>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE, covering COMCAST Innovation Day, brought to you by COMCAST. >> Hey welcome back here ready Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're at the COMCAST Silicon Valley Innovation Center. You know there's innovation centers all over Silicon Valley we hadn't been to the COMCAST one until we came to this event, it's very very cool, I think it's like five storeys in this building, where they're developing a lot of new technologies, partnering with technologies, but today the focus is on customer experience, brought together a panel of people to talk about some of the issues, and we're excited to have a representative from a company that's really out on the edge of defining customer experience, and measuring customer experience, joined by Ganesh Subramanian. He is the senior director of product marketing for Gainsight. Ganesh, great to see you. >> Great, happy to be here. >> Yeah, so I'm a huge Nick Mehta fan, I've interviewed him before I've been following Gainsight for a long time and you know, it really struck me the first time that, that Nick said you know CRM is you know, basically order management. It's not customer relationship management, you know customer relationships are complicated, and they're multi-faceted and there's lots of touch points and you guys really try to build a solution to help customers manage, actually do manage that relationship so they have a great experience with their customer. >> Yeah that's totally right, and not to say that CRM isn't an important ingredient when you make that cake, but there's a lot of other touchpoints right? How are people interacting with your digital products? What is that customer journey across sales, services, support? How does all of that come together? So what Gainsight does is really provide the customer cloud to bring all of those solutions together so that businesses can really operate in a more customer-centric way. >> So you, you said an interesting thing earlier in the conversation about customer success being measured just by revenue, again kind of the CRMy kind of approach to worth versus measuring success and measuring lifetime value and measuring so many other things that can define a great relationship. What are some of those things that people should be thinking about? What are some of those other metrics out there beyond you know, did I get a, you know, a net increase value of my contract? >> Yeah absolutely you know one way we think about it at Gainsight is the two-by-two of customer experience and customer outcomes. So, you can think about experience just as how happy are people on a day-to-day basis interacting with you, your products, your organization, your team? The flipside's also true though. You can have the happiest customer, that isn't getting what they want out of their product or service. In a B2B context we think about it as tangible ROI or outcomes. So at Gainsight we're ultimately trying to make sure our clients are delivering on both of those vectors. They want happy, successful clients, ultimately that's going to lead to the recurring revenue cycle: retention, growth, adoption and advocacy. >> So where does that kind of tie together? 'Cause I'm sure there's a lot of people that think those are in conflict right? That if I bend over backwards and I provide this great experience and these great services and all these things that this is going to negatively impact my profitability, it's going to negatively impact my transactional value. How should they be measuring those things? How should they be balancing, 'cause 'cause, you know, you can sell dollars for 90 cents, have a really happy customer, not going to be in business very long. >> Yeah I think that's kind of the secret sauce right? True innovation, what we talked about today at COMCAST, a lot about, how do you take that next step forward? How do you improve your products and services in ways that make customers, customers for life? Right, and if you make the right investments, you actually find out that maybe it's, it's minor change, maybe it's process change in your call center or call service, maybe it's implementing AI in an appropriate way, so that you're able to deliver more value with less time, or maybe it's transformative, maybe it's something that's a new service you're offering all together, that's making customers get outsized or unrealized returns on their investment. Well, it doesn't matter what that investment was, if it's going to long term drive your company to higher valuations and greater competitive differentiation. So we don't think about customer experience on kind of below the line, what's going to get me the incremental ROI, we really think about it as a fundamental differentiator for your business. >> Right. Now you're in charge of, of kickin' off new products. >> That's right. >> And you know one of the things I think is really interesting about the COMCAST voice, which has had a lot of conversation today, is I still get emails from COMCAST telling me how I should use it! Right 'cause it's a different behavior, it's a different experience that I'm not necessarily used to. As you look forward, you know introducing new products, what are some of the, the kind of trends that you're keepin an eye on, what do you think is going to kind of change and impact some of the things you guys are bringing to market? What are some of the new things we should be thinking about in customer experience? >> Yeah absolutely. So one thing at Gainsight, one thing we've learned leading the customer success movement is that to be customer-centric is more than a given function, or a given team, customer success managers kind of took the mantle in B2B and started leading the charge, leading the way towards being more customer-centric but that team on their own can't do everything. Nor do they want to, or can they, right? So, one big change and one big innovation that we're leading the front on is how do you bring all those different teams together? Which is why we launched the Gainsight customer cloud. So what we're doing is we're bringing disparate data together, that used to be silohed in functional specific software, bring that into a single source of truth, to truly provide an actionable customer 360, one that provides meaning to different teams with the right context, and then drive action off of that. So whether it's an automated email to get, improve product adoption in the COMCAST example, or maybe it's some kind of escalation effort, where you need a cross-functional team to get together on the same page, to improve a red customer, or maybe it's something that's in the product itself, by just making the product easier to use or a little bit more intuitive, the, all of your end users will end up benefiting from that. What Gainsight's tryna do is to try figure out, how can we break down these walls across these different teams, make it easier for people to collaborate to improve the customer experience. >> So Ganesh I got to tease you right, 'cause everyone's eyes just rolled out when you said 360 view of the customer right, we've been talking about this forever. >> Yeah. >> So what's different, you know, what's different today? Not specifically for what you're tryna do with your product and share that too, but more generally, that, that we're getting closer to that vision. >> Yeah. >> That we're actually getting closer to delivering on, on the promise of a 360 view, and information from that view that will enable us to take positive action? >> I love that question, and I think whenever you hear the word 360 view or digital transformation, you're going to get a couple eye-rolls in the crowd right? And, I actually totally believe that, that, you know, to date I think we've done things in too much of a waterfall methodology. Let's spend three years, get a unified idea across all our disparate data sources, and then we're going to be customer-centric. I think we've learned our lessons over the course of time that, hey you know, the end result doesn't really materialize in the time frame and ROI you expected, so why don't we start with the other end of the spectrum? What are the gaps that customers are perceiving? If it's just, let me, go back to that example of product ease of use. Are we identifying that as a major gap? Then how do we go solve that? How do we reverse engineer that process? And