U. S. Government. I have about 500 employees and 400 contractors. So we provide the I T for Sadia, all gametes of it, including some classified environments. >>A lot of security, your role. What's wrong? >>I'm the chief diversity officer. It's Plus I get the pleasure to do that every day. A swell, a cz. It's everyone's job. Not just magically explode. But I'm very honored to do that. How to look after talent. >>I want to compliment you guys on your new branding. Thank not only is a cool and really picking orange, but also that position is very broad and everything is trade message. But the big posters have diversity. Not a bunch of men on the posters. So congratulations, it's anger. Representative is really important. Worth mentioning. Okay, let's start with the journey. The topic you guys just talked about on a panel here in Las Vegas is female leaders smashing the glass ceiling. So when you smash his last ceiling, did you get caught? Was her bleeding? What happened? Take us for your journey. What was big? Take away. What's the learnings? Share your stories. >>Well, a lot of it, as I shared today with Panel, is really learning and be having that Lerner mindset and learning from something that you do, which is part of your life. And I use the example of I'm married to an Indian Muslim, went to India, spent some time with his family, and they told me Let's be ready at 6 30 and I said, Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready. Dressed in 6 30 nobody else was ready. And everyone in the room said, Well, we're gonna have Chai first we're gonna have some tea And I was like, Well, you said 6 30 and I'm ready And, um, everyone said, Well, you know, we need to relax. We need to connect. We need to have some time So I took that back and said, You know what? We all need to make time for tea Way. All need to connect with our people and the individuals that work with us, And I've kind of taken that on through the last 20 years of being married, Tim. But connecting with individuals and your teams and your partner's is what's important and as what Lead Meeks. I've built those allies and that great group of people that >>being people centric, relationship driven, not so much chasing promotions or those kinds. >>That's what's worked for me. Yes, >>Carol, it's been your journey. Stories >>start a little bit of beginnings. I've been in Tech over 30 years. I got a bachelor's and marketing, and then I was looking to get my master's. So I got, um, I s degree, but I didn't know even to go into that field. So my professor said you needed to go into my s, so don't know that's too hard. You can't do that. You know, you could do it. So it's always been challenging myself and continuing learning. I worked at IBM then I was there in the time when they did great layoffs. So no, e he was 93 right to left. Only wonder he's gonna be left by the end of the year. >>You know, for the younger audience out there M I s stands from management information systems. Before that, there was data processing division which actually relevant today. Quite a journey. What a great spirit. What's the one thing that you could share? Folks, this is a lot of young women coming into the workforce, and a lot of people are looking at inspirational figures like yourselves that have been there and done that. There's a lot of mentoring going on is a lot of navigation for young women and understand minorities. And they just you guys, there's no real playbook. You guys have experiences. What's your advice, folks out watching >>my number one advice. And I gave this to people who are wanting to go into leadership. Trust yourself. Trust to you. Are you all got to this place because of the successful person you are and just continue to trust yourself to take advantage of those opportunities. Take a risk. I took a risk when my total focus was in Medicare. I was asked to do another job and I took another, you know, position. And it wasn't in Medicare. So you have to take those opportunities and risk and just trust that you're gonna get yourself. >>Carol. You're >>similar. It's to continue to grow and to be resilient, there'll be times in your career like a layoff where you don't know what you're gonna do. You bounce back and make it into uneven. Better job on. Take risks. I took a risk. I went into cybersecurity. Spent 10 years there, continuing learning and the Brazilian >>learnings key, right? I mean, one of the things about security mentioned 10 years. So much has changed, hasn't it? >>Well, it's bad. Guys still outnumber the good guys. That has changed faster. Exactly. Technologies change. >>Just talk about the diversity inclusion efforts. You guys have a Splunk Splunk cultures very open transparent on the technology solutions very enabling you actually enabling a lot of change on the solution side. Now we're seeing tech for good kind of stories because Texas Tech Tech for business. But also you're seeing speed and times value time to mission value, a new term way kicked around this morning. It's time to mission value. >>Yes. So I'm glad you mentioned data, right? We're data company, and we're very proud that we actually whole star diversity inclusion numbers, right? So way moved the needle 1.8% on gender last year, year on year pride, but not satisfied. We understand that there's much more to diversity inclusion than just gender, But our strategy is threefold for diversity. Inclusion. So it's work force, workplace marketplace farces around just where talk is improving our representation so that these women are no longer the only. These are in the minority that were much more represented, and we're lucky we have three women and our board. We have four women in our C suite, so we're making good good progress. But there's a lot more to do, and as I say, it's not just about gender. We want to do way, nor the innovation is fueled by diversity. So we want to try. You know, folks of different races, different ethnicity, military veterans, people with disability. We need everyone. It's belongs to be, since >>you guys are all three leaders in the industry, Thanks for coming on. Appreciate that. I want to ask you guys because culture seems to be a common thread. I mean, I do so money talks and interviews with leaders for all types, from digital transformation to Dev ops, the security and they always talk speeds in fees. But all the change comes from culture people on what I'm seeing is a pattern of success. Diversity inclusion works well if it's in the culture of the company, so one filter for anyone a woman or anyone is this is a company culturally aligned with it. So that's the question is what do you do when you have a culture that's aligned with it? And what do you do? There's a culture that's not allow, so you want to get out. But how do you unwind and how do you navigate and how do you see the size of signals? Because the date is there >>a way to certainly really harness and failed a culture of inclusion. And that's through employee resource groups in particular. So it's plunks. More than 50% of our spelunkers are actually members. Followers are allies on employee resource. So gives community. It gives that sense of inclusion so that everyone could bring their whole Selves to work. So, to your point, it really does build a different culture, different level of connection. And it's super different. >>Any thoughts on culture and signals look for good, bad, ugly, I mean, because you see a good ways taken right. Why not >>take a chance, right? Right. No, I think, you know, like you look at it and you decide, like some young women we were talking to, You know, Is this the right company for you? And if not, can you find an ally? You know, it's a feeling that the culture isn't there and helped educate him on help to get him to be Jack of what does he and his leaders, I think we have to always ask ourselves, Are we being inclusive for everyone >>and mine? I would spend it a little bit. Is that diversity and thoughts And how? When I joined this organization. Culture is a big factor that needs to change and some of the things that I'm working on, but to bring people to the table and hear those different thoughts and listen to them because they all do think differently. No matter color, race, gender, that sort of thing. So diversity and thought is really something that I try to focus in on >>carry. Palin was just on the Cuban CMO of Splunk and top of the logo's on the branding and, she said, was a great team effort. Love that because she's just really cool about that. And she said we had a lot of diversity and thought, which is a code word for debate. So when you have diversity, I want to get your thoughts on this because this is interesting. We live in a time where speed is a competitive advantage speed, creativity, productivity, relevance, scale. These air kind of the key kind of modern efforts. Diversity could slow things down, too, so but the benefit of diversity is more thought, more access to data. So the question is, what do you guys think about how companies or individuals could not lose the speed keep the game going on the speed and scale and get the benefits of the diversity because you don't want things to grind down. Toe halts way Slugs in the speed game get data more diverse. Data comes in. That's a technical issue. But with diversity, you >>want a challenge that, to be honest, because we're a data company in the details. Irrefutable. Right? So gender diverse Teams up inform homogeneous teams by about 15% if you take that to race and ethnicity was up to 33%. Companies like ourselves, of course, their numbers see an uptick in share price. It's a business imperative, right? We get that. It's the right thing to do. But this notion that it slows things down, you find a way right. You're really high performance. You find a way best time. So it doesn't always come fast, right? Sometimes it's about patients and leadership. So I'm on the side of data and the data is there. If you tickle, di bear seems just perform better, >>so if it is slowing down, your position would be that it's not working >>well. Yes, I know. I think you got to find a way to work together, you know? And that's a beautiful thing about places like spun were hyper cool, right? It's crazy. Tons of work to do different things were just talking about this in the break way have this unwritten rule that we don't hire. I'll see jerks for >>gender neutral data, saris, origin, gender neutral data. >>Yeah, absolutely no hiring folks are really gonna, you know, have a different cultural impact there. No cultural adds the organization way. Need everyone on bats. Beautiful thing. And that's what makes it special. >>I think you know, is you start to work and be more inclusive. You start to build trust. So it goes back to what Jane was talking about relationships. And so you gotta have that foundation and you can move fast and still be reversed. I >>think that's a very key point. Trust is critical because people are taking chances whether they're male or female. If the team works there like you see a Splunk, it shouldn't be an issue becomes an issue when it's issue. All right, so big Walk away and learnings over the years in your journey. What was some moments of greatness? Moments of struggle where you brought your whole self to bear around resolving in persevering what were some challenges in growth moments that really made a difference in your life breaking through that ceiling. >>Wow. Well, um, I'm a breast cancer survivor, and I, uh, used my job and my strength to pull me through that. And I was working during the time, and I had a great leader who took it upon herself to make sure that I could work if I wanted. Thio are not. And it really opened that up for me to be able to say, I can still bring my whole self, whatever that is today that I'm doing. And I look back at that time and that was a strength from inside that gave me that trust myself. You're going to get through it. And that was a challenging personal time, But yet had so many learnings in it, from a career perspective to >>story thanks for sharing Caroline stories and struggles and successes that made him big impact of you. Your >>life. It was my first level one manager job. I got into cybersecurity and I didn't know what I was doing. I came back. My boss of Carol. I don't know what you did this year, and so I really had to learn to communicate. But prior to that, you know that I would never have been on TV. Never would have done public speaking like we did today. So I had to hire a coach and learn hadn't forward on communications. Thanks for sharing stories, I think a >>pivotal moment for me. I was in management, consultants say, for the first half of my career, Dad's first child and I was on the highway with a local Klein seven in the morning. Closet Night started on a Sunday midday, so I didn't see her a week the first night. I know many women who do it just wasn't my personal choice. So I decided to take a roll internal and not find Jason and was told that my career would be over, that I would be on a track, that I wouldn't get partner anymore. And it really wasn't the case. I find my passions in the people agenda did leadership development. I didn't teach our role. I got into diversity, including which I absolutely love. So I think some of those pivotal moments you talked about resilient earlier in the panel is just to dig, dying to know what's important to you personally and for the family and really follow your to north and you know, it works out in the end, >>you guys air inspiration. Thank you for sharing that, I guess on a personal question for me, as a male, there's a lot of men who want to do good. They want to be inclusive as well. Some don't know what to do. Don't even are free to ask for directions, right? So what would you advise men? How could they help in today's culture to move the needle forward, to support beach there from trust and all these critical things that make a difference what you say to that? >>So the research says that women don't suffer from a lack of mentorship. The sucker suffer from a lack of advocacy. So I would say if you want to do something super easy and impactful, go advocate for women, go advocate for women. You know who is amazing I there and go help her forward >>in Korea. And you can do that. Whatever gender you are, you can advocate for others. Yeah, also echo the advocacy. I would agree. >>Trust relationships, yes, across the board >>way, said Thio. Some of the women and our allies today WAAS bring your whole self. And I would just encourage men to do that, to bring your whole self to work, because that's what speeds up the data exchange. That's what it speeds up. Results >>take a chance, >>Take a chance, bring your whole self >>get trust going right. He opened a communicated and look at the date on the photo booth. Datable driver. Thank you guys so much for sharing your stories in The Cube, you think. Uses the stories on the Cube segments. Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for the 10th stop. Compass Accused seventh year John Ferrier with Q. Thanks for watching.

