>> Narrator: From around the globe it's the CUBE with digital coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. And always love when we get to be able to talk to the practitioners that are using some of the technologies here. One of the interesting things we've been digging into is lens, the IDE in this space, as it's being referred to. So, happy to welcome to the program Matti Paksula. He is the founder and chief technology officer at supervisor.com. Matti, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you thank you for having me. >> So, if you could just, you help us understand, you know, your company as supervisor.com. What's the background as the founder? What was kind of the impetus to creating that business too? >> Sure, so, supervisor was this like super simple because we believe, and we know, that the only way to tests websites, if they can handle load, for example, eCommerce sites on black Friday, or when you, or, just about to make a product launch or that kind of stuff. Is just by sending real web browsers to the site. That's actually click and scroll and do it all the same things as a real users will do. But, and unlike, our secret thing is that we can do it, like before Black Friday. So, if somebody wants to simulate if they can handle like 2000 users or 5000 users, then they can use supervisor.com to make it happen like today. >> So, I'm just curious, you know, the concern always is about the DDoS attacks and the like. Do you help companies along that line too? Or is it more the, the testing for proper traffic and we leave the security aspect to somebody else? >> Yeah, well, like with any load testing tool, you have to verify yourself somehow. And with us, it's super easy because we integrated with Google analytics. And if you authorize us to read your Google Analytics Data, then we know that you are allowed to test your site. >> Wonderful, well, as I said in the lead, you're using lens, my understanding you've been using it since the early day, of course, a technology that closed source Mirantis has, has acquired that and the team, it's now also open source. So if you could bring us back to, you know, how did you get involved with lens? What was the, you know, the problem statement that it helped you resolve? >> Yeah, sure. So the (inaudible) super briefly is that Lens was developed by this startup called Condena, it's a finish startup, and they made a couple of attempts in container orchestration, like before Kubernetes and then Coobernetti's game. And they just felt like Kubernetes is super hard to kind of visualize or like, understand what's going on because you have these containers flying around, you have nodes going in going out. So they built this lens and then since I'd be working with those guys from 2015 or so, I was like one of the first outside users, or probably the first user outside of the company. >> So, that, pretty neat that you had that, you know, that project that they were doing. As an early user, you know, give us a little bit of that journey. What does it enable for your company? You know, how has it expanded from kind of the early use cases to where it is today. >> Yeah. So, if you're using Kubernetes traditionally, or like how most of the people who haven't yet heard about Lens use it is by or from the command line. So that's where you use keep CTL or cube control. You say cube CTL pod, and then you get the listing pod. But the problem is that, all that data is stale on the screen. So if you trend try to, for example, delete a port and you issue cutesy delete pod, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you enter on the pod all ready, it might be gone. So Lens makes like everything real time. And like, if you try to delete something with lens, you move your mouse on top of the pod. And if it's getting deleted, you know, this, it, because it just disappears from your screen and like, it's not there anymore. And I think that's a huge a productivity boost in a way, that's how you can like get more and more stuff done every day as these kind of like, when you are a developer or CSI admin or whatever you need to kind of like, see what's happening in your cluster and house that note and pods are doing. And that. So back to your question, when you asked, like, how has the evolved lens it's like nowadays it's super stable. It handles big workloads very well. In the very, very early on, they had some performance issues with like, like large clusters, for example, when supervisor, when we run a load test with, for example, 10,000 concurrent web browsers. So basically what we have in Kubernetes is we have 10,000 pods. And then when you connect something like lens to it, it's just like started to spin up my fans until on the laptop, still about eating all the Ram. So I helped them a lot with my special use case of running like super big Ephemeral workloads there. >> Yeah. It's an interesting discussion. And in the whole, you know, container space, there's all that discussion of scale(chuckling). You know, of course everybody thinks back to Google and how they use it. So we know it can go really big, but, you know, environments, I needed to be able to work really small or youth cases like yours. I needed to be able to, you know, burst use that usage when you need it and go back on that a less density that we hope for in, in cloud. So I'm curious any, what's your expectation with it, you know, going open source, coming into Mirantis as a, as a longtime user of it, you know, what do you expect to see? >> Well, I think like Mirantis offers the right kind of home for the product, because they really get what's happening in the space. And I think they're like commercial offering on top of the open source will be around authentication. That's why, like, I kind of understood from the press release. And I think it makes sense because like, developers don't want to pay for these kinds of tools. And there are other tools that are commercial. And even if it's like just 100 bucks per year, I think that's still not going to work out with most of the developers and you kind of need this kind of long tail developer