by the way that doesn't just fall on the product team to make the product easier, services need to onboard customers more effectively, you need documentation so that they can access and understand the key aspects of your product in a more concrete way. So all of that needs to come together. So I think the biggest difference between what we used to talk about, with 360s and digital transformation, to where we are today, is really the context and the outcome you're trying to deliver, and then reverse engineer the 360 that's most meaningful to you. So to make that a little bit more clear, what does that mean at the grassroots level? If you're a services team member you're working on projects. Does a 360 view about the next opportunity from a financial or commercial perspective really matter to you? How far down in that 360 view do you have to scroll before you start seeing information that's relevant? So at Gainsight what we're trying to do is use a many-to-many relationship mapping so that if you're a services team member, or a sales member, the view you're accessing is curated to what you need to actually do. >> Right. >> And that'll drive adoption of the digital transformation efforts within your organization. >> Right. Which then obviously opens up the opportunity for automation and AI and ML to, as you said, context is so important to make sure the right information is getting to the right person at the right time for the context of the job that I have and building that customer relationship. >> That's right. Yeah we think about AI all the time how's that going to improve the customer experience? It starts with that data foundation and understanding hey what should we own and what should we leverage? And being very conscious about what you're about to do, and then second, thinking about those point problems and, again, reverse engineering how can we staff augment, or make the experience better, maybe make the lives of our employees a little bit better, when they're engaging with customers. Ultimately it's got to be in service of people. >> Right. Well Ganesh thanks for sharing your story. Again I think what you guys are doing, and Nick and Gainsight is so important in terms of redefining this beyond order management, and to actually customer relationship management. >> So, >> That's right. >> Thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Awesome. >> My pleasure. >> All - >> All right. >> Thank you. >> He's Ganesh I'm Jeff you're watching the CUBE we're at the COMCAST Innovation Center in Silicon Valley. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time.

>> 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.

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering Comcast Innovation Day. (smooth music) Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale. Very cool facility right off the runway from Moffett. They got a ton of cool toys downstairs which I get to go play with, which I'm looking forward to, but today the conversation was all about CX, customer experience, and you know, Comcast is there. A lot of people like to watch their TVs, interacting with their cable systems for a long, long time, but there's a whole range of new and innovative things that are coming out from Comcast, and we're excited to have an engineer who's kind of down in the bowels here in the engine room building all this stuff. So like to welcome Mike Fine. He's a cable software architect for Comcast. Mike, great to see you. >> Likewise. >> So you had a really cool demo earlier, which is not a demo, right? I think this thing is-- >> Production. >> Now in production, it's called the X1 Eye Control. I think most people know what X1 is. What's X1 Eye Control? >> Yeah. X1 Eye Control is a web application that integrates with off-the-shelf accessibility hardware, so that could be a Tobii eye gaze rig, it could be something called a sip-and-puff, which let's users use their inhalation and exhalation to control the application, or any other off-the-shelf accessibility hardware that can mimic a mouse to a piece of software. >> Too, it's-- >> Yeah. The goal of the project was pretty simple. It was to let people with ALS and other conditions control their TVs independently. >> That's amazing, and you showed a great video. The gentleman on the video is using I think an eye gaze method, but you said you've got integrations to a number of different, you know, kind of ADA-approved interface devices. >> That's right, the journey that this project has taken has been interesting. We started with just the ALS use case, which was the eye gaze, but it turned out that one of our early users had control over his voice, which is somewhat unusual for ALS patients, and so he asked whether he could control it with his voice, so we did that work through he had Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was nice, so we did that work, and then of course given that we have the voice remote we decided could we make voice work for everybody, which we did, so now the application is on par with a physical remote, and then we even went further and let people type in voice commands, so in case somebody who's perhaps mute or had a speech impediment, or some sort of speech pathology issue that prevented them from using a voice, they could do that as well. >> It's really interesting, I mean you guys have so many kind of interface points to an ecosystem broader than simply what's available at Comcast, whether it's on the front end, as you said, with some of these interfaces with ADA devices, or on the backend if I want to watch my Netflix or I want to watch YouTube, or I want to watch, you know, a different service. You guys have really taken, you know, kind of an open, integrated approach to all these, one might argue, competitive threats to really bring it in as the customer wants to experience. Why did you do that, what's kind of the philosophy driving that? >> Yeah, well, the first thought that comes to mind is that none of it's possible without the right cloud APIs, so somebody very visionary years ago made the decision that everything you can do on your TV or on the mobile app you can do through the cloud, and so a project like this couldn't happen unless it was possible for a piece of software that somebody invented well after the fact to cause a TV to change channels unless there was that underpinning, so like any other piece of software it's a bit of an iceberg. There's a lot of stuff underneath that you don't realize as a user-- >> Right. >> But it's there and that's what makes it possible. >> Right, I'm just curious about some of the challenges in terms of moving UI and UX forward into places that people are not familiar with. And I've joked about it on a number of these interviews that, you know, I still get an email, not only from Comcast, but from Google and from Alexa, suggesting to me ways in which I might use voice. You know, as you sit back from a technologist what are some of the challenges you guys, you know, kind of anticipate, what are some of the ones you didn't anticipate, and how do you help us old people, you know, find new ways to interact with the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean there's a lot of us here that spend our days solving that exact problem, right? Part of it is is notifying you of interesting things through SMS or through mobile push, or the messages on the TV, so your team is playing in a game that you want to see, a movie that you've declared interest in has become cheaper, become free, or maybe even buyable if you wanted to do that. Obviously there's lots of AI and ML in terms of putting recommendations in front of you based on your viewing habits, based on broader trends across, you know, because you watch this, other people watch this, so we know this is probably a good solution for you as well, but yeah, we're all, there's a large number of us trying to optimize what we call "time to joy," from the time you pick up your remote to think about what you want to watch to the time you're actually watching something you want to watch; make that as seamless as possible. >> Preston said you guys get like a billion voice commands, what was the period of time? >> A month. >> A month. >> A month, yeah. (chuckles) >> So obviously a big, giant new dataset for you guys now to have at your disposal. >> What are some of the things that you're learning from that inbound, what