(exciting music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation, here in Palo Alto, CA CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier your host of the CUBE. We're here with James Segil President and Co-Founder of Openpath Security. Hot start-up in a very cutting edge area that everyone can relate to physical security. But as that grows with the internet, the convergence of physical security with how people work online. It's been a huge issue, we've been covering IOT, we've been covering cloud security, we've been covering internet security. James, thanks for joining me today. >> It's great to be here, John. >> So, you guys are a young company in a very hot area. Great investors, you have a great background, we interviewed in the CUBE before, CUBE Alumni. Before we get into it, this is a super important area, I wanted you to take a minute to explain what you guys do. How long you've been around, what is Openpath? >> Sure, so you know, my partners and I are serial tech entrepreneurs out of L.A. this is our fourth company together over the last twenty years. You interviewed me when we were running EdgeCast. So, it's great to be back. You know, Openpath came from our own frustration. We're an Access Control company so we allow folks to enter office buildings, physical space, work space, using a security tool. That is not a badge. So, this is how we used to enter our prior buildings. So, this is actually my business partners badge pack just to get in and out of our offices, and we were basically tired of wearing dog tags or dog collar, however you want to call it, right? The whole idea was you can use your phone, your phone is your key. So, the credential to get into the office, into the building is on your phone, and mobile was a technology that hadn't really been introduced into the physical, sort of, property technology space before. And by bringing mobile to Bear as well as cloud technology, 'cause all the software's in the cloud. We were able to improve this value proposition and offer a cool solution. >> So, just quickly how, how long have you guys been out with the product and when was the company founded? >> So, we started the company three years ago and launched commercially about a year ago. You know, we spent two years building the technology, getting our patents, really getting everything, figured out. We have software and hardware, it's part of our solution. And so, when we launched a year ago, it was kind of like drinking from a fire hose. We literally had people coming and saying, finally, somebody figured out how to get rid of the badge and use my phone just so it will let me in. And since then we've raised a good amount of money and have been, you know just selling to basically everyone, yeah. >> Congratulations, this is a hot story, so I want to get into it. So, the origination story is, obviously you had to be a successful entrepreneur in the past. Being a serial entrepreneur has it's ups and downs, but you know, with the cloud, everyone thinks, Oh, Security is just a cloud problem. You guys are attacking a physical property, physical security, kind of bringing a DevOps ethos to this. I mean, when you hold those badges up, reminds me of the old janitor key ring. This is the digital ring. You know, all your access. So, clearly an opportunity to automate. >> Yeah. >> So clearly, kind of, obviously, the cloud mentality here. But, your impact is to, kind of, the kind of older industry. Explain this trend of property technology. I mean, most people can relate to their office space. >> Yeah. >> You know, waving the badge to get in, maybe VDI on the desktop or whatever's happening. I mean, talk about the the market place and the trend. >> So, you know, buildings, real estate for the most part, are very slow to move in adopting new technology. And I think, you've seen that in a lot of different industries. Certainly in real estate, there was a sort of slowness or unwillingness to move on past old techs. So, this works, it's an RFID badge. And you can use it and people are comfortable with it. It's worked for forty years. Prop-tech, Property Technology, is really a focus around innovating how you work with, interact with, and spend time at work, in office buildings. But it extends well beyond office, it extends into multi-family residential, health care, any building you really go to. And so, there is a lot money and there is a lot of entrepreneurs who are focused on, how do I improve the quality of every experience we have? When I go into an apartment building, when I got into a hospital, when I go to school, when I go to work and that's really what were focused. We're sort of thinking about that whole experience and reducing the friction in every step of how you interact with that building. >> You know, this used to be an IT problem, if your with big company you sign in, you on board, you get your laptop, you get your badge, someone probably enters your name into a database. And then if you leave it has to be deleted. Is you guys addressing that area? Talk about that piece of it because I think this is more real time, more person without the phone, for instance, your bridging the physical and the logical. Talk about the IT versus the old way of doing it. >> Yeah, so, you know, typically in the real estate world, there's an office manager, a facilities person, maybe, a physical security person, or even like real estate person and they're in charge, at least within the enterprise, of thinking about physical security. But what's happened is, there is a lot of exposure that we have to our data, to our personal safety, to everything really in the office. If you don't protect the physical space, from the thieves or bad actors who want to steal your data or hurt you. And so, all this money has gone into Cyber Security, the chief security officer, the IT department, they have unlimited budgets to go out and solve that problem, to protect the network. But they are literally leaving the front door open. And so, a lot of what is happening today in the enterprise is that the CISO, the Chief Security Team, the IT Team is starting to really gain denomination over this real estate and facilities space, and sort of say, hey, these systems need to work together. If I have a single source of truth to hold all my users and my employees in a single database, I want that to connect, not just to my salesforce.com instance but I want it to connect my Access Control system and how people enter the the building. >> Access Control also an IOT problem, Industrial IOT, we hear that area. Clearly a use case for that opportunity so clearly why you got some funding and I want to cover that in a second on origination story. But the question I have for you is, when you guys started the company and now that you are in market with customers, what's the main problem that you solve? What's like, I mean, you have to solve that one problem, what problem do you solve and where is the growth from there? >> So, I have two groups of sort of customers who I talk to. The first group are tenants or enterprise customers, and these folks who need to move into an office, and most of the choice around when to buy Access Control comes because you're building out space or your moving into an office. You need Access Control. It's not on the list of nice to haves, you need to be able to lock the door. So, when you move into a new office, you need to have internet connectivity, alright, you need to have Access Control, maybe an alarm system, sparkletts water or whatever it's going to be. And we're on that list. So, when people are investing in that capital infrastructure. They're going to future proof that investment, they're are going to choose Openpath. The second group we talk to are folks that are building buildings or renovating buildings. And that's asset managers, developers, property managers, landlords. And those constituents are looking to build a physical space that's both safe but allows them to attract folks to their building as tenants. And so, if you offer amenities, you offer a gym, a cool, sort of, you know, work space, and Access Control Technology it becomes an incentive for folks to want to come and office in your space. >> So, you know, you and I are techies. We love to buy that shinny new toy. The property type tech world, they not as innovative or have a propensity to just at the next thing because, they're about security, they're about that, locking doors. So, I got to ask you, what are some of the things, and they're getting more savvy now, I can see that, so it's clear. You can see most of the digital amenities. First, a start with WIFI, we don't have WIFI, you're done. Now, you're starting to see much more app, centric things happening on these locations. What are some of the areas that people are gravitating in terms that they like, in terms of features with Access Control? What is it enabling from a value stand point? Is it differentiate services, is it access to certain amenities, you mentioned some of that. What is some of the new things that are being created? >> Well, I think the first thing is that we're reducing some level of friction in interacting with you workspace. So, the fact that you can basically, keep your phone in your pocket or keep talking on your phone or keep it in your purse and just walk up to the door and have the door unlock because it knows you're there. That's not just kind of cool that's really just helping out the quality of your day to day experience. You know, ever since 9/11 when we upgraded the security experience almost everywhere. Whether you're entering an arena, a plane or a building that friction is something we are used to now and there is a push back that people want a little bit less friction even though they want that higher level of security. >> Not that I want to get doom day scenario. You mentioned 9/11, they were told to stay in their buildings when they could have been evacuated, everyone in New York knows that tragic story. Huge active shooter environment right now, it's just my kids went to an event in San Francisco. Literally, what is on the mind of people is, oh my God, is there going to be an active shooter? These are examples of things that could go wrong and in security this becomes an Apocalypse scenario that we've been talking about it takes that to get people to take action. So, can you help in those scenarios? How do you help someone either thwart those kinds of security attacks or help them get through them if somethings happening? Let's just say an active shooter comes into a building? >> Yeah, so we've thought a lot about that. And we have kids in schools and we actually have a lot of schools and houses of worship that are buying and installing our system. So, we have a couple different capabilities, lockdown is our latest release. And this is the capability from anyone, anywhere on any mobile phone in that building to enable a lockdown procedure. What I think is particularly valuable here is that if you're basically no where near the fire alarm which is where the lock down button might be as well, and you're stuck in a closet and or hidden away tryna to make sure you're not going to get shot. If you have your phone on you can enable a lockdown and because our plans are kind customized, you can enable a lockdown that let's say locks all the doors in the zone. But lifts up the garage gate so that first responders can get there. And we've seen proven the faster the first responders can get to the problem, whether it's, you know, an EMS person that's tryna to stem the bleeding on someone who is injured or whether it's a SWAT team-- >> Well that's