adoption for these kinds of products to succeed. And I think that, like, that's kind of like authentication, like centralized, like who can see what, and that kind of stuff. It doesn't like affect most of the startups or Indie Devs, but like for any company who was doing it like a real business, those are the features that are needed. And when you use that, the products for business, then I think it makes sense to pay also. >> Yeah, absolutely. There's always that, challenge developers of course love open source tools if they can use them. And, you know, the packaging, the monetization, isn't a question for you it's(chuckling), you know, for the Miranda's team. What would you say to your peers out there, people that are in this space, you know, what are the areas that they say, Oh, you know, if I have this type of environment, or if I have type, if I have this team, this is what lens will really be awesome for me. What are some of the things that you would recommend to your peers out there from, from all the usage that you've done? >> Yeah. So let's say three things. The first thing is what I already mentioned the real timeness that everything updates live, the second thing is the integrated metrics. So you cannot, for example, follow how much memory or CPU something is consuming. It's super helpful when you want to like, understand what's really going on and how much resources something is taken. And then the third thing is that Landis is great for debugging because once you have deployed something and something is off, and it's kind of hard to reproduce locally, especially with this kind of a microservice architecture, whatever, what you might have is that you can just like go inside at any part or note instantly from the UI. You don't have to, like, again, you don't have to use cubes sheets, the L blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and you have just like in there also, because you are already in the. But its the fourth thing is that if you manage multiple Kubernetes clusters, it's super easy to accidentally connect to the wrong cluster. But like, if you have, some visual tool where you can see in I'm in this. I mean, my production cluster are I'm in my staging cluster and you make the selection like visually there, then all the cube sees and everything works against that's a cluster. So I think that's like very helpful so that you don't actually accidentally delete something from production, for example. >> Wonderful. Last question I have for you either blend specifically, or kind of the eco-system around it, what, would be on your wishlist for, as I said, either lance specifically, or to, you know, manage your environments surrounding that, you know, what, what would you be asking kind of Miranda and, the broader eco-system for? >> I know that, well, let me think. Yeah. Okay. First of all, I have like maybe 50, 60 issues still open a GitHub that I have opened there. So that's like my wish list, but like, if you, they got like longer term, I think it would just be great, if you could actually like start deployments from Lance, there are a bunch of deployment tools, like customize and help. But again, if you just wanted to get something running quickly, I think integrating that to Lance would be like, super good. Just you it's just like click like I want to deploy this app. That's, that's something I'm looking forward to. >> Yeah, absolutely. Everybody wants that simplicity. All right. Well, Hey, thank you so much. Great to hear the feedback. We always talk about the people that developed code, as well as, you know, the people that do the beta testing and the feedback. So critically important to the maturation development of everything that's based though. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Mirantis Launchpad 2020 I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>> Innovation Day, brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick, here with theCube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. It's a very cool space, I think it's grown up over a number of years as they've originated with some acquired companies, and now they got a huge setup here, and we had a big day today talking about customer experience, and really, if you look at the Comcast Voice Remote, and there's a lot of stuff going on that's maybe under the covers, you don't really give Comcast credit for, but they're actually doing a lot. And we're excited to, kind of dive into it a little bit deeper with our next guest, she's Annie Weskesser, she's a CMO of Uniphore. Annie, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here today. >> Absolutely. So what is Uniphore, for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> So Uniphore is a global leader in conversational service automation, and our vision is to bridge the gap between human and machine, through voice AI and automation. >> That's a mouth full. >> Yes. >> Conversational... >> Service. >> Service. >> Yes. >> So, people talk, and so you guys are heavily involved in voice. So what are the applications where people are using your voice? >> Yep, well primarily our focus is call centers. >> Okay. >> So large enterprises who have massive call centers, where we want to go in and help them with AI and automation, to help better listen to their customers, help better listen to the customers voice, and solve the problems in a faster manner. >> So I don't have to repeat my account number six different times to six different agents. >> Exactly, right. >> Or caught an in IVR cycle, or perhaps the chat that you were talking to doesn't-- The person on the phone, you have to repeat your story. This is something where the AI and automation will actually assist the agent to become a superhero. >> So, it's pretty interesting cause you know there's a lot of conversation about AI and ML, but really you know where it's going to have its impact is applied AI. >> Yes. And you said the company started out really more just on a pure voice, but now you're applying more and more kind of AI in the back end. So what kind of opportunities do you have now beyond just simply being able to do