can you do with it, how do you, you know, now use this direct touch with the customer to, again, kind of recycle and have another iteration on improved experience? >> Right, so voice is a lot like a text chat, like a bot interface in that it's an experience where users are telling you exactly what they want to do, so if a user sits in front of a traditional web application or mobile application and has trouble finding what they want to do, they can't figure out what button to press, what screen to go to, you have no idea, right? You can't infer that they're having a problem, but with voice or somebody interacting with a bot, they type exactly what they mean, or they say exactly what they mean, so we can mine those voice commands and find the popular ones that we don't at that point have implemented, and if we can iterate on that cycle fast enough we can quickly introduce new voice commands that our users are literally asking for as quickly as possible. >> Right. What about the stuff that customers are not asking for, because right? There's one line of thought, which is the customer knows best, but the customer doesn't know-- >> That's right. >> What they don't know. So how do you guys continue to look for more kind of cutting edge stuff that isn't necessarily coming back through a feedback loop? >> Right, yeah, so it's an interesting question. So we're trying to add other non-TV use cases into the mix, right, so controlling your IoT devices at home, controlling your security, seeing your cameras through the Set-Top Box, and so on. So you know, until those use cases exist nobody's asking for them, and so you do have to be a bit visionary in terms of what you want to put out there as voice commands. You know, luckily we have people who, well, we're all customers of the platform generally, so we know what it means to be a user, but you know, we have people that talk with users and have a general sense of what they want to do, and then we figure out what the right commands are. >> Right, not voice specifically, but let's unpack a little bit deeper into the impact of IoT. You know, Nest probably was the first kind of broadly accepted kind of IoT device in the home, and now you got Ring, which everybody loves to take pictures of people stealing their boxes from the front porch, but that puts you guys with the internet connectivity in a very different place than simply providing a football game or the entertainment. So as you think of your role changing in the house, specifically with now these connected devices, how do you think about new opportunities, new challenges that being the person in the middle of that is different than just sending a TV signal? >> Yeah, there's a lot of talk about trying to be the home OS. Certainly we are in a unique position being in the home, both in terms of the router and the internet, but also, you know, often frankly you know when your system's setup a human being came in and helps you understand how to best position the physical devices in your house, and so on, that other companies don't have, right? Those vendors just don't have that builtin advantage. Clearly security has become a big thing for us. Home automation, I sit very close to that group. They're doing amazing things with automating rules like, you know, "Tell me when my door's been open too long," and these sort of things, and so more and more the use cases start to converge, that, for example, when you say, "Good morning," we have this idea of scenes, all right. So when your morning starts you not only want to tune the TV, but you also want to crank up the lights and unlock the door and open the windows, or whatever, and when you go to bed, so the actions that are involved in those use cases span not just TV and not just internet, but all of it. >> Right, it's just funny because I don't think Comcast would be the first name that people would say when they're talking about voice technology and the transformational impact of voice technology, right? They're probably going to say Siri was the first and Alexa's probably the most popular, and you know-- >> Right. >> Google's got Lord knows how many inputs they have, but you guys are really sitting at a central place, and I might argue it's one of the more used voice applications-- >> Absolutely. >> Out there, so from kind of a technology leadership perspective you guys have a bunch of really unique assets in terms of where you are, what you control, what you're sitting on in terms of that internet. You know, how does that really help you and the team think about Comcast as an innovation company, Comcast as a cool tech company, not necessarily Comcast as what used to be just a cable company? >> Right, right. Well you know, as somebody in the valley with friends in the valley it's always interesting to try to differentiate reality from the view that many people have. You know, this is definitely much more than your dad's cable company. It's a consumer and electronic company as much as anything else. We very much position ourselves with all the, you know, with the FAANG companies, et cetera, so you know, when we talked about CX it's no longer the case that whatever's passable for a stodgy cable company passes as CX anymore. Now you're being compared to a set of customers, companies that are providing fantastic user experiences for their customers, and you're being held to that standard, so you know, there's a lot of pressure on us, which is great; we like that. We want to produce fantastic products, and yeah, I don't know if I have a great answer in terms of how to move forward in terms of melding it all together, but we have a lot of smart people in the hallways making that happen. (chuckles) >> So last question is really the impact of AI, because you know, we cover a lot of tech events and a lot of talk about AI, but you know, I think those of us around know that really where AI shines is applied AI in specific applications for specific U cases. So how are you guys, you know, kind of implementing AI, where are some of the opportunities that you see that you can do in the future that you couldn't do the past, whether it be just with much better datasets, whether it be with much faster connectivity and much better compute so that you can ultimately deliver a better customer experience using some of these really modern tools? >> Right, so some of the work is just making what you already do or experience better, so for example showing you recommendations, right? Just make that algorithm better, and so there's a great deal of effort, as you might expect, at a company like this on that problem, but there's also work being done to just take any interactivity between you and the system out of the picture completely. We talked a little bit about this earlier, that, for example, we're working on technology that when you turn your TV on in the morning it should probably tune to the channel that you normally tune to in the morning. That's a pretty simple problem, in a sense, but you know, if I watch your viewing patterns and I see that you turn on a particular news show in the morning, why should you have to pick up the remote and change it from what you watched the night before to that channel? It should just happen. We talked about the Smart Resume stuff, that's obviously a fantastic use case for end users, so there's, you know, it's not surprising it's being used all over the technology set. It's in the home automation world. You know, it's in A/B testing, so trying to figure out the right cohorts to try different things in front of, so it's everywhere as you would expect. >> Right, right, it's pretty amazing. I mean there's just so many things going on, you know, kind of under the covers, some that we can see, some that we can't see where you guys are really kind of progressing, you know kind of the leading edge, cutting edge customer experience with something that people interact with every single day. >> That's right. >> Yeah, cool stuff. Well Mike, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the Eye Control; really a cool story, and look forward to more publicity around that because that's a really important piece of technology. >> Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. >> All right. He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation Date to you by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back it ready? Geoffrey here with the Cube were in the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runways here. Moffett feels really cool place, a lot of fun toys and gadgets that I have not got to play with yet, but I got to do before I leave. But the conversation today is really about customer experience. We had a small panel this morning of experts talking about customer experience. What does that mean? How do we do a better job at it? And we're excited. Have an expert brought in just for this conversation. She's a net Franz, the founder and CEO of C X Journey, and it's great to see you. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Absolutely been a fun morning. >>What did you think? >>What were some of your impressions of the conversation this morning? You know >>what? It's always great to sit in a room with so many people who have been living and breathing this customer experience journey. And so it was great to hear what Comcast is doing. It was great to hear from some of the other folks in the room. What are some of the latest trends in terms of data and technology and where customer experiences headed? Yeah, it was awesome. >>So customer experiences, it's >>a little bit over. It's almost kind of digital transformation a little bit. Everyone's like experience, experience, experience. And that's a big, complicated topic. How do you help customers really kind of break it down, make it into something manageable, make it into something they can actually approach and have some success with >>us? So I spent a lot of my time working with clients who are brand new to this field, right? I had a former boss who said that they can't even spell C X. Right. So yes, so So yes. So I go in there and I really listen and understand what their pain points are and what they need help with and then get them started on that journey. Basically, soup did not see X strategy work. We typically start out making sure that the right foundation is in place in terms of the executives that they're all a line that they're all committed to this work. The culture. We've got the right culture in place. We've got, you know, some feedback from employees and from customers of what's going well and what's not. And then from there we dive right into a phase that I call understanding. And that's listening to customers listening to employees developing personas so that we can really understand who customers are and who are employees really are, and then also journey mapping to really walk in their shoes to understand the experience that they're having today and then design. Use that to design a better experience for tomorrow. So there's a lot of work that happens up front to make you know the things that we talked about in there this morning. >>Right? Happen. What's the biggest gap? Because everyone >>always talks about being customer centric. And I'm sure if you talk to any sea, of course, were customer centric and you know, we see it would like would like Amazon Andy Jassy and that team is just crazy hyper customer centric and they executed with specific behavior. So what's the part that's usually missing that they think their customer centric, but they're really not? >>Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head with the word execute, right? So there's a stat out there that's been out there for forever, and we know it. Every single company, every single business interviews or surveys us to death, right? So they have all this great feedback, but they do nothing with it. They just don't execute. They just don't act on it. And they've got such rich feedback and and and customers want to tell them, Hey, you're doing this well behaved. This is not going so well. So please fix it because we want to continue doing business with you. And so, yeah, it's about execution. I think that's one problem. The other problem is that they focus on the metrics and not on actually doing something with the feedback >>temporary experience. Do they just ignore it? Do they not have the systems to capture it? Are they are they kind of analysis? Paralysis? He just said they have all this great data, and I'm not doing anything about it. Why >>there it is that, too Analysis, paralysis. Let's just beat the numbers to death and and what's the What's the quote about beating the number until the beating the data until the talks >>kind of thing. You know, I don't know that something. I know I'm just mess that, >>but But yeah, they don't have the system in place to actually. Then take what they learn and go do something with it. And I think a big part of it. We talked about this in the room this morning, too. Was around having that commitment from the top, having the CEO say, Listen, we're doing this and we're going to when we listen to, our customers were going toe act on what we hear, So But they don't They don't have the infrastructure in place to actually go and then do it >>right. It's pretty interesting. You have, Ah, a deck that you shared in advance Eight Principles of customer centric city. Yes. And of the aid three are people people before products people before profits people before metrics. That sounds great, but it sounds contrary to everything we hear these days about measure, measure, measure, measure, measure. Right? It's human resource is it almost feels like we're kind of back to these kind of time. Motion studies in tryingto optimize people as if they're a machine as opposed to being a person. >>Yeah, well, it's It's not, because we have to. The way that we could think about is we have to put the human into this. That's what customer experience is all about, right? It's about putting the human in the experience. And it's interesting that you bring up that back because when I opened that talk, I'm show a comm your commercial from Acura, and it's if you've never seen it. It's called the test. If you can google it and find the video and it's really about. If we don't view them as dummies, something amazing happens. That's the tagline, right? And so it's really about people. The experience is all about people. Our business is all about people. That's why we're in business, right? It's all about the customer. It's for the customer. And who's gonna deliver that? Our employees? And so we've got to put the people first, and then the numbers will come >>right. Another one that you had in there, I just have to touch on was forget the golden rule, which which I always thought the golden rules of us. You know, he has the gold makes a >>rule. You're talking about a different golden, which is really treat. Treat others >>not the way you think they want, that you want to be treated but treat people the way that they want to be treated in such a small It's the pylons, but it's so important. >>It's so important. And I love this example that I share. Thio just recently read a book by Hal Rosenbluth called The Customer Comes Second, right, and to most people, that seems counterintuitive, but he's really referring to The employee comes more first, which I love, and I'm the example that he gives us. He's left handed and he goes into a restaurant. He frequents this restaurant all the time, and until I read this story, I never even thought about this. And now that I go to restaurants, I think about this all the time. The silverware is always on the right hand side, but he's left handed, so this restaurant that he frequents the waitress. He always seemed to have the same waitress she caught on, and so when when he would come into the restaurant, she would set the silvery down on the left hand side. for him that's treating people the way that they want to be treated. And that's what customer experience is all about, >>right? One of the topics that he talked about in the session this morning was, um, the reputation that service experiences really defined by the sum of all your interactions. And it's really important to kind of keep a ah view of that that it's not just an interaction with many, many interactions over a period of time that sounds so hard to manage. And then there's also this kind of the last experience, which is probably overweighted based on the whole. >>How do people >>keep that in mind? How did they How did they, you know, make sure that they're thinking that kind of holistically about the customer engagement across a number of fronts within the company. >>Well, you've got to think >>about it as think about it as a journey, not just touch points, not just a bunch