actually proven you saw Gilroy, you saw the response in Dayton. Literally minutes taking those active shooter. >> Well, every second counts, so being able to have a lockdown that works fast, that's effective and that allows people to get through and the bad guys to sort of be isolated is important. The second thing is, we actually have integration with video systems, so you can send a live video feed instantly of every door that's locked down to the first responders. And they can actually see it right there on their iPhone where the bad guy is, what he is doing, real time, from the video systems. They can take over the video system, so it's a pretty-- >> So, it augments the security environment for good and bad scenarios. So, let's get a kind of more realistic scenario. Doomsday scenarios is kind of depressing, but it's real. Our people are planning and are protecting around that. One basic concept, and I got reprimanded at VMware was, I've been at the VMware campuses since they've been building it. But recently I was going to a meeting, and I knew it was building number four, or whatever it was. And I'm sitting there waiting at the door. Someone comes out and I went in and they call it tailgating. Turns out I didn't have a badge and the new person who was there really kind of got in my face and said, You tailgated, I'm like, I do it all the time, I'm like, okay, stop. So, okay, you don't tailgate a VMware anymore and I now know that. But this happens all the time. This is another common problem, I could be stealing laptops, I could be getting the plans at VMworld. I mean, whatever's going on. And this, bad things are happening with tailgating. That's a big thing isn't it? >> It is a big thing. Security experts are telling us it is one of the top three physical security challenges that enterprise CISO's are running into, tailgating. And what's happening is, people just like you, are well meaning are sneaking in. But, there's some bad actors that are sneaking in as well. So, we've got technology that have deployed with partners that actually count the people that are coming in through the door. And if there's two entries when you're only supposed to have one, we can actually track that and instantly make the meter go beep, beep, beep, beep and send an email alert to a security desk or to the individual themself with a video and a picture of the person who snuck in behind you. >> That is a great example, and I mentioned VMware in all seriousness. That actually had happened. There's a huge campus and the reason why, I just didn't want to go to the front I parked at the wrong garage and I didn't want to walk five buildings over. A little bit lazy but that's the point of the large buildings, where the security access comes in. For large campuses, whether it's Universities or corporate, that's the big challenge, right? Not just Access Control but management. >> It's management and so the idea, of sort giving and empowering people to be able to really quickly change, configure and access places. The fact that from your phone you can actually, as a manager change access privileges and give someone who's visiting a temporary pass. That's not one of these, but it's actually a virtual pass on your phone. That's really empowering. So, if you were coming to visit me at VMware, I'd send you a guest pass that gives you one hour access to five different doors and so that you wouldn't have to sneak in. You would basically be able to just use your phone to get in as a visitor for one hour. And after an hour you're not going to be able to get in. >> All right, so let's talk about the company. Openpath Security, you guys obviously targeting the physical space, Access Control, logical physical coming together seamless frictionless environment. Business model? How much funding did you get? What kind of investors do you have? Employee count? Product shipping status? Give us through the numbers. Give us the data. >> Sure, so we started the company three years ago, we came out a stealth mode a year ago and launched commercially, we had actually done our series A internally, we led that ourselves as the founders. And then, when we came out of stealth mode, we had a lot of great attention in the space. Emergence Capital is our lead investor in our series B. We raised $27 millions total. We've got a great team of folks, just under 16 employees. We are based in Los Angeles but we have offices in Indianapolis as well 'cause why not? It's the best place to be. And we're growing fast. We actually sell focused on commercial real estate, but have expanded to multi-family residential. Also, to schools, churches, houses of worship. And we are here in the U.S. now and we're growing internationally over the next two or three years. >> And the product is the a SaaS, managed service, physical? What's the story of the product? >> Yeah, so there's a combination of physical hardware but there is a 100% attached software to it. So, you install a reader at the door, a panel in the IT closet and it's wired as most traditional Access Control systems are but our software is all hosted in the cloud. As well, as the credential that is on the phone. And so, we sort of sell the hardware upfront and then you buy sort of a recurring annual fee associated with the number of doors you own. >> And so you get on the spec that be on the new building, so you do a little go to, you go to market as it is, getting on the design side, suppliers to the building. >> Yup, so, there's the developers, the architects, who put us into the spec. There the system integrators, these are the folks who are low voltage electricians, security system integrators who go out and actually deploy all the wiring you have in this building. They'll go ahead and do the WIFI network, the CCTV camera system, the alarm system and the Access Control system. And so, we have a national network of certified installers who go out, and that's actually how we go to market. We sell through them. >> And you have the software, it's a nice margin. And is there a cloud play here too? Is data stored in the cloud? >> Yeah. >> How are you guys handling some of the backend stuff? >> So, yeah, all the information is stored in the cloud. What's kind of important in a life safety environment is that you have a cloud system that runs it but that you can work if the internet is down. 'Cause imagine if the Internet's down and you can't even get into the office to fix the internet. So, our system works offline as well as online. We store all the credentials locally. >> I remember interviewing Ring's founder at an Amazon event. Simple concept use the cloud. Same thing for you? Not a simple concept but you're in the spec use the cloud with a hundred percent attach rate. >> Exactly. >> All right, so what's the coolest thing that you see happening in this market for you guys? What's going on that you would say that's notable that you would think is important that people should pay attention to. >> There is a number of big trends. You know, we talked about one, right? Which is the whole change of, you know, combining physical security with cyber security and having those two really come together. I'd say the transition of IOT from just the home into the workspace is another big trend we are watching. People are just used to having an NEST on their wall or a Ring on their doorbell and the want Openpath on their door at work. And that's something else that we've seen as a big transition. People are getting used to having an easier experience and I think the final thing is how people use the workspace, right? People work all over the space now. It's not just at their cubicle and that's impacting. >> I got to get some commentary and understanding around the name Openpath because most people in these kind of areas that you're in have closed systems. You know, the HVAC system, I'm running an IOT like an operational technology. Information technology is a protocol based OSI model, open source. So, those worlds are colliding, we're covering that in the whole IOT, industrial IOT trend. Openpath Security? If it's open can I hack it, what's going the Openpath name? Tell us why Openpath? How are you open? Tell us the story behind the name? >> I'm really glad you asked. We were really frustrated when we analyzed the space, as investors and entrepreneurs in this category. We saw that all the systems that are out there, are incredibly closed. Their proprietary systems, they work on old protocols and they're not open. Ours is open. It's built on open API's. Every element of our technology can be connected to, right? And we have tons of developers who are integrating, just like they do in the web, with Openpath. And that's something you can't really do in the old physical Access Control World. So open is just correlating that. >> So, you that's from an ecosystems stand point, you guys enabling others to build on top of your stuff. >> Oh yeah, we've got Envoy the visitor management company. They've got an integration with our Access Control. Density, which is a really cool people counting tool. We've got Camo, a video integration tool. All these folks are integrating with us because it's open and it's really easy to do. >> Okay, so I got to ask the question. I'm now, I'm a building person designing the specs for the new campus, open? That sounds insecure. How do you guarantee that you're going to to be secure? I'm worried about security. How can a hacker get in, take over the physical space, shut it down, that's my concern. How do you address that? >> Yeah, no it's legit. So, what I often say to people is, let's see. You can have a badge, like this, right? And you can pick up my badge and find it anywhere you want, right? And now you're James, right? You can go take that, and you can get in anywhere you want. But I challenge you to try to use my phone. Try to unlock right now, right? >> There it is. (laughs) >> That super computer is encrypted, there's no way you're going to break that. This is the most secure way to enter anywhere. >> But if I get, that's an iPhone but with an Android I'd get some Malware on there. >> But the Malware that you get on your Android isn't necessarily going to allow you to authenticate our system. >> So, you're content, even though you might be on an open device, you guys are containing the app, security app on the device. >> Yeah, so the same protocols that we use on the internet to have secure HTTPS communication between any kind of client, your computer and a website. We're using that same hand off. Where we have rotating security certificates on this, as well as in the cloud, as well as on the panel. So, everything is fully encrypted end to end. And that gives us a level of security that's unmatched and unrivaled actually, in the Access Control space. >> James, thanks for coming on theCUBE, final just give a plug for the company. What's new, what's happening? What's going on Openpath? What's next for you guys? >> Well, if it's a plug openpath.com that's an easy one. But, I think for us, we're really growing in a way that people are excited about. I want to change the work day experience. So, everybody who's out there, who's tired of using a keycard and a badge, I want them to go to their boss and say, why can't we upgrade to Openpath? Go to your landlord and say, hey, I'm negotiating this into my tenant improvement. I want Openpath as a part of how I sort of access the building. The trends that we're really excited about, this lockdown technology, the Anti-Tailgating Technology. Those are really cool, sort of advantages that we give the enterprise and we're just excited to be helping people improve the quality of the workday. >> And what's the reason why you're winning deals? What's the one factor or two factors? Ease of use, open-ness, convince features? What's your-- >> I love it, you're selling my product for me. It's ease of use, it's the fact that it reduces a number of steps in the friction you experience personally everyday. And that the enterprise or the landlord experiencing managing a system, is less expensive and more secure. Kind of all the things you want. Plus, I mean, how much sense does it make that you don't have to carry around ten badges that you can actually just have it all on your phone. It just makes sense. >> Soon series C funding around the corner. (laughs) >> If you're interested, we should have a conversation. >> TheCUBE fund's not yet setup but when we get theCUBE venture capital fund will be in. >> That's good, you let me invest in your company, I'll let you invest in mine. >> We'll talk. James Segil, entrepreneur President, Co-Founder Openpath Security, hot start up here inside theCUBE. Featured startup here. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier. (exciting music)