voice conversion?. >> To the first part of your question, the company started at IIT Madras back in 2008. And originally the focus of the company was really centered on voice, voice being the lowest common denominator and in Indie where the languages are 260 you know, potential languages to understand and maybe 25 at the top. We set out really to focus on voice and then realize that customer service was a large market and somewhere we can have a big impact. >> Right, right. So you reckon as you said a 100 different languages. >> A 100 different languages through our platform which is pretty incredible when you think about it. All of the different people calling in to customer service potentially or maybe through a chatbot or a voicebot to get their issues solved. >> And then you integrate in whatever the core system is that the customer services agent are using. >> Yes. >> So what are the types of tips and tricks that the call agent gets by using your guys service? >> So think about it as a platform where the customer can help they agents be more affective agents. So one of the things that call centers struggle with is something called after call work, where agents may spend two to three minutes after a call, summarizing the call. One of the things that our technology does and this is primarily for one of our customers who's a health care client. They said "Wouldn't it be great if we can automate that completely". So we've taken the after call work for one customer client, taken that two to three minutes down to 10 seconds, where that work that the agent would have done is completely summarized and the agent validates it, can correct it if needed and its completely done. So that not only saves the agent time to either pick up more calls and help other customers or it can get them of the phone in a quicker manner to save the call center more money. >> So that's doing more than just simply providing a transcript of the call which is something a different track than actually listening into to provide suggestions is actually taking it to the next level in terms of what categorizing, what type of call, the outcome etc. >> it's actually quite interesting because often times less than 1% of calls are listened to somewhere between 1 and 10% of calls are listened to in calls centers. So we can listen to a 100% of those calls in addition we offer something called that's more along the line of like a live agent coach to where the agent can concentrate on the conversation with the customer which is the primary thing listening to the customer. And our technology will serve you up coaching mechanism in terms of getting to faster resolution for the customer and getting them better insights to be almost a superhero of a agent. >> Right, and I would imagine the accuracy in terms of recording what happened in the call to go back and do the analytics and have a text base search you can do all types of analysis on those calls which was data that was probably just lost before right into (mumbles) >> You're exactly right. I think the accuracy is clearly a lot lower than if you were to have the AI and automation and Machine learning technology there. >> So the other conversation in the sit down that we had earlier today was really about driving a customer centric culture in your own company, not only just enabling it but really building it inside. I wonder if you could share some of the things that you guys have done to help make sure that everybody stays focused on the objective, which is the customer. >> Yip, I think it really starts at the top it starts with the leader of the organization. So we have a CEO whose extremely focused on customer centricity and in fact its our number one core value within the organization. So you see everyone from the CEO down to the rest of the organization completely focused on the customer and their needs. >> What about when the customer doesn't know what they need? What about you know, you bringing a new technology and your inviting a slightly different process or a slightly different change and your saying "Hey, this is actually a better way to keep text and transactions and we actually have a really coach that can help", you know, kind of guy to people. How do you help move customers to a place they don't necessarily know they want to go? >> Yeah, I mean you find that a lot, right. Its not necessarily the technology that we're providing for today but its having the innovation and having the foresight to create a platform that will be future proof. So that's critical, you know, I think that there are a lot of customers who might not know what they need today but that's our job to help them innovate and push the envelope on all things AI and automation. >> Right, I'm just curious to in terms of the impact of your technology on kind of the tracking software for those call center agents, right. So this is a group of people that have to process a lot of calls, you know everything is track to the minute and you know its funny I had a demo with Westworld and you know when Westworld's funny cause we started treating machines like machines and they wanted to be treated like people sometimes I wonder on some of these technologies You know is it enabling them to have more time to be more thoughtful, is it enabling them to have more time to get the better outcomes or is it sometimes perceived as 'oh my gosh you just trying to jam' you know, 'four more calls on in my hour by taking care of my two more minutes that I used to spend wrapping up the call". Do you think about those things and the end customer? >> The time is really the premium, right. So the number one focus is giving people time back and whether that's the customer who's calling in and you want to solve an issue and get them faster resolution or whether that's the agent that wants to free up more time in having the conversation with the customer, solving their problem and then getting of the phone I think that's the most effective way of doing it. >> Final question in terms of voice and the evolution of voice. `Cause I don't think people are really completely tuned in certainly not people