of little touch points, because if you think about just the last experience or just a touch point, then you're thinking about transactions. You're not thinking about a relationship, and what we're trying to get at is customer relationships and not just transactional, you know, it's it's they're in, they're out, they're gone, right? So what? We want relationships. We want them to be customers for life. And and that's the only way that we're gonna do it is if we focus on the journey, >>right? What about the challenge of that which was special suddenly becomes the norm. And we talked a lot about, you know, kind of consumers ations of i t. Because as soon as I get great results on a Google search or, you know, I find exactly what I need on Amazon in two clicks and then to take that into whatever my be to be your B to C application as when Now those expectations are not being driven by what I promised to deliver. But they're being driven by all these third party app said. I have a no control up and they're probably developing at a faster pace of innovation that I can keep up housing people, you know, kind of absorb that deal with it and try to take some lessons from that in the delivery of their own application >>essay. You you brought up two things there which I want to address the 1st 1 to which was about the delighting customers. But to answer your question is really about focusing on your customers and your customers needs on. And that's why I talk a lot about customer understanding, right? It's it's about listening to your customers. It's about developing personas and really understanding who they are, what their pain points are, what their problems are, what needs. Are they trying to solve our problems? Are they trying to solve on and then walking in their shoes through journey, mapping? And that understanding allows us to design an experience for our customers, right for our customers. If we don't solve a problem up for our customers, they will go elsewhere and they'll get their problems solved elsewhere, right? So I think that's really important. The first part of your question was, our point was around delighting our customers, and you're absolutely right. We don't have to delight customers at every touch point. I know that's counter to what a lot of people might say or think, but to your point, once we delighted every touch point, now it becomes the new norm. It's an expectation that has now been set and now delight, Where does it stop? You know, Delight is here, and then it's here. And then it's here. And so So it's It's a whole different. So my thinking on that is that most businesses cannot delight at every touch point, and they certainly don't. Um, I think we need to meet expectations and the and the only way that we can do that is to listen and understand and and and then act on what we hear. And, um, most businesses are still very primitive, even when it comes to that, >>right? Okay. Give you the last word. What's what's the kind of the most consistent, easy to fix stumble that most customers are doing when you when you get engaged and you walk in, what's that one thing that you know with 90% confidence factor that when you walk in, this is gonna be, you know, one of these three or four little things that they should stop doing or that they should do just just just get off the baseline? >>Yeah, I think it's You know what I think it >>za combination of sort of speed and responsiveness. I'll give an example. I won't mean the company, but But I thought, man, in this day and age, this shouldn't be happening, right? It was a company that I contacted. I was supposed to set up an account and they said I couldn't for it just wasn't working. I tried different browsers, just wasn't working. So I sent them and eat. First. I tried to call, but I got stuck in Ivy are hell. And then I sent an email and my the email that I got back was an auto responder. That's I will reply within five business days. >>Five business days, Thio like, really, where? Why don't you just ask me to send a fax, right? You know, So So that's the kind >>of stuff that seriously I I want to solve that e mails like really in 2019. We're still responding in five business days. That's just that's just ludicrous. I think that's one of the and it's such it doesn't cost anything to respond in a timely manner and to respond at all right now. Here it is. It's been I haven't heard from them yet, so it's been like seven days now, so >>there's that just tweet tweet at the CEO going to, hopefully the >>CEO tweets and maybe doesn't tweet. >>I know, right? Yeah, well, in >>that you know nothing about opportunity for you because this is not an easy it's not an easy thing to do is it's hard to stay up with people's expectations and to drive new and innovative products when they don't necessarily even know how to engage with those things. >>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, The field is wide open because, like I said, there's still so many companies that are still just trying to get the basics right. So >>Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. Thanks for participating. Absolutely, She's in that. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time.

(futuristic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runway here at Moffett Field. Really interesting place, a lot of cool toys downstairs. But we had a conversation today about customer experience and kind of next gen customer experience, and how to drive a better customer experience so that you have a better customer relationship, and we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Kristy Schaffler, the director of customer experience for Comcast California regions. Kristy, great to see you. >> Thank you! Thanks for having me here, I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, we had this great little panel discussion talking about customer experience, but you kept coming back to employees, and really leading with employees before you worry about what's going on with the customer. Where does that mindset come from and how should people be prioritizing employees for the benefit of customers? >> So, you know, honestly, it all comes back to Comcast itself. It is a very strong employee culture. And so the company began as a small company, family owned, and I think that's what's permeated throughout the company as a whole. So when we started to introduced the best practices for a net promoter system overall, it was an easy grasp, I think, for employees to start looking at how is it that I'm going to be able to help overall? Because I think they're all out there trying to help each other. >> Right, well its funny, right? Because there's kind of two dynamics. There's a great dynamic of helping a teammate right? And this goes back to military rule and you fight for the person that you're with, and not necessarily some great cause or old white guys that are back thousands of miles away. But it's different in terms of getting bad news up to the boss. That's a really hard problem, and nobody wants to tell the boss bad news, and in fact, a lot of times, the bad news doesn't get up. >> Exactly. >> So how do you enable people to actually share the real bad news that they might be uncomfortable or not necessarily even addressable. >> Yeah, so what we did was we introduced our employees to the concept of elevations, and so what they do is they input an issue where they're struggling with helping out the customer. There's a barrier to them to be able to deliver the service we're expecting. And what happens is once that gets input, then that actually goes up into the region, we take a look at it and say "We can't really do anything with it here, but we can bump it up to the next level." That eventually gets to a point, especially in the case of employee tools, for example, where is has to go all the way up to the headquarters and there's a team that's ready and waiting for that to happen. So, when you tell them, "Hey, there's something broken here", they have to come back and respond within two weeks. They have to be able to get back with that employee to say "Here is what we're going to do about that" or maybe put on a map to say that we're going to eventually fix that. That communication goes directly back to the person who actually inputted. So, its a direct communication between the employee who's having the issue and the software developer who