>> live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the two you covering. Citric Synergy. Atlanta 2019. Brought to You by Citrix >> Welcome back to the Cubes. Continuing coverage of Citrix Energy, 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin. My co host for the event is Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to talk. Teo, one of the Citrix Innovation Award nominees, Indiana University, with a couple of folks from Indiana University joining us. Stephanie Cox, manager, a Virtual Platform Services and Mat Link, associate vice president of research Technologies Guys, thanks so much for joining Keith and me, Thank you. And congratulations on Indiana University being nominated for an innovation award. I was talking with Tim in hand there CMO yesterday, saying there was over a thousands nomination. So to even get down to being in the top three is pretty exciting stuff. Talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. Us. This is a a big, big organization. Lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Matt, let's start with you. Give us that picture of what's going on there. Yes, so I >> u is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We've got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is were consolidated shop. So there are 1,200 of us and I you that support the entire university and all the campuses and anyone point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services. >> That's a Big 70 talk. Talk to us about your virtual a footprint. How How big is the location? Data centers? What's the footprint? >> Well, we have two data centers. One of them is in Indianapolis, which is my home. It's one of our larger campus is calling Indiana University Purdue University affectionately, I U P y. There is a data center there, but our large danna center is at the flagship campus, which is in Bloomington, Indiana, >> and to support 100,000 plus people and to hundreds of any given the 2nd 200,000 devices. How have you designed that virtual infrastructure to enable access to students, faculty, etcetera and employees. >> So from the network perspective, we have several network master plans that have rolled, and we're in our 2nd 10 year next network master plan, and the network master plan is designed to continually upgrade the network. Both the physical network, the infrastructure and the wireless network in our last 10 year budget, for that was around $170,000,000 of investment just to support the network infrastructure. And then Stephanie rides on top of that as the virtual platform with Citrix to deliver the images anywhere on campus. Whether it's wirelessly or whether it's connected via network connection >> kill seven campuses is already a bit. If you ever look at a map, Indiana sits Christ map damp in the middle of the country. It's a big space. Right before we hit record, we were just talking about that. Drive off I 65 from Indianapolis to Chicago is just a lot of rules area, and I'm sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is the sensible thing. Everyone in Indiana talk to us about the challenges of getting connective ity and getting material virtual classrooms to those remote areas. >> Yeah, it's really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really at the premiere Remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So we built our citrix environment. Teo encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty, staff and students to use the service. Do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. But we do offer it to everyone, which is I found in the education. You're in a very unique tin Indiana University. Another another thing to have consolidated I t. And then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restricted to specific pockets of the university. With that, we've been able to them extend offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote location. So if you're a student who is working in or go, you know, lives in rule Indiana and you want Teo get in Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We I have a very nice of online program, just a lot of other options that that we've really tried Teo offer for remote access. >> So Citrix has really enabled this. I think you call it the eye. You anywhere. Indiana University anywhere Program. Tell us about opening up this access to everyone over the time that you've been ascetics Customer, how many more people can you estimate have access now, that didn't hurt not too long ago. >> Yeah, I think initially, and Matt was probably no more before me before I Even before I even came on the scene, I believe that the original youth case was really just trying. Teo, extend what we were already doing on premise in what we call just our Indiana University lab supported areas. Right? So just your small, like the old days you would goto your college campus and you go into your computer lab with it. We just really wanted Teo the virtual Isar expand the access to just those specific types of APS and computers. And that was an early design. Since then, over the years, we've really kind of, you know, just really expanded. Really. We used the Citrix platform to redesign and distribute how we deliver the applications and the virtual desktops. So now not only do we service those students who would who would normally come onto the campus just to use your traditional computer lab. Wait do a lot, especially programs for other schools. Like we, we deliver a virtual desktop for our dentistry. Students may actually use that whole platform in the dental clinic to see real patients are third tier. Third year doctors do that way. Also replicated that same thing and do it in our speech and hearing sciences for our future audiologist. We have certain professors that have wanted to take a particular course that they're teaching and extended to different pockets all over the world. So we might host a class from Budapest or Africa somewhere else. You know, wherever that faculty and staff has three sources that they know they need to get to in their content already virtualized. We worked to make that happen all the time. >> That's a lot of what you just said is first of all, initially, maybe before Citrix being able to provide support in the computer labs for your maybe seven core campuses. Now you get your giving 130,000 plus individuals anywhere, anytime. Access that is the ex multiplier on that is massive, but you're also gone global It's not just online, it's you're able to enable professors to teach in other parts of the world where it was before. It was just people that were in Indiana, but master and and >> you're just limited by the network. So that's the only draw back. When you go to the rule areas way out, you're just limited by the network. You know, the initial program was really you really thought of as a cost saving measure way we're goingto put thin clients out. We wouldn't have to do life cycle replacements for desktop machines that were getting more expensive and more expensive, you know, 10 years ago, and now the way that we look at it is I you wants to provide services across the breath of the organization and make those services at no additional cost and open to everybody open access to everybody. The desktop, for example, is one of you know Stephanie is, is the brainchild behind the desktop, took three years of dedicated hard work to create an environment to support the visually impaired. >> Talk to us more about that because that was part of the video and that captured my intention immediately. What is 80 accessibility, technology, accessibility technology is inaccessible to get that. So I'm just, you know, hundreds thousands, and not just those that are sight and hearing. >> So one of the things then I think it's just a wonderful thing about working at a university. We're able to buy software licenses in a big quantity, large quantity, right? Because we have that kind of buying power software that I normally never would see or get access to, even in my private sector. Administer tricks engineer for a long time. But when you come to a university and then you're selling or you're getting licenses for 50 60 70 80,000 you get to see some of these products that you don't normally as a regular consumer. You'd like it, but you know you can't really afford it. So with that, when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity site licence, you know, the way we thought, Oh my goodness, let's virtualized these and make sure everybody gets access to them and the ones that were really attractive to us, where the ones for the visually impaired, sure they're in niche and They're very, very expensive, but we but let's just try it. We'll see how well they perform in a virtual environment. And with that, our Citrix infrastructure underneath they performed quite well. Plus, the apse have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. So we're really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. We had to work really hard to make sure that the speech recognition software was fast enough for them. It turns out that blind people listen to speech really, really, really, really, really fast, and so we had to make sure that we kept our platform while we're working on it to keep it sped an updated so that it's usable to them right since functional to me. But they really need it to be like, 10 times faster. I found that out after even shooting the award video and spending even more time with them, I thought, Why don't you guys tell me it was slow to you? But yeah, it's, uh, it's been an honor, really, Teo to be up for that award. But tow work with those students to learn more about their needs to learn more about the city different applications that people write for people with old disabilities. I hope we can do more in that space. >> So the young man in it and why I don't remember his name. >> Priscilla, Bela, Chris. So >> share just quickly about Chris's story. >> Yeah, and he watches the Cube. I hope he's listening because I >> think I think this whole >> kind of >> really put a little bit icing on the cake because you're taking an environment and urine empowering a student to do what they want to do versus what they are able or not able to do. So Christmas story is pretty cool of where he wants to go with his college career. >> Yeah, I won't say he's a big, you know, proponent, user of the virtual desktop, because he's just so advanced. He's like, way beyond everything We're learning from him. But he is Indiana University's believe. I'm saying this right, very first biomedical chemical engineer who is blind and fourth completely blind, Yes, wow and is quite a brilliant young man, and we were lucky to have him be r. He will test anything for me and and Mary Stores, who was featured in the video Chris Meyer. And he's also featured in the video. Gonna remember their names? I mean, it's a hole. I'm lucky to have a whole community of people that will Yeah, they know where we want to be there for them. We don't always get it right. What? We're gonna listen and keep trying to move forward. So >> But if you kind of think of even what a year or two ago not being able to give any of this virtualized desktop access to this visually impaired and how many people are now using it? >> Um, well, we open it up to everyone. We have hundreds and hundreds of users, but we know not everyone who uses it is blind. People like you can use it if you want it or not way. Don't really understand why some people prefer to use that one over there. The other But it does have some advantages. I mean, there there are different levels of sight impairment, too, as I've just been educated right. There are some people who are just at the very beginning of that journey of just losing their site. So we if if that happens to be, you know, someone that we can extend our environment to. It's probably better t use it now and get really familiar with that issue. Transition to losing your sight later in life. I've been told so >> So you ask a little bit about the scope of of the desktop, so I'll layer on a little bit of the scope of eye you anywhere. Last year, around 65,000 individual unique users over well over 1,000,000 Loggins and 8,000,000 and the average session time was around 41 minutes. That's so our instructors teach with it. Are clinicians treat people with it? We've built it in two. How's Elektronik protected health data? Er hit. The client's gonna be critical, writes the hip a standard because you can't say compliance anymore because you can't be compliant with a standard change. That wording several times way are very familiar with meeting hip. A standard we've been doing that for about 12 years now with where I came from was the high performance computing area of the university. So that's my background, and I >> so one thing we didn't get a chance to talk, uh, touch 12 100,000 devices were a citrus citrus is a Microsoft partner. Typically, when those companies think of 200,000 users, they think for profit. There's, you know, this is a niche use case for 200,000 users. Obviously, you guys have gotten some great pricing as part of being a educational environment. What I love to hear is kind of the research stories, because the ability to shrink the world, so to speak, you know, hi HPC you're giving access to specialized equipment to people who can't get their normally. You know, you don't have to be physically in front of GPU CPUC century. What other cool things have been coming out of the research side of the house because of the situation able? >> So this is cool. I mean, >> I get it. So >> So one of our group's research software solutions stole the idea from Stephanie to provide a research desktop. Barr >> imitation. Highest form of flattery, Stephanie. Absolutely. So what we've >> done is is is we always continually to try to reduce the barriers of entry and access? Uh, you know, supercomputing. Before you had to be this tall to ride this ride. Well, now we're down to here and with the hopes that will get down even farther. So what we've done is we've taken virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers, and now you can be wherever you want to be and have access to HPC. Untie you and that's all the systems. So we have four super computers and we have 40 petabytes of spinning disc ah, 160 petabytes of archival tape library. So we're we're a large shop and, you know, we couldn't have done it without looking at what Stephanie has done and and really looking in that model differently. Right? Because to use HPC before, you'd have to use a terminal and shell in and now, looking at you anywhere that gives you just the different opportunity to catch a different and more broad customer base. And I call on customers because we try to treat him as customers and and helps the diversity of what you're doing. So last year alone, our group research technologies supported a 151 different departments way were on 937 different grants, and we support over 330 different disciplines. Uh, it I you and so it's It's deep, but it's also very broad. First, larger campus we are. And as a large organization as we are, you know, we're fairly nimble. Even a 1,200 people. >> Wow! From what I've heard, it's no wonder that what you've done at Indiana University has garnered you the Innovation Award nominee. I can't imagine what is next. All that you have accomplished. Stephanie. Matt, thank you so much for joining Key to me. We wish you the best of luck and good a citric scott dot com Search Innovation Awards where you can vote for the three finalists. We wish you the very best of luck will be waiting with bated breath tomorrow to see who wins. >> So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Keep >> our pleasure for Keith Townsend. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Citrix. Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the event is Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to talk to one of the Citrix Innovation Award nominees, Indiana University. We have a couple of folks from Indiana University joining us, Stephanie Cox, Manager of Virtual Platform Services and Matt Link, Associate Vice President of Research Technologies. Guys, thanks so much for joining Keith and me. >> Thank you Lisa. >> Thank you. >> And thank you Keith. >> It's an honor to be here, yeah. >> And congratulations on Indiana University being nominated for an innovation award. I was talking with Tim Minahan, their CMO yesterday saying there was over a thousand nominations, so to even get down to being in the top three is pretty exciting stuff. >> Yeah. >> Awesome. >> So talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. You guys, this is a big, big big organization lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Matt, let's start with you, give us that picture of what's going on there. >> Yeah, so IU is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is, we're a consolidated IT shop. So, there are 1200 of us at IU that support the entire university and all the campuses. And at any one point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services. >> Big, that's big. >> Big. >> Wow, that is big. Stephanie talk, talk to us about your virtual imp, footprint and how big is the location. How many data centers? What's the footprint? >> Well we have two data centers, one of them is in Indianapolis which is my home. It's one of our larger campuses, we call it Indiana University Purdue University, affectionately IUPUI. There is a data center there but our larger data center is at the flagship campus which is in, Bloomington, Indiana. >> And, to support 100,000 plus people and, you said at any given second, 200,000 devices. How have you designed that Virtual Integral Structure to enable access to students, faculty, et cetera and employees? >> So from the network perspective we have several network master plans that have rolled and we're in our second 10 year network master plan. And, the network master plan is designed to continually upgrade the network, both the physical network, the infrastructure, and the wireless network. In our last 10 year budget for that was around $170 million of investment just to support the network infrastructure. And then, Stephanie rides on top of that as the Virtual Platform with Citrix to deliver the images anywhere on campus, whether it's wirelessly or whether it's connected via network connection. >> Yep. >> So seven campuses is already a bit. If you ever look at a map, Indiana sits right smack dab in the middle of the country. It's a big space, right before we hit record, we were just talking about that drive up I-65 from Indianapolis to Chicago is just, a lot of rural area and, I'm sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is accessible to everyone in Indiana. Talk to us about the challenges of getting connectivity and getting material, virtual classrooms to those remote areas. >> Yeah, that's really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really the premier remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So, we built our Citrix environment to encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty, staff, and students to use the service. Now do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. >> Thankfully. >> But we do offer it to everyone which is, I found, in the education arena, very unique to Indiana University. Another thing to have the consolidated IT and then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restrict it to separate pockets of the university. With that, we've been able to then extend, offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote locations. So, if you're a student who is working in or lives in rural Indiana and you want to get an Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We have a very nice online program and just a lot of other options that we've really tried to offer for remote access. >> So Citrix has really enabled this, I think you call it the IUanyWare, Indiana University Anywhere Program. >> Yeah. >> Tell us about opening up this access to everyone over the time that you've been a Citrix customer how many more people can you guesstimate have access now that didn't not too long ago? >> Yeah, I think initially, and Matt would probably know more before me, before I even came on the scene, I believe that the original use case was really just trying to extend what we were already doing on premise in what we call just our Indiana University lab supported areas. Right, so just your small, like the old days when you would go to your college campus and you go into your computer lab, we just really wanted to virtualize, or expand, the access to just those specific types of apps and computers. And that was an early design, since then over the years we've really kind of, just really expanded. Really use the Citrix platform to redesign and distribute how we deliver the applications and the virtual desktops. So, now not only do we service those students who would normally come onto the campus just to use your traditional computer lab, we do a lot of specialty programs for other schools. Like we deliver a virtual desktop for our dentistry students, they actually use that whole platform in the dental clinic to see real patients our, third tier, third year doctors do that. We also replicated that same thing and do it in our speech and hearing sciences for our future audiologists. We have certain professors that have wanted to take the particular course that they're teaching and extend it to different pockets all over the world so we might host a class from Budapest or Africa somewhere else, wherever that faculty and staff has resources that they know they need to get to and their content already virtualized. We work to make that happen all the time. >> That's, a lot of what you just said is first of all, initially, maybe before Citrix being able to provide support in the computer labs for your maybe seven core campuses, now you're giving 130,000 plus individuals anywhere, anytime access. That is, the X multiplier on that is massive. But you're also gone global, it's not just online, you're able to enable professors to teach in other parts of the world, where it was before it was just people that were in Indiana. >> Right. >> That's massive. >> And you're just limited by the network. So that's the only drawback when you go to the rural areas way out, you're just limited by the network. The initial program was really, really thought of as a cost saving measure. We were going to put thin clients out, we wouldn't have to do life cycle replacements for desktop machines that were getting more expensive and more expensive 10 years ago, and now the way that we look at it is IU wants to provide services across the breadth of the organization, and make those services at no additional cost. And open to everybody. Open access to everybody, the AT desktop, for example is one of, Stephanie is, the brainchild behind the AT desktop. Took three years of dedicated hard work to create an environment to support the visually impaired. >> Talk to us more about that, because that was part of the video and that captured my attention immediately. What is AT? >> Accessibility. >> Technology. >> Technology. >> Accessibility Technology. >> Accessible, is it Accessible Technology? >> Accessible Technology. >> Yeah, I always get that wrong. (laughs) >> So, hundreds, thousands, and not just those that are sight and hearing. >> Right. >> Yeah, so one of the things that I think was, it's just a wonderful thing about working at a university, we're able to buy software licenses in a big quantity, large quantity right, because we have that kind of buying power. Software that I normally never would see or get access to even in my private sector, I've been a Citrix engineer for a long time, but when you come to a university and then you're selling or you're getting licenses for 50, 60, 70, 80,000, you get to see some of these products that you don't normally, as a regular consumer, (laughs) you like it but you know you can't really afford it. So, with that when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity site license way we thought oh my goodness, let's virtualize these and make sure everybody gets access to them. And the ones that were really attractive to us were the ones for the visually impaired. Sure they're a niche and they're very, very expensive but we thought let's just try it. We'll see how well they perform in a virtual environment and with our Citrix infrastructure underneath they performed quite well, plus the apps have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. So, we were really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. We had to work really hard to make sure that the speech recognition software was fast enough for them. It turns out that blind people listen to speech really, really, really, really, really, fast and so we had to make sure that we kept our platformer working on it, to keep it sped and updated so that it's usable to them, right. Seems functional to me, but they, it really needed to be like, 10 times faster. After I found that out, after even shooting the award video and spending even more time with them I thought, why did you guys tell me it was slow to you? But yeah it's been an honor, really, to be up for that award but to work with those students, to learn more about their needs, to learn more about the different applications that people write for people with all disabilities. I hope we can do more in that space. >> So the young man, in, at IUPUI. >> Yes. >> I don't remember his name. >> Chris Lavilla. >> Chris. >> Yes. >> So share, just quickly about Chris' story. >> If, he watches theCUBE I hope he's listening 'cause I think he's kind of remarkable. >> I think this'll really put some, a little bit of icing on that cake because you're taking an environment and you're empowering a student to do what they want to do, versus what they are able or not able to do, so Chris' story is pretty cool of where he wants to go with his college career. >> Yeah, now I won't say he a big proponent user of the virtual desktop because he's just so advanced, he's like way beyond everything. We're learning from him, but he is Indiana University's I believe I'm saying this right, very first biomedical chemical engineer who is blind since birth, completely blind, yes. >> Wow. >> He is, and he's quite a brilliant young man and we're lucky to have him be our, he will test anything for me, and Mary Stores, who's featured in the video Chris Mire, he's also featured in the video I got to remember their names, I mean, it's a whole, I'm lucky to have a whole community of people that will. Yeah, they know, we want to be there for them, we don't always get it right, but we're going to listen and keep trying to move forward, so. >> But, if you kind of think of, even a what, a year or two ago, not being able to give any of this virtualized desktop access to the visually impaired and how many people are now using it? >> Well we open it up to everyone. We have hundreds and hundreds of users but we know not everyone who uses it is blind. People can, you can use it if you want it or not. We don't really understand why some people prefer to use that one over any other but it does have some advantages, there are different levels of sight