old like we are. What are some of the conversations when people finally get, you know, kind of the enabler that voice communications opens up that's not necessarily available with texts or not necessarily available with other types of channels? >> Yeah, I mean I see it most easily in my children they expect everything to be voice enabled and so everything from the Comcast remote that they pick up in our living room everywhere they go when they see a remote they expect everything to be voice enabled. So that's really the future and I think a lot of customer service will be listening to your customers voice however, they want to communicate with you, whatever channel they want to communicate on. >> Great, really cool story Annie and thanks for taking the few minutes and sharing it with us. >> Yeah, thanks for inviting me. >> All right, she's Annie, I'm Jeff your watching theCube with the Comcast CX Experience Innovation day here at the Sillicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching see you next time.

>> Voiceover: Live from Washington D.C., it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in wonderful Washington D.C. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are welcoming Dave Levy to the program, he is the Vice President, Federal Government at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >> Yeah, thank you for having me. >> Rebecca: This is your first time, your first rodeo. >> It is my first time. >> Rebecca: Welcome. >> Glad to be here. >> You're now a Cube alumni, welcome to the Cube alumni club. >> Well exactly, right, exactly. So you have been with AWS for about two years now. AWS famously has this day one mentality. I want you to talk a little bit about the culture of the company and how the culture helps create more innovative products and services. >> Yeah, and it is always day one. You hear about that but truly working in my first two years, you really get the experience when you're here everyday, that excitement and that enthusiasm for customers. It's interesting and somebody was asking me the other day, how do you get influence inside of Amazon, how do you get you points across? And in large part because Amazon's not a PowerPoint culture, being charismatic or having some of those traits really doesn't carry the day. What really carries the day inside of Amazon is what customers want and so I can't tell you how many times in the first few years that I've been here that we have been in meetings, going through our customer working backwards process, where somebody has said, wait a minute, we heard customers say we prioritize these four things versus these three things. And that kind of sentiment carries a lot of currency inside of the business for what we prioritize and what's important to us and it's how we innovate on behalf of customers. So that's what happens everyday, it happens day one at AWS and it's been really exciting these first few years. >> That's been a great formula for Amazon. That long game as Bezos always says, Andy always says, customer first, customer-centric thinking. But this working backwards process we've learned, come to learn, it's really critical within Amazon. But also making sure customers have the right journey, right, they get what they need, they get value, lower costs, living with undifferentiated heavy lifting. I feel like I'm messaging for Amazon. (laughing) Got it memorized. I sit down and interview so many people from Amazon, I got the rap down but digital transformation is about the long game 'cause all the shifts that are going on now aren't incremental, small improvements, it's really moving the ball down the field, big time. So you're seeing major shifts within customer bases saying, like the CIA did in 2013, >> Dave: Sure. >> which was initially a hedge against big data, we heard on stage today, turned out to be a critical decision for their innovation, this modernization. Could you share some other customer experiences around this IT modernization trend that's, it's totally real, it's happening right now in D.C. in Public Sector. >> Sure, there are a lot of examples. IT modernization is something that takes on a lot of different forms and a lot of different agencies think about it in different ways but fundamentally, it's about taking the systems that are serving citizens or a war fighter and allowing for an ability and an agility to do things better and faster and cheaper and doing it in a way that continues to innovate. And you see a lot of examples of that. CMS has the 76 million records of Americans on AWS. You see large data sets starting to be hosted on AWS from agencies across the civilian sector. DOD is really starting to lean in on workloads that are traditional things like ERP. >> DOD is more than leaning in, they're really going big. There's a paper that they put out was very comprehensive-- >> Yeah, I think there's a tremendous advantage from this digital transformation and agencies are really just at the beginning of it. They're really beginning to see what flexibility it provides. I think the other thing that it's doing is it's really helping to modernize the workforce. It's allowing the IT workforce to start focusing on things that are really valuable instead of managing hardware or managing IT environment strictly. It's giving the ability to deliver solutions and that's really exciting, that's what modernization is doing. >> One of the things that comes up in the modernization talks, it's not that obvious on the mainstream press, but the whole red tape argument of government process. People process technology, again, we've done these conversations all the time but in each one, the process piece, there's red tape in all of them. People who go slower, the process has red tape in it but this idea of busting through and cutting the red tape. >> Dave: Yeah. >> All these bottlenecks, Teresa calls them blockers. >> Yeah. >> Right. That's her different word. >> Yeah, yeah. >> These are real, now people are identifying that they can be taken away, not just dealing with them. Your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, well, I agree. There's