may actually own that tool. >> So it goes directly-- is it a special type of ticket, if you will? >> Exactly. >> That I want a post knowing that this is a-- I've decided its a high enough priority that I'm going to take the risk, and take the personal risk or professional risk to go ahead and escalate that up the chain of command? >> Right, so what I'm so proud about is we've gone back to the team and said "Give be your number one barrier that's holding you back?" . So they work it out amongst their peers about what they think should be the top issue. Then they get everybody else to watch that issue. Once you get a number of watchers on it, it becomes elevated into the company where it becomes a big issue, and its like Hey, there's a lot of people that look at this issue, want it resolved, and so as soon as they put that in, they assign it to the area that responsible, and that is a direction communication, because as soon as they comment, anybody who's watching that elevation gets an email in their inbox with the actual comment from the person who owns it. So, its a nice targeted communication for issues that they're having. >> So, is there any fanfare when there some big one that gets voted by the broader group that "Oh my gosh, this was a really big deal."? >> So recently, we had something that came up with our Xfinity Home, and so, as you probably know, we have the ability to have security where you can actually look at your cameras on your mobile app. And one of our technicians said "Hey guys, I'm hearing this from the customer.". So what they do is they come back in and they have a huddle with their team and have the discussion, and then that manager takes that and puts it into the system. What happened was it went straight back up to the person, they actually did a software update on it, And then our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience out of our corporate headquarters said "Hey guys, congratulations, that's fantastic! This got fixed!". Then that communication went directly back to the person who input it, so it's just a celebratory moment when you can be able to get that direct feedback from the customer, comes up through the employee. The employee's owning it as an issue that they can't solve personally, but they know to get it to the right people. >> Right. So you've talked a lot earlier today about employee tools, and so, you know, as you clearly there's something that you think is a great investment, how should people think about investment in employee tools actually manifesting itself in better customer experience with the company? >> Exactly. We actually had an elevation that was associated with that, where the employee was using a tool in the home, and when he was trying to check the health of the system, they found that there was a piece of the tool that was breaking off. And so, again, they took it back to the owner of that tool, and they worked with the manufacturer to go back and redesign that tool, so that meant that the customer was able to get better service, because of their tools aren't working, that's what they depend on to be able to serve our customers. >> Right. >> And so, it's key that we take care of them. >> So, just curious, to kind of wrap it up, what has the focus on the NPS, both the score as well as the process, you know, kind of, what's happened from then? Not only the, you know, the direct result in terms of changing in the score and execution details, but more kind of the second order and unintended consequences of that focus? >> Yeah so we've definitely seen our net promoter score increase year over year, so that's very exciting, and we're celebrating that, and we're not there yet, so we still have a ways to go. But the other thing that we're seeing is that the employees are feeling empowered. They're feeling like that they can bring back issues, but something that they share with everybody, they feel like they have a sense of "I can help direct where we need to focus our time and make sure that those issues are being addressed". So, we have an employee survey. It's actually called the ENPS, so actually, we send that out every other month, and ask for employees, you know, "How do you feel about the workplace?", "Are you motivated?". We have some of the highest scores of any company of employees that are motivated because we have set up this system to basically come back and say "Let us know where you need help", and we're coming back in and helping. So, I'm excited about it. >> Great, alright Kristy, well we need to have another followup conversation about NPS another time-- >> Definitely! >> --I need to get educated, but thanks for spending a few minutes, and inviting us to attend today's event. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Alright, she's Kristy, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back, get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, here in Sunnyvale, California. They had a really cool thing today, it was a customer experience day, brought a bunch of Comcast executives and a bunch of thought leaders in the customer experience base. We're excited to come down and sit in and talk to some of the guests, and really excited about our next guest, 'cause he's an anthropologist, he's Brian Solis, digital analyst, author, analyst, anthropologist, futurist, Brian, you've got it all going on, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. >> Course, this is a really great conversation, so, I'm happy to be here. >> So first off, just kind of impressions of the conversation earlier today, talking about customer experience, the expectation, consumerization of IT is something we talk a lot about, where people's expectations of the way this stuff is supposed to work, change, all the time, and what was magical and almost impossible, like talking on a cell phone in your car, suddenly becomes expected and the norm, so how do you think of this, as you look at these big, sweeping changes that we're going through? >> Well today's conversation I think has been sort of, a spotlight on what's most important, which is innovation not for the sake of innovation, but innovation for the sake of pushing the customer experience forward, changing customer behaviors in a way that's going to create a new standard for experiences, and that way you become the leader in engagement. Everybody else has to catch up to you, and what was so important is that we're here at a company with all the love that wasn't the best in customer experience several years ago, and now they're sort of one of the pioneers in what customer experience needs to be, from a technological standpoint, a customer service standpoint, and an overall experience standpoint, right? >> I want to jump into the voice capability specifically, because I don't think there's really enough accolades as to what Comcast has achieved with the voice remote, I think if you don't have it you don't know it's there, and the ability to migrate across hundreds or thousands of channels, multiple services, to find the show that you want with just the ask of your voice is amazing. What's even more amazing is trying to teach people to actually navigate that way, so changing people's behavior in the way they interact with devices is not a simple thing. >> So, it's come up, and it's an expression shared in many UI and UX circles, which is the best interface is no interface, and in many ways, voice was the next frontier, that's a frontier that was pioneered, I think at a mass level by Amazon and Alexa, Apple and Siri, Google and Ok Google, we're really starting to see that voice as a UI is much more natural, what makes it so complex is all of the back end, I think Comcast has done a really nice job in the simplistic linguistic engagement of saying the name of a TV show or a genre of shows or movies, and then the back end to be reimagined in order to bring you something that's not just this long list of stuff, that is much more intuitive and helps you get to what they call time to joy, much faster. That's game changing, right, but that isn't just something that Comcast looked, for example, to just Alexa, or anything specifically, it looked, and also, especially not to other cable companies. They looked to the best-in-class experiences in every area, to pick those parts and build something altogether new that becomes the new standard, and I think voice, one of the things that you