impairment too, as I've just been educated right. There are some people who are just at the very beginning of that journey of just losing their sight so, if that happens to be someone that we can extend our environment to it's probably better to use it now and get really familiar with that as you transition to losing your sight later in life, I've been told so. >> So you asked a little bit about the scope of the AT desktop, so I'll layer on a little bit of the scope of IUanyWare. Last year around 65,000 individual unique users over, well over a million logins and-- >> 1.4 million. >> 1.4 million. And the average session time was around 41 minutes. >> That's long. >> So. >> Yeah. >> Our instructors teach with it, our clinicians treat people with it, we've built it to house electronic protected health data. >> So HIPA compliance, got to be critical, right? >> It meets the HIPA standard. >> Right. >> Because you can't say compliance anymore because you can't be compliant with a standard. (Stephanie laughing) They've changed that wording several times in the course of the year. >> We know this. >> So, and we are very familiar with meeting the HIPA standard, we've been doing that for about 12 years now, with, where I came from was the high performance computing area of the university so that's my background that I. >> So, one thing we didn't get a chance touch on, 200,000 devices. We're at Citrix, Citrix is a Microsoft partner. Typically when those companies think of 200,000 users they think for profit, this is a niche use case for 200,000 users. Obviously you guys have gotten some great pricing as part of being an education environment. What I would love to hear is, kind of the research stories because the ability to shrink the world, so to speak high HPC, you're giving access to specialized equipment to people who can't get there normally, you have to be physically in front of GPUs, CPUs, et cetera. What other cool things have been coming out of the research side of the house because of the Citrix enablement? >> So, this is cool I mean. >> You got to, got to. (laughs) >> Right, so one of our groups, Researched Software and Solutions stole the idea from Stephanie to provide a research desktop. >> Borrowed. >> Borrowed. >> Imitation, highest form of flattery, Stephanie. >> That's right, absolutely. So what we've done is we always continually to try to reduce the barriers of entry and access. Supercomputing before, you had to be this tall to ride this ride, well now we're down to here. And, with the hopes that we'll go down even farther. So what we've done is we've taken a virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers, and now you can be wherever you want to be, and have access to HPC at IU. And that's all the systems, so we have four supercomputers And we have 40 petabytes of spinning disc, 160 petabytes of archival tape library so, we're a large shop. And, we couldn't have done it without looking at what Stephanie has done and really looking at that model differently, right? Because to use HPC before you'd have to use a terminal and shell in. And now, looking at IUanyWare, that gives you just the different opportunity to catch a different and more broad customer base. And I call them customers because we try treat them as customers >> Right. >> And it helps the diversity of what you're doing so last year alone our group, Research Technologies supported 151 different departments. We were on 937 different grants. And we support over 330 different disciplines at IU and so it's deep, but it's also very broad, for as large a campus we are and as large an organization as we are, we're fairly nimble even at 1200 people. >> Wow, from what I've heard it's no wonder that what you've done at Indiana University has garnered you the Innovation Award nominee. I can't imagine what is next with all that you have accomplished. Stephanie, Matt, thank you so much for joining Keith and me, we wish you the best of luck. You can go to Citrix.com, search Innovation Awards where you can vote for the three finalists. We wish you the very best of luck. We'll be waiting with bated breath tomorrow to see who wins. >> So will we, thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you Keith. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconeANGLE. (energetic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCube's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, the 12th year of this user group, fifth year we've had theCube here. I happen to have on the program a first-time guest, Kyle Ruddy, who's a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer with VMware, knows a thing or two about virtualization. >> Maybe a couple of things. >> Stu: Thanks for joining us, Kyle. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> All right, so Kyle, I know you were sitting at home in Florida and saying, "What I'd like to do is come up in the 20s. "It kind of feels like single digits." Why did you leave the warmth of the south to come up here to the frigid New England? >> (chuckles) Yeah, well, it was a great opportunity. I've never been to one of the VTUGs before, so they gave me a chance to talk about something that I'm extremely passionate about which is API usage. Once I got the invite, no-brainer, made the trip. >> Awesome! So definitely, Jonathan Frappier who we asked to be on the program but he said Kyle's going to be way better. (Kyle chuckles) Speak better, you got the better beard. (Kyle laughs) I think we're just going to give Frappier a bunch of grief since he didn't agree to come on. Give us first a little bit about your background, how long you been VMware, what kind of roles have you had there? >> Yeah, absolutely! So I've probably been in IT for over 15 years, a long-time customer. I did that for about 10 to 12 years of the IT span doing everything from help desk working my way up to being on the engineer side. I really fell in love with automation during that time period and then made the jump to the vendor side. I've been at VMware for about two years now where I focus on creating content and being at events like these to talk about our automation strategy for vSphere. >> Before you joined VMware, were you a vExpert? Have you presented at VMUGs? >> Yes, yes, so I've been a vExpert. I think I'm going on seven years now. I've helped run the Indianapolis VMUG for five to six years. I've presented VMUGs all over the country. >> Yeah, one of the things we always emphasize, especially at groups like this, is get involved, participate, it can do great things for your career. >> Yes, absolutely! I certainly wouldn't be here without that kind of input and guidance. >> Indy VMUG's a great one, a real large one here, even though I hear this one here has tended to be a little bit bigger, but a good rivalry going on there. I want to talk about the keynote you talked about, automation and APIs. It's not kind of the virtualization 101, so what excites you so much about it? And let's get in a little bit, talk about what you discussed there. >> Yeah, absolutely! We were talking about using Ansible with the vSphere 6.5 RESTful APIs. That's something that's new, brand new, to vSphere 6.5, and really just being able to, when those were released, allow our users and our customers to make use of those APIs in however way that they wanted to. If you look back at some of our prior APIs and our SDKs, you were a little more constrained. They were SOAP-based so there was a lot of overhead that came with those. There was a large learning curve that also came along with those. So by switching to REST, it's a whole lot more user friendly. You can use it with tools like Ansible which that was just something that Jon knew quite well. I thought that was a perfect opportunity for me to finally do a presentation with Jon. It went quite well. I think the audience learned quite a bit. We even kind of relayed to the audience that this isn't something that's just for vSphere. Ansible is something you can use with anything. >> For somebody out there watching this, how do they get started? What's kind of some of the learning curve that they need to do? What skillsets are they going to build on versus what they need to learn for new? >> Sure. A lot of the ways to really get started with these things, I've created a ton of blog posts that are out there on the VMware {code} blog. The first one is just getting started with the RESTful APIs that we've provided. There's a program that's called Postman, we give a couple of collections that you can automatically import and start using that. Ansible has some really good documentation on getting started with Ansible and whichever environment you're choosing to work or use it with. So they've got a Getting Started with vSphere, they've got a Getting Started with different operating systems as well. Those are really good tools to get started and get that integrated into your normal working environment. Obviously, we're building on automation here. We're building on... At least when I was in admin, I got involved in automation because there was a way for me to automate and get rid of those tasks, those menial tasks that I didn't really enjoy doing. So I could automate that, push that off, and get back to something that I cared about that I enjoyed. >> Yeah, great point there 'cause, yeah, some people, they're a little bit nervous, "Oh, wait, are these tools going to take away my job?" And to repeat what you were just saying, "No, no." There's the stuff that you don't really love doing and that you probably have to do a bunch. Those are the things that are probably, maybe the easiest to be able to move to the automation. How much do people look at this and be like, "Wait, no, once I start automating it, "then I kind of need to care, and feed, and maintain that, "versus just buying something off the shelf "or using some service that I can do." Any feedback on that? >> Well, it's more of a... It's a passion thing. If it's something that you're really get ingrained in, you really enjoy, then you're going to want to care and feed that because it's going to grow. It's going to expand into other areas of your environment. It's going to expand into other technologies that are within your environment. So of course, you can buy something. You could get somebody from... There are professional services organizations involved, so you don't have to do the menial tasks of updating that. Say if you go from one version to a next version, you don't have to deal with that. But if you're passionate about it, you enjoy doing that, and that's where I was. >> The other thing I picked up on is you said some of these things are new only in 6.5. One of the challenges we've always had out there is, "Oh, wait, I need to upgrade. "When can I do it? "What challenges I'm going to have?" What's the upgrade experience like now and anything else that you'd want to point out that said, "Hey, it's time to plan for that upgrade "and here are some of the things that are going to help you"? >> We actually have an End of Availability and End of Support coming up for vSphere 5.5. That's going to be coming up in here later this year in September-October timeframe. So you're not going to be able to open up a support request for that. This is a perfect time to start planning that upgrade to get up to at least 6.0, if not 6.5. And the other thing to keep in mind is that we've announced deprecation for the Windows version of vSphere. Moving forward past our next numbered release, that's going to be all vCenter Server Appliance from that point forward. Now we also have a really great tool that's called the VCSA Migration tool that you can use to help you migrate from Windows to the Appliance. Super simple, very straightforward, gives you a migration assistant to even point out some of those places where you might miss if you did it on your own. So that's a really great tool and really helps to remove that pain out of that process. >> Yeah, it's good, you've got a mix of a little bit of the stick, you got to get off! (Kyle chuckles) I know a lot of people still running 5.5 out there as well as there's the carrot out there. All the good stuff that's going to get you going. All right, hey, Kyle, last thing I want to ask is 2018. Boy, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. One, how do you keep up with everything, and two, what's exciting you about what's happening in the industry right now? >> As far as what excites me right now, Python. That's been something that's been coming up a lot more with the folks that I'm talking to. Even today, just at lunch, I was talking to somebody and they were bringing up Python. I'm like, "Wow!" This is something that keeps coming up more and more often. I'm using a lot more of my time, even my personal time, to start looking at that. And so when you start hearing the passion of people who are using some of these new technologies, that's when I start getting interested because I'm like, "Hey, if you're that interested, "and you're that passionate about it, "I should be too." So that's kind of what drives me to keep learning and to keep up with all of the latest and greatest things that are out there. Plus when you have events like this, you can go talk to some of the sponsors. You can talk and see what they're doing, how to make use of their product, and some of their automation frameworks, and with what programming languages. That kind of comes back to Python on that one because a lot more companies are releasing their automation tools for use with Python. >> Yeah, and you answered the second part of my question probably without even thinking about it. The passion, the excitement, talking to your peers, coming to events like this. All right, Kyle Ruddy, really appreciate you joining us here. We'll be back with more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCube. (energetic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE covering PentahoWorld 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of PentahoWorld, brought to you of course by Hitachi Vantara. My name is Rebecca Knight, and I'm here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. We are joined by Nathan Hart, he is the Development Manager at NextGear Capital. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Nathan. >> Thanks for having me. >> So let's start by telling our viewers a little bit about what NextGear Capital is, and what you do there. >> Sure, NextGear Capital is a, we do auto financing for auto dealerships, so if a dealer goes to an auction and wants to buy some inventory, we're going to be the ones who actually finance that and purchase it for them, and then they pay us back. >> Great, and your role as a development manager. >> Yep, I am over our integrations team, so we are responsible for basically getting data in and out of the company, a lot of that is getting data to and from our sister companies, all under Cox Automotive. >> And the data we're talking about is? >> Uh, it's a whole lot of things, obviously it's a lot of financial data, as we are a finance company, but a lot of things like inventory, unit statuses, where a car is located, we have credit scores, and that sort of work as well, so all kinds of data are coming in and out and then into our systems. >> So, are the cars instrumented to the point where you can kind of track where they are in an automated way, or is it? >> Yes, we do have some GPS units, not on all that inventory, just because we have quite a few open floor plans, about 500,000 I believe. But yes, we do have some select units that are GPS'd that we can track that way, or we have inspectors that go to lots. >> Okay so as a developer you know this story well, back in the day if you had a big data problem, you'd buy a Unix box and you'd stuff all the data in there and then you'd buy a bunch of Oracle licenses, and if you had any money left over, you could maybe do something, maybe buy a little storage, or conduct business. Okay that changed, quite dramatically. I wonder, if you could tell us your version of that story and how it's affected your business. >> Sure, so, uh. (laughter) >> Dave: Is it a fair representation? >> Not, not... >> Dave: Is the old world, was it a big data warehouse world? >> Yeah, so. >> Where it's sort of expensive to get stuff in and get stuff out and has that changed? Or is that sort of? >> Yeah, it has changed greatly, we're not quite that bad, but we do currently have an older monolithic database system that we are trying to get away from. >> Dave: It's hard. >> Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of our processes right now, go in and come out of this so obviously, if anything in that breaks, it hurts everywhere. >> Dave: Right. >> So yes. >> Dave: Sort of a chain reaction. >> Exactly. >> Okay, but so how have you, talk about the journey of bringing in Pentaho and how that has affected you. >> Sure, Pentaho has been great for us, just in terms of being able to be really flexible with our data. Like I said, we're trying to get away from this monolithic service, so we have, in Pentaho, we can easily branch off and say, go to the monolithic database, but also talk to another service that is going to replace it. And then it's just one click of a button, and now this is off, this is on, or we can do both and have some replication going, just so we have that flexibility, and that kind of adaptability around those changes. >> So why Pentaho, I mean, a lot of tools out there, there's open source, you could roll your own, you could do everything in the cloud, why Pentaho? >> We liked Pentaho because of the, I guess the freedom and independence it kind of offers, in the sense that it allows us to have a large set of steps and tools that are already prebuilt, that we can just use right out of the box, and, it's just a massive library, far greater than most of the competition that we looked at. And then it also is just built on this great Java platform that we can, if we need to, write a custom Java class, pop it in, and then that can do what we need to, if we don't have something out of the box. >> Dave: So it's integrated, >> Yep >> but it's customizable. >> Nathan: Exactly. >> If you need it to be. >> Nathan: Yep. >> Okay, and one of the things that customers like you tell us about Pentaho is that they like the sort of end-to-end integration. >> Nathan: Yep. >> We were talking off camera, you had mentioned that you've got an initiative to move toward the cloud. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so right now, just Cox, as a whole, is kind of investigating the cloud. I definitely don't want to speak out of turn, or say we're definitely going there, but that is the current initiatives are to start experimenting with how we can leverage this more. I know one of the, kind of the first steps that we're taking towards that is we have large archives, we keep all of the files we've ever received or sent out, and we don't access them much, we don't need them much, but we want to keep them, just so we have this history, and we can always look back if we need to. So using the cloud for something like that, where's it's just like a deep storage, where we can just upload it and forget it, and if we ever need it, it's there and easily accessible, and this way we don't have to pay for as much storage on print. >> Very workload specific, cheap storage. >> Nathan: Yep. >> Probably a lot of test and dev. >> Nathan: Exactly. >> So going back to the Pentaho, and why Pentaho, and you mentioned the freedom and the flexibility that it provides, can you talk about some of the best practices that you've discovered that could help some other Hitachi Vantara customers? >> Absolutely, the biggest change, learning curve that we went through, my first introduction was Pentaho when I started at NextGear, and it was a real huge learning curve for the whole team. We all started within about a month of each other, and there were only three of us to start. So, it was a real learning curve of, okay, here's how we do this, here's how we do this. So, once we kind of got the workflow going and understanding what we were trying to do, the next step was figuring out okay we can make this very modular, we can build a sub job that does a very specific task, and we can use it everywhere. And we just did that again and again and again, so now we have a library of about 118 different utilities that we can just plug and drop anywhere and they just do what they need to do, we don't need to re-test them, we don't need to think about them ever. And of course, if we update one of those, it updates every single job that it touches. As soon as we kind of unlocked that and figured we didn't have to make a custom solution for every single job, that we could use a lot of reuseability. It really sped up our development, and how we do things. >> Could you talk about data sources, have they or how have they evolved over the last decade? >> Sure, I can't speak for the whole decade, I haven't actually been in the industry that long, but a lot of what we came into and inherited when I came in, were flat files, just everything is CSV, TXT, either in or out, and we still do a lot of that, that's still kind of our bread and butter, just by the nature of our current role, but as it's changing we are interacting more and more with APIs. We're shifting away from this monolithic database into micro services so we're having to interact with those a lot more and figure out how we can get that real time communication and get the data where it needs to go so it's all in its happy place. >> One of the things that Brian Householder, the CEO, got up on the main stage and talked about how, for companies, the two most important assets are the people and the data. I want to talk to you about the people aspect. >> Nathan: Okay. >> We're hearing so much about the shortage, the tech shortage of data scientists, and other kinds of talent in this industry. How hard is it for you to recruit? Your company, as you said, is based in Carmel, Indiana is that right? >> Nathan: Yep. >> What are you finding out there? >> The greater Indianapolis area, like many other places, is very starved for tech talent. It's very, very easy as a developer to throw a stone and get an interview. It's definitely a challenge. We actually currently have two openings on my team. Just, do less with more and do what we can. So, it's definitely a challenge, but I think that there's a lot of really great young talent coming out of colleges right now that are coming in, they've grown up with this right? They're a lot further along than necessarily I was when I came out of school and some of our other developers. So they can step in and already understand a lot of these complex architectures that we're dealing with and can just hit the ground running. >> So at least 10 times a week, I get somebody hitting me on LinkedIn about hey do you need development resources? (Nathan laughing) As a developer, it must happen to you 100 times a week, but there's obviously challenges of off-shoring and managing that remotely. I'm sure you've thought about it. What are your thoughts on off-shoring? You want someone there in a bee hive effect? Maybe talk about that a little bit. So, at NextGear we've been fairly rigid about butts in the seats, in the office, real collaborative environment, where you're at the morning stand up, you're there in the meetings, and it's a very present environment. And we are being a little bit more adaptable with that, just as time changes and other companies, obviously do offer more remote from home or what have you, so that is shifting a little bit, as far as necessarily off-shoring, that's way above my pay grade to even make that call, I have worked in previous environments where that was a large part of it. In a previously life we had a US based team and then we had a Malaysia based team, and I thought it was a really great experience cause we basically all had our own counterparts over there, so at the end of your day, you just email your notes, here's what I did today, here's where I left off, and they pick it up and do the same, then we had about a weekly meeting. So I think it definitely can work, I'm all for the global tech community all coming up together, when appropriate and when it works. >> But you've got to have the right infrastructure and processes in place, >> Nathan: Absolutely. >> Or it's just, it sucks all your productivity out. >> Nathan: Absolutely, if you spend half your day trying to figure out what the other person did, then you've lost your day. >> Yeah, right. And you follow the sun, yes and no right, you've got to wait for the sun sometimes. Pentaho, back to Pentaho, what are the things that, as a customer, you want them to do. What's on their to-do list, you know, when you're talking to Donna Prlich and her team, what are you pushing them for? >> So, the biggest things kind of on our wish list and that we're seeing is interacting more natively with those microservices like I mentioned and I was really glad that that came up in the keynote as something that they're focusing on and it's something that is going to come up in 8.0, at least the kind of stepping stones to go in that direction. So, that's really exciting stuff for us, just it answers a lot of questions we're currently having of how are we going to interact with those, and the answer can still be Pentaho moving forward. >> I was struck in the keynote, when Brian was asking hands up please, how many people are doing business with Hitachi outside of Pentaho, and just a smattering, right, I presume your hand was down. >> Nathan: My hand was down. >> And then, had you heard of Hitachi Vantara? >> I read the press release when they first announced Vantara, but that's about the extent of it. Obviously I knew about Hitachi from when they purchased Pentaho. We actually were having a week long, kind of a tech support get together that week that it happened, so I think on the Tuesday or something, our rep was like I now work for Hitachi. It was a fun thing, but yeah I'm not terribly familiar with Hitachi's products or, obviously I know where they're going with the Vantara concept, but. >> As a developer in a very focused area, >> Yep. >> Cox Automotive, obviously has some IOT initiatives, I'm sure, >> Absolutely. >> And some process automation, but I presume you haven't really dug into that yet, but when you think about the messaging that you heard this morning. What does it mean to you? Do you say, okay, nice, but I've got other problems? Or do you see the potential to leverage some of the technologies down the road? I definitely see the potential to start, at least exploring that direction, and figuring out what can we get out of