a lot of opportunity. Digitizing work flows gives you the opportunity to re-examine all of these operational processes which frankly, may have been in place for very sound reasons in the past but when you modernize and you digitize and you do it in a cloud way, you're going to start to see that some of those things and those processes that were in place, really aren't necessary any more. And it allows you to move faster, it gives you more speed and we're seeing that across customers and the US government. We're seeing it really everywhere. >> And one of the things you were saying too about the digitizing the work flow, it's really about ensuring that citizens, civilians or members of the armed forces are interacting with government in a more meaningful way. That is the overarching problem that you're trying to solve here. >> It is and it can be as simple as citizens getting the kind of content that they need from a modern website, accessing it quickly, going to higher level functions around chatbots and things like that. So these modern cloud architectures are allowing agencies to deliver services faster, deliver things to citizens in a way they haven't before. Could be citizens that need assistive technology. It's giving agencies the opportunity to do things around 508 compliance that they haven't done before. So it's really opening up the aperture for a lot of agencies on what they can deliver. >> We've been doing a lot of reporting around Jedi, the DOD, actually been following a lot of the white papers from a cloud perspective. We're not really in the political circle so we don't know sometimes whose toes we're stepping on when we poke round but one thing that's very clear from the agencies that I report, even here in the hallways this week, CIA and other agencies I've talked to, all talk about the modernization in the context of one common theme, data. Data is the critical piece of the equation and it's multifold, this single cloud with the workload objective or multiple clouds in an architecture like the DOD put out. So there's clear visibility on what it looks like architecturally, multicloud, some hybrid, some pure public cloud based on workloads, the right cloud with the right job and people are getting that. But data is evolving, the role of data 'cause you got AI which is fed by machine learning. This really is a game changer. How is that playing out in conversations that you're seeing with customers and talk about that dynamic because if you get it right, good things happen, if you get it wrong, you could be screwed. It's really one of those linchpin, core items, your thoughts. >> Every agency, virtually every agency we talk to, every customer we're talking to is saying that data is the most important thing, their data strategy. Data, you know, we've all heard the sayings, data has gravity, data is the new oil. So there's a lot of ways to characterize it but once you have the opportunity to get your data both unstructured and structured, in a place, in a cloud, in an environment where you can start to do things with it, create data lakes, you can start to apply analytics to it, build machine learning models in AI. Then you're really starting to get into delivering things that you haven't thought about before. And up until then it's been tough because the data, in a lot of our customers, has been spread out. It's been in different data centers, it's been in different environments, sometimes it's under somebody's desk. So this idea of data and data management is really exciting to a lot of our customers. >> Now a lot of people don't understand that there's also down, and this is what we're getting, we're hearing from customers as well is that, they set up the data lakes or whatever they're calling it, data strategy, data lake, whatever, then there's downstream benefits to having that data just materialize and as an anecdote to what is, you look at the Ground Station after we've had a couple great interviews here about Ground Station which I love by the way. I think that's totally the coolest thing because of the, well, the real impact is going to be great back hog, IoT is going to boom, blossom from it but it only happens because you got Amazon scale. So again, data has that similar dynamic where as you start collecting and managing it in a holistic way, new things emerge, new value emerges. >> Yeah, I would say-- >> What are some of those things that you're seeing with your customers there? >> I would say there are real-world challenges that our customers have to deal with with data, right. When you start to have volumes, terabytes, petabytes of data, they've got decisions to make. Do they expand the wall, knock out a wall and expand their data center and buy more appliances which require more heating, more cooling? Maybe they do do that but there's an alternative now. There's a place for that data to go and be safe and secure and they can start doing the things that they want to do with that data. And like you said, downstream effects. There are some things that they can do with that data that they don't even know about today, right, and Ground Station's a good example of that. >> You talk to people in the military, for example, because we just had Keith Alexander, our General, the General was on. They think tactical ads using data, save lives, protect our nation, et cetera but there's also the other benefit of it that has nothing to do with the tactical, it's a business value. The enablement is a huge conversation >> Dave: Sure. >> that you hear in these modernization trends. Not just the benefits tactically, but the enablement setup, talk about that dynamic. >> Well, you think about the data that is collected. You think about the valuable data at the VA and that has potential implications for population health and so this day is just enormously valuable. I think we're at the very beginning of what we can do with some of these things across federal and you look at agencies like Department of Interior and some of the data sets they have are just fascinating. What we can do. We've got millions of visitors to our national parks every day and we don't know what's possible with a lot of those data sets. >> Talk about some of the tools and techniques that are being used to work with that data and talk about AI and machine learning and how they have been a real game changer for some of your federal customers. >> Well, ML and AI is really, we're really at the very beginning of this transformation. I think in the fullness of time, the vast majority of applications are going to be effused with machine learning and artificial intelligence. I think that day is not too far away and they're using tools on our platform like SageMaker to make predictions in this data. And one of the great things about having a platform that has really three, different parts to the stack which are machine learning, that's where you have your frameworks. I say that's where all the really, really smart people live, all the data scientists that we're all so desperate for and then you've got that middle layer which are tools like our SageMaker which everyday developers can use. So if you've got geospatial data and you're trying to determine what's in a given area, everyday developers can use SageMaker to build machine learning models. Those are some of the things they're doing, very exciting. >> Hey, I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Teresa Carlson just made earlier today. I'm not sure she said this on camera or not but it was memorable. She said, "It used to be an aha moment with the cloud "but this year it's not, it's real, people now recognize "that cloud adoption is legit, proof is in the--" >> Rebecca: Cloud is the new normal. >> The proof is in the pudding, it's right there. You can start seeing evidence, all the doubting people out there can now see the evidence and make their own judgment, it's clear. >> Yeah. >> Cloud is of great benefit, creates disruption. As this continues to increase, and it is, numbers are there, see the business performance, what are the challenges and drivers for continued success? >> Yeah. I think the first conversation starter, so Teresa's spot on as she always is. I think the first conversation starter is always cost savings. That was the way everybody thought about the cloud in the beginning and I think there are cost savings that customers are going to realize. But I think the real value, the real reasons why customers do it is, there's an agility that happens when you move to cloud that you don't necessarily have in your other environments, there's the ability to move fast, to spin up a lot of capability in just a few minutes, in just even minutes and change the experience for users, change the experience for citizens. I think the other thing that cloud is delivering is this whole breadth of functionality that we didn't really have before. We talked about machine learning and AI but there are tools around IoT now. There's Greengrass on AWS which is simply AWS IoT inside. And places like John Deere, we have hundred thousands of telematically enabled tractors sending data back to planters. So customers are getting involved because there's this huge breadth of functionality. I think, and so that's exciting, those are the enablers, that's what's driving. I think some of the things that are getting in the way is, we've got a workforce by and large, especially in the federal government, well, this is new and that learning is happening, that enablement is happening about cloud. We're teaching about security in the cloud. It's a shared responsibility model. So it's the new normal, we know what can be done in the cloud but now there are some new paradigms about how to do it and AWS and a lot of our partners are out there talking about how to get that done. >> I want to get a double down on that because one of the things that we're doing a report on, I've been investigating, is kind of a boring topic but it's your world right on which is how Amazon bare-knuckled their way into this market through cost saving which for the federal government, I would say, is a great lead 'cause they care about cost savings. A financial institution in Wall Street might not care about cost savings. They might want arbitrage on the other side but again, government's government. You guys have earned, done the work to get all the certifications. Your team, Teresa's team has done that and now you're at the beginning of the next level. But procurement is really broken, right. I was talking to an official in an interview off the record and he said, I won't say his name till I can say it here, he said, "You know, we're living procurement in the 80s. "We still have a requirement to ship a manual "on a lot of these things." So the antiquated, inadequate procurement process is lagging so much that the technology shifts are happening in a shorter period of time. Amazon which produces thousands of new services every year and reinvents Jace's big slide thousands, next year it'll be probably 5000, who knows but it'll be a big number. That's happening, all this is happening right now, really fast but procurement's lagging behind it, really stunting the innovation equation, >> Dave: Yeah. >> the growth of innovation. Your thoughts on fixing that, how you get around it, all these old tripwire rules. >> Well, first I'll say, procurement reform is something that's on everybody's mind. This is, it's not just a blocker for cloud, it's a blocker for everybody. Technology is far outpacing what our federal government can do. So I don't, there's nobody that I talk to that thinks that we're headed in the right place with procurement reform, even our customers inside of the government. So I think what I'd say is it's really collective approach. It's an industry approach that's going to be taken to change a procurement, to help them adapt to modern laws. Do we need changes in the far perhaps, yes, but I think we need fundamental policy changes, a legislative approach to change procurement for technology. It's only going to move faster, you're right. Indie announced in 2018 I think, nearly 2000 services so you can expect there's going to be more this year. Part of that is understanding new models. Our marketplace, for example, is a way to buy and access software quickly, fast, even by the hour if necessary. That's a total-- >> Rebecca: Like Ground Station >> Yeah. >> in that way, yeah. >> By the minute if necessary. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> So it's a totally new paradigm. As far as how we're approaching now, it takes having good partners. We have good partners that are helping us with respect to contract vehicles. I think we're being transparent around how we bill, how these services translate, what's in the services that they're getting charged and I think agencies are starting to feel more comfortable with that. >> I learned a term from Charlie Bell, Engineer Lead for Amazon, did an interview, a term you guys use internally at Amazon called, dogs not barking. >> Dave: Yes. >> And it means that everyone, the barking dog everyone hears and they go after, they solve that problem. It's what you don't see, the blind spot, aka blind spots. What do you see in federal that's not barking >> Yeah, what are our dogs? >> that you're aware of? What keeps you up at night? >> What are our dogs not barking? >> John: Yeah. >> I would say, it really is our customer workforce. I think our customers really need to get enablement and training and support from us and the partner community on how to make this transition to cloud. It's incumbent upon us and it's incumbent upon the agencies to really deliver it. That does keep me up at night because this is new. This is new for, the ATO process is a little bit different. The accreditation process is different. So there's a lot of new things out there and if there's a dog that's not barking, it's somebody needs help and they're not really letting us-- >> They might not even know they need it. >> They don't know they need help or they're not saying that that they need help and they don't know where to go. >> Right. >> Right. >> They should come to you. >> Well, thanks for coming on. (laughing) >> Dave, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >> Yeah, thank you, all right. >> Thank you, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the Cube AWS Public Sector Summit, stay tuned. (upbeat music)

(click) >> Well welcome to the special Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. We're here at Sundance Film Festival, Sundance, 2018, special coverage. All the top stories are obviously in the Intel Tech Lounge. All week's been our home base. We've been out on the streets getting the best stories, but one of the most biggest, compelling tech stories is the VR revolution is here. And the impact artist, the new creative. My next guest here is Michael Smit, who is the Chief Commercial Officer of Ziva. Welcome, to The Cube conversation. >> Thanks John, thanks, it's a pleasure to be here. >> You guys have a very impressive company. You're here at the Intel Tech Lounge. You're displaying Ziva. I saw a demo over there. You guys are bringing, I mean, really studio grade quality of animation, and integrated into storytelling. And this is not new for you. But one of the themes of democratization. So, you guys are a key tell sign in my opinion of where the developer, the creative developer market's going. Talk about what you guys are doing. And some of the big things you've done. I know you had some big films. Share a little bit about Ziva, and then we can have a conversation. >> Sure, sure. You know, we like to say, I mean, truly we believe in characters. And at the heart of our technology is character simulation technology. So, here at Sundance, you know, and Intel, we've been working with Intel for a while. They gave us an opportunity to be here. You know, when you think about stories. Stories kind of are driven by characters. And great characters make great stories. So, in our world, great characters are characters that are simulated through physics, and anatomical simulation to achieve levels of plausibility and reality. That previously maybe was only accessible to the very top, you know, budgeted productions. Or the very top VFX studios of the world. >> And what have you worked on? Just share some of the films that you've worked on. And some of the tech. >> Yeah, I'll give a background of the, where I guess the previous kind of, legacy of the technology comes from. But it's actually my partners, who are here with me, have a story record. They actually co-authored the software. You know, 10 years ago or so, that drove characters in titles like, Avatar, and Apes, and the Hobbit. James and Simon, I think they're on a, floating around back there. They've also got a Sci-Tek at home for the engineering work. And the vision here is that, you know, they did that work, and they were really motivated and enthused to do amazing work, amazing results, provide amazing results. They want to enable that same, and provide that same kind of functionality to small studios, big studios, game studios, independents, anyone who wants to tell a great story. >> And there's a huge tsunami. We've been talking at The Cube for the folks watching. Know that, I've been on this narrative around a renaissance in software development. Now we're seeing a renaissance in creative development. And we call that the new creative. Because an organic trend is brewing pretty fast. And used to be, not just Indie filmmakers, we're talking about kids, adults, creatives who are doing filmmaking things, in like virtual reality. And some of the successes that we're seeing, like Baobab Studios is one. They're having the hits around the characters. So, there's a thirst and a demand for technology for characters, but it's hard to build. This is an opportunity for you guys. What's your view on, on that trend? Are you guys going to be a supplier? Can I just use your technology to get characters? And where does this fit into the evolution of say, VR? >> Sure, I mean I touch on that concept of the new creative, because those who want to build and create amazing characters, to tell rich stories, tell immersive experiences. They don't want be, you know, like anything else in our life these days, like anything else that Intel is powering in our life these