this, right. It makes a lot more sense to play in a singular ecosystem and have all those tools at our hand just in one bucket instead of trying to figure out how does this play nice with this, how does this play nice over here, if we just can have a singular ecosystem that does it all together, that definitely makes our jobs a lot easier. >> How about the event, is this your first PentahoWorld? >> Yep, this is my first PentahoWorld. >> So it's early, but why do you come to events like this, and what do you hope to take away? >> Sure, I came to this event, cause I was specifically invited to. That's really it. It was nothing more than that, but I definitely come to kind of, see what's next and learn about the new technologies, and get that chance to visit some of the booths and some of the breakout sessions for maybe things that I don't get to do in my day to day life. We're very heads down in PDI so I don't get to spend too much time learning about the analytics and playing with those tools. So it's a lot of fun to come here and kind of see what's out there and be like, oh could we leverage this, or how could I adapt, or what are some of the other professionals doing that maybe I can bring back and improve our processes. >> And it's early days, but what are your thoughts on 8.0? >> I liked what I saw, and then I stopped by the booth and got another demo and I can definitely already see a couple of use cases where we can improve existing jobs with some of the new streaming features that they have in play, so I'm excited for that to come out and for us to start working with that. >> So that, the integration of streaming, Kafka, and the like was appealing to you? >> Yep, absolutely, and that'll be something that we can probably use right out of the gate, so excited for that. >> Well great, Nathan thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Nathan: Yeah, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from PentahoWorld just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley it's the Cube, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm brought to you by Western digital. >> Hi welcome back to the Cube. We are at the fourth annual Food IT: Fork to Farm event at the Computer History Museum. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Jeff Frick Very excited to to welcome our next guest, Paul Noglows, who is the executive producer of the Forbes AgTech Summit. Paul, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you >> So we're in the heart of Silicon Valley right now, but you are the creator of the Forbes AgTech Summit, which happens tomorrow, June 28th and 29th in Salinas, the salad bowl of America. Talk to us about this event that you've created. What was the genesis of this, and why Salinas? >> We were doing a series at Forbes in 2014 called reinventing America, and we were going around cities mostly in the midwest, but we were mostly looking at industries that were really reinventing themselves and remaking themselves, so we focused on advanced manufacturing in Chicago, we focused on healthcare in Indianapolis, then we went up to Detroit and we focused on reinventing the workforce. So we did a series of five shows over 15 months. And the last one, we thought we were going to reinvent the farm, and we thought we were going to do it somewhere in the Midwest. But we got a proposal from the city of Salinas and they said, why don't you come out and see what we got here, and it's the salad bowl of the world, and I knew Monterey pretty well from having lived out here, and we used to take our kids down to the Monterey Aquarium, but I never really knew Salinas or the Salinas valley. So I got a tour from the former mayor, Dennis Donohue, and it was just we were blown away by how much was going on, and really, it's become the epicenter of AgTech innovation. We're just thrilled at Forbes that we were able to be part of that and to support it. And the summit has grown dramatically over the three years, and so we're really looking forward to a terrific show. >> Tell us about the growth that you've achieved in this summit. The opportunities, the types of people that are there, and what they are going to be able to see and discuss. >> Yeah, We started out with about 400 participants in the summer of 2015, we had 20 startups, but it's really mushroomed from there. This year, we're have 650 participants, we'll have 50 companies in the innovation showcase, we've expanded the field demos and the plant tours to a full day. About a good third of our audience are farmers, and that's really been the secret sauce for us. Is that we've priced the summit right. There's a lot of summits out there, and people are starting to get big numbers for an afternoon at the Marriot Marquee. Ours is really different, we've kept the rate low enough so that farmers can participate, and we love to have everyone outside. We do it all under giant white tent right out in front of the Taylor building on main street in Salinas, and we also have people out at the local processing plants and the local fields. We go out to Hartnell's Alisal campus and we use the USDA test field. >> Its interesting because Salinas has been at the forefront of Ag Innovation a long time ago. It was one of the first refrigerated rail cars to try to get fresh lettuce for salad to Chicago. I remember reading about that numerous times, and the first couple didn't work that well. >> Well it's really amazing. It's been such a privilege to deal with folks Bruce Taylor. It was Bruce's father and grandfather who really were the pioneers of iceburg lettuce. The more you get into it, you know, I've gotten really passionate about it and the history and everything else. You see the continuation today, and with the developments. And, even if it's a Taylor farm putting a startup's robotics, putting them in their processing plants. This is really the cutting edge of AgTech innovation. >> So I'm curious, we cover a lot of big tech events, usually more on the infrastructure side, this is really on the application side. So as you look at cloud, and edge computing, and big data, and mobile, and some of these big trends. What if you can just highlight some of the ones that really jump out to you that have enabled some of these innovations, autonomous vehicles obviously drones, we're seeing so much of it, but now they're putting it to work. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there's so much going on. We look in field robotics, we look at precision automation, precision agriculture, and the use of big data, and the ability to harness that and to really apply it, it's changed a lot of things. It's changed the way we can grow. It's also changing consumer's tastes in what consumers want. And that's a lot of what we're talking about here today. So it really has been revolutionary. I think we need the industry, we need to industry to really agriculture itself to get really get together. I think sometimes there still this is looked at as competitive advantage, so what I, we, find interesting is are we going to move beyond competitive advantage and what's good for your plant or your farm. Is there going a collective effort to really start applying this across the agricultural system. >> What are the interesting things that they talked about this morning in the general session was and the theme of the event. We're so used to farm to table, farm to fork, and I looked at that and fork to farm? The consumer is so empowered, very demanding. Right, we want cage free, we want organic, we want hormone free, we want, we've changed the distribution model. How are, but also there's this paradox of the consumer not wanting factory farms. How are farmers, you said quite a bit of the attendees are farmers, how are they embracing this consumer demand with technologies like big data, cloud computing, block chain? >> Well I think it's really the key. It's that you have different farmers and different processors. There's a wide spectrum in terms of adoption and in terms of innovation. But they are putting it to work, and that's why there's so much interest in the startups, and there's so much interest in how can we do this more efficiently, how can we do this better. I think it used to be that you basically needed to have a crisis, like the ecoli crisis, for things to really change in the industry. But hopefully, we've moved beyond that. In that it's not going to take a crisis for folks to really start embracing these new technologies. >> So then in the other trend that has come up in a number of times in doing some background in this show is that there's not only kind of the very organic, cage free specialty demands in the customer. On the other hand, the population is growing, and we got to feed 10 billion people, I think number is projected by 2050. There's no new dirt being created last time I checked, except in Hawaii. How are the farmers embracing that challenge specifically cause, it's kind of this bipolar thing, one you want to increase specialization, on the other hand you got to get yields way way up at massive scale. >> Well, and that's it, and it's really looking at how do you increase yield. This is a lot of the interest. This is a lot of the interest in genetics and everything else and looking at the real science of growing. But it's also interesting in this is a little bit more further afield, but I was talking to Bruce Taylor even about kale. You know 10 years ago kale was considered a throwaway crop. >> Right >> Paul: It wasn't even harvested. And now you look at the impact kale is having on the American diet and you know you have a crop that represented really nothing probably as recently as five years ago. >> Jeff: Right >> Now it's an important crop. So there's all sorts of innovation, all sorts of different ways of looking at things, but I do think for the most part that's the reason we have those things. We've always been adamant that we don't want to get people together to talk about 2050, we're not futurist. We're looking at near term solutions to current problems. So what we're really interested in, you know, what is the farm of 2020 look, not the farm of 2050. >> Jeff: Right, right >> As we look at California that's just come out of this severe drought, the event being hosted in the salad bowl of the, really, the world, what are some of the challenges that are really common across farms, across the heartland of America? Water, planting inefficiencies, harvesting or supply chains, are you seeing a lot of commonalities? >> There are a lot of commonalities. I think there's a mistake. We actually have a conversation tomorrow. I kind of feel like the assumption is all the water problems are over, and the water problems are not over. They maybe over for a short period of time, but I am fully convinced that this is going to be. Two years ago this was the topic du jour at our conference. I'd say this year probably the major topic is labor. And labor, you see, having tremendous impact. You have, across the country. And so, you have the issues of immigration, you've got issues of minimum wage, that certain farms are saying we don't know how we are going to do this. >> Lisa: Right >> We don't know how to make this work. But the major pressures, things like that water, labor, those haven't gone away, and those haven't been solved. But that's why we're all getting together. That's why we're here today, and that's why we're going to be down in Salinas Wednesday and Thursday. >> And on the labor front, it's that you've talked about the Californian minimum wage is going up quite considerably. But it's also things like an aging farming population, and there's, you can see the value there from a big data perspective to be able to capture, to facilitate some automation and drive the next generation of >> Paul: Well >> Lisa: the farmers. >> And one of the ways we're going to close our conference on Thursday afternoon is I'm going to moderate a discussion on farmers of the future. Because we've all heard it, we've all heard it time and time again. The average of the American farmer, I think it's pushing 70 years old, and there's no succession planning and that no body gets into this business unless they're basically born into it or forced into it in some way, and what we're finding is that it's not really true. We're putting up four young farmers, who are really making a difference, and who are applying innovation to be able to build their farms. And so, we think that it's actually more hopeful, and more interesting than may at first blush. So yeah, we do think there is a future for farming, and we're determined to explore it to its fullest. >> That's fantastic. Aught to be a fly on the wall on that conversation. Well Paul, thank you so much for joining us on the Cube, and we wish you the best of luck in your third annual Forbes AgTech Summit in the salad bowl. If you haven't been to Salinas, as Paul said, it's worth a drive down there, it's incredible. Roll down the window, take a nice breath in, and it's a beautiful place. And again, we wish you the best of luck at that summit, and we look forward to hearing about some of the great things that come out of that. >> Paul: Thank you >> And we want to thank you at the Cube at the Food IT: Fork to Farm event, I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Jeff Frick. Stick around, we're going to be right back.