days. Automation of the simpler tasks should be a given. You don't want creatives to get hung up on, you know, trying to make your cheek look exactly the way it needs to look over 500 frames. When you want them to be making, bringing the story to life. So, our software basically automates a lot of the nuance of organic characters and properties. And the things that make us realistic. And I think it empowers and enables those creatives to tell the stories. >> And how can they tap into Ziva? Because I believe that you guys are on the cusp of something really big. A big trend that no-one's really talking about. And we come at it from a tech angle. So, we can see historically what happened with open source software. I mean 10% of the notional property in most big breakthroughs is the unique IP. 90% of it is reused software. >> Yeah. >> So, you can almost see these dots connecting in this new creative world. You guys seem to be at the forefront of that. Is that part of how people can engage with you? Is that a role you guys see yourselves playing? And, you know, how does someone get a hold of your technology? Do they buy it? Do you license it? How does it work? >> Great question, I mean yeah, we focus on software to make characters. And that's what our customers license from us. We license to studios, we license to Indies. We license to academics. We license to people who want to try it out for free. So, if there's a plug opportunity the url for the website is zivadynamics.com you'll learn a lot more about the company, about some of the work-- >> How expensive is it? I mean, just give a, can you talk about the number? Is it expensive, is it affordable? How does someone who's experimenting, might have their art and their storytelling vision coming to life, and might not have a big budget. >> Yeah so, the Indie licenses basically work out to about 50 bucks a month, per user to leverage the software. Which when you think about previous, maybe less robust implementations of this kind of thinking. We're limited, and we're at the tail end of multi-million dollar investments by huge studios. So, we think that's a pretty good value equation. >> Where are you guys located? Talk about your company, and culture. And what drives you guys. >> Yeah, we're located in Vancouver. You know, we're in one of the epicenters of a lot of creative work, and a lot of filmmaking. In fact, I mean, within a short radius of our studio, the number of game, and visual effects studios, it's amazing. So, you know, but our team's international, in fact, one of our team members is kind of mostly based in Wellington. Another one is actually working in Norway these days. We've got somebody in Los Angeles. So, we're kind of all over the place. And our customer footprint, we've got users in every continent, but Antarctica. >> I wish you could have come on the panel. But we were kind of sold out, we've got a small footprint here at the Intel Tech Lounge in Sundance. And the real theme is, new creative. So, I've got to ask you, in your view what is the new creative mean to you? >> The new creative is somebody who's curious, and they're not scared. They're not concerned with necessarily what it is that they're going to be making, or the media format they're going to be making. They're curious about what story they're going to be telling. And they're going to pursue anything. And they're not going to be shackled by artificial constraints. They're not going to be shackled by budgets that stop them. That make them take creative ideas off the table. They're going to pursue what they can do themselves. They're going to leverage technology in unique ways. And we're going to see some pretty amazing stuff happening. >> Yeah, and it's always, give them more time to work on their art, not worry about the scaffolding in the software to do it. >> That's exactly it. >> What's your take on Sundance this year? Obviously the theme, obviously VR here in the studio. But AI has been the Intel theme as well. We see AI as a critical part of automation. The role of automation in software to assist and augment, and give more opportunities for developers. >> Yeah, yeah I think it, again, it's people that have developed expertise. And we shouldn't look at AI and automation as something to be concerned about. We need to look at it as a tool. And it's to say well, how do I do the last mile? How do I the last 10% of what I do really good, and have all the other stuff kind of taken care of for me. >> Michael what's the hallway conversation, as you know, there's no hallway here in Sundance, it's more of this sidewalk. When you're out at dinner, when you're done here at Intel. When you're out on the streets with your peers, and colleagues, and meeting new people. What's the conversation like this year at Sundance 2018? >> The conversation at Sundance, I mean, it's a conversation that to me, just goes beyond where Sundance has been before. In that, and I think we heard it in some of the panels. But some of the emerging technology used to be like, the additive thing, like now let's go see what's next. Now it's just a part of the big story. And certainly the filmmaking has legacy. Has more experience. Has a lot of amazing stuff. There's so many amazing filmmakers. And amazing content coming out of this place this year. But it's just the variety, the diversity of everything that's happening is just blowing me away. >> Michael Smit with zivadynamics.com check out the website. I think this is a trend that you guys are on. I think the sooner we get to ease of use of the creative developer. Whether it's a filmmaker, VR, and, or, content and digital. They need characters. I want my avatars (laughs) >> That's right. >> Thanks for spending the time, appreciate it. >> Thanks John. >> I'm John Furrier here for The Cube conversation, Sundance Film Festival 2018. We are covering it on the streets. And also here, ground zero for us is the Intel Tech Lounge. It's been buzzing all week with immersive media, not just VR, really showing creative developers a new way to reimagine storytelling. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)