and I were talking about, Jeff, earlier, was kids, there was a time when they would walk up to a screen and they still do to some regard, where they want to do this, but I have a three year old at home who has a toy remote control, and I had to record video from afar of just watching her talk into her toy remote, "Mickey Mouse Club, Mickey Mouse Club," and just sitting there, with all the patience in the world, nothing was happening but expecting that something was going to happen. And it's just a new standard. The other thing, though, is that we're not done, we now live in an era of AI, machine learning, automation, so personalization now is really going to start to build upon voice experiences where it's just simply turning on the TV is going to give you instant options of all of the things you're most likely going to want to watch all on one nav. >> Right, it's just, we say that and yet we still have qwerty keyboards, right, which were specifically designed to slow people down and yet now we're not using arm typewriters anymore, and we still have qwerty keyboards, so changing people's behavior is not easy, and it's interesting to see kind of these generational shifts based on the devices in which they grew up using, kind of define the way in which they expect everything else to work. But it's, I still get the email, maybe, or even, they talked about here at Comcast, where instead of just saying NCAA Football, it knows I like to watch Stanford football, it suggests, maybe you should just say Stanford football, so there's still kind of a lot of education, surprising amount of education that has to happen. >> Yes and no, if you think about the conversation, I often talk about it in terms of iteration and innovation, iteration is doing the same things better, innovation is creating new value, and if you look at the evolution of the remote control, I mean just go back 50 years, it has gotten progressively worse over time, in fact on average, today's remote control has 70 buttons on it, and if you think about iteration in that regard, we've completely started to fail in the user interface, I don't know that anybody has mastered their relationship with the remote control except for some geeks, so I think if anything, voice is going to change the game for the better. >> Yeah, I was in the business for a long time, and now I know what killed the VCR, right, was the flashing 12, nobody could ever get their flashing 12, and for all the young people, look it up on the internet, you'll figure out what a VCR and a flashing 12 is. So you talk about something called Generation C, what is Generation C, why should we be paying attention? >> Look, I think voice is a good example of Generation C, so anybody who uses, you mentioned qwerty, right, I don't know that I've actually even used qwerty in a sentence in a really long time, but I'm old enough to, I trained on a manual typewriter back in the day, so it doesn't mean that I don't get it, it means that my behaviors and my expectations as a human being have changed, because of my relationship, my personal relationship, so for example, in consumerization of technology and IT, my personal relationship has changed with technology, and so what I had found in my research over the years was especially when it comes to customer experience, if you study a customer journey, and you look at demographics of these personas that we've created, you can see specifically that people who live a mobile-first lifestyle, regardless of age, will make decisions the same way, they're increasingly impatient, they're demanding, they're self-centered, I call 'em accidental narcissists, they, time, convenience are really important, they want personalization, their standards are much different than the personas that we've developed in the past, and so I gave it a name, which is Generation C, because it wasn't one, where C stood for connected, it wasn't one bound by age, or traditional demographics, education, income, it was defined by shared interests, behaviors, and shared outcomes, and it was a game changer for all things, if you're going to point innovation or customer experience or whatever it is, and you're going to aim at that growing customer segment, then they're going to have a different set of needs than your traditional customer, right? >> But it's so bizarre, again, how quickly the novel becomes expected baseline, and how the great search algorithm that we get out of Google, which is based on lots and lots and lots and lots of data, and a bunch of smart people and a whole bunch of hardware and software, suddenly now we expect that same search result if we're searching on, pick some random retailer or some other random website, when in fact, that is special, but we have this crazy sliding scale of what's expected and how can companies stay out in front of that, at least chase close behind, 'cause it's a very different world in how fast the expectations change. >> I'm sorry, I totally spaced out 'cause my attention span went away. I'm just kidding, I'm kidding. >> Well I didn't even get to the attention economy question yet. >> It's, you're competing at a much different level today, and I think that's what so disruptive for companies, is that they're still thinking that momentum and progress and experience and performance and success, I have to say that success is the worse teacher when it comes to innovation because you're basing your decisions on the future based on things that you did in the past. So what do companies need to get, is that the customers change, I'll give you an example. I think in many ways, companies compete against Uber, right, because Uber has changed the game for what it takes to get a service brought to you, and to give it to you and take you where you need to go, where time and convenience are big factors of that. So for example, one of the things I studied was how long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open Lyft in certain markets, and the reason that I wanted to do that was I wanted to show that the number went down every single year. Now, for example, Uber will advertise in Sydney that the average pickup time is three minutes and 39 seconds, because it knows it adds a competitive advantage over everybody else, because it's important, because once that experience happens to you and you get something your way fast, you're not going to suddenly realize, when you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles, that "Well, I understand that this isn't Uber, "and therefore I shouldn't expect "to have things done at a much more efficient "and personal manner." You take that mindset subconsciously to everything you do, so while it's a threat, it's also an opportunity, but you got to break that executive mindset to say, "How can we take "best-in-class experiences across the board, "and how can we apply it to what we do?" >> Yeah, again, an interesting concept in the conversation earlier today, where there was a question about ROI, and you threw it back as ROE, return on experience, so how should people start to adjust their thinking, because the thing on, return on investment implies almost a very small kind of direct impact, kind of one to one benefit, where really, return on experience implies a much broader, kind of accidental benefits, benefits across a lot of parameters that you may or may not necessarily be measuring, it's a very, a much better way to measure your investment. >> Look, it's almost impossible to get away from the ROI conversation, it's important, executives have to make decisions based on what they know the outcomes are going to be, a lot of this is, you don't know what you don't know, and so if you can tie some types of rudimentary metrics that are going to show progress and also return, it helps, but at the same time, I always say, what happens in the ROI equation if I equals ignorance, what's the return of ignorance? What's the return of not doing something, and so what I tried to demonstrate in a book I wrote about experience design, which was called X, it was, let's break it down to what we're actually trying to do, the word experience actually means an emotional reaction to a moment, and so for example, in a high sales pitch situation like a dealership for an automobile, that's not a good experience. If you have to call customer service, you've probably not had a good experience, and all of those things are emotional, so if you can design for emotional outcomes, where people are going to feel great in the moment and feel great afterwards, that is a metric that you can have a before and after state. The likelihood of attaching that emotion to things like loyalty, customer lifetime value, growth, then you can get to your ROI in a different way, but you have to first do it with intention. >> Yeah, Brian, fascinating conversation, we could go all day, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for joining today, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Thank you, thank you, it was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>>from the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering Comcast Innovation date. You want to You by Comcast. >>Hey, welcome back already. Jeffrey here with the Cube worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. It's right in Sunnyvale, not too far from Moffitt. And they had a special day today, really all about customer experience and invited. Ah, lot of industry people around to dig into the issues and find out What is it that's all about customer experience. We're excited to have our next guest. He's ripped Gerber, the chief marketing and innovation officer from Velocity Rip. Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me here. >>Absolutely. Shade. It's over. People aren't familiar with velocity. Give us the give us the overview. >>A terrific velocity builds mobile and cloud applications 100% on Salesforce. To extend the customer experience into deep into industries such as communications, media, health insurance, government, energy and utilities, we extend the power of the cloud that power of sales force to help these companies compete to transform on to win and improve their customer experiences. >>So what's the tie with Comcast >>tied with Comcast? Well, Comcast is certainly a very innovative media company and of itself in a big sales force customer and some things that they're doing and that we learned about today and some of the technologies that we saw very exciting in terms of how they're integrating you knew content displays and products new ai ai technologies wth the assisted your voice activation modules that we saw others very exciting. So you're a Comcast, like many of us here in Silicon Valley, Certainly are on ah, on some amazing journeys with taking these enabling technologies in making our lives as consumers and customers. And business is so much better, >>right? So you talked about, you know, digital transformation. And he called them the Big Four for your customers, you know, Social Cloud, Mobile and Analytics. How are you seeing those things, Matt? Back? The digital transformation. It's such a big, chewy term. How do you help people kind of zero in on specific, actionable things and initiatives that they can start to see success? >>Right, Right. So we're about a decade in in terms of those transformation technologies that I listed earlier today in our panel, Social Cloud Mobile and Analytics, and we were about 10 years into these, and so many might say we're in a post digital world now and entering what we call a customer engagement world. I mean, so you take these technologies which are amazing in of themselves. You combine them together. Ah, and then you start creating the kinds of experiences that new companies that are cropping up disrupting industries and existing organizations are taking to do things better, faster, less expensive. So one of things that we talked about today is there's a lot of legacy technology. A stack. Let's take C R M, for example, where you have very old technologies that are there that are keeping companies back that are holding back those experiences because of the way that the on premise software has been customized. And it's kind of sticking their and new companies like Salesforce, which is, in fact, a new company. If you think in Silicon Valley, timelines have come in and created this amazing experience level on top that and that we work with Salesforce. It extended even further in those industries to create these these amazing technologies. Ah, pulling up the data from the legacy systems bringing in Social Mobile analytics. Aye aye, and creating an experience that is seamless, almost invisible to you as a consumer or as a business. And so that's when we talk about digital transformation. It's not just the digital part of it. It's the transformation of the entire technology stack inside of an organization of the processes that they're following, sometimes the teams and the people. And it's sometimes the entire industry and of itself, >>right? But is it is it hard to get a B to B vendor to think about delivering their product in the form of inexperience? Right. We hear it all the time, obviously, and and B to C, and everyone's trying to sell experiences and everybody wants experiences, and Gen X wants experiences. But if you think of a sales force application and delivering kind of CR and capability to some sales person on the line, how did they rethink that delivery in the form of an experience for that user? >>Sure, many of the existing ah metrics or benchmarks that you might have as a consumer Ah, business is air now being held to a CZ well, so Comcast is a terrific example where there's a B to see as well as it be to be sales organization on divisions and whether it's the contracting process that you might have with Comcast as a business or the sign up process you might have as a consumer, your expectations are growing exponentially in terms of seamless, fast, intuitive, personal. In those technologies that we work with, the velocity and salesforce together help enable that kind of experiences for companies. Media companies like Comcast, >>for example, right? The other piece of it, we talked about a lot in the in the room before we got out here is driving it internally with your own employees and really driving kind of, ah, customer centric culture and attitude and two degree experience within your own culture so that those people are then able to deliver that to your customer. How are you doing that at velocity? What are some of the priorities that you set in this area? Right >>velocities Five years old, we are one of the fastest ah growing clout, cos actually, in the world today, one of the reasons for that key driver is our core values. We say where values lead company, our 1st 2 values out of our seven, our customers first. And people are the core. And so you can't take. You can't do what we're doing Ah, and grow how we're growing and serve the customers with the results that they're getting the way that we're doing without those two customer first, customer centric strategy. Ah, and emphasis. But then people are People are at the very core of that, and they combine to basically deliver the kinds of results that we're delivering. Whether it's building innovative technologies, helping our customers with Salesforce implement those technologies and helping the leadership of those of those customers that we have you measure, benchmark and demonstrate. Ah, to they're consistencies the results that they're getting from those investments. >>Awesome. Well, thanks for Ah, for joining us today and you're at the event and taking a few minutes on the Cube. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, he's rip. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Q worth the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. See you next time. Thanks for watching

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

(bright music) >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE We are high atop San Francisco in the Sales Force Tower in the new Accenture offices, it's really beautiful and as part of that, they have their San Francisco Innovation Hubs. So it's five floors of maker's labs, and 3D printing, and all kinds of test facilities and best practices, innovation theater, and this studio which is really fun to be at. So we're talking about hybrid cloud and the development of cloud and multi-cloud and continuing on this path. Not only are customers on this path, but everyone is kind of on this path as things kind of evolve and transform. We are excited to have a couple of experts in the field we've got Larry Socher, he's the Global Managing Director of Intelligent Cloud Infrastructure Services growth and strategy at Accenture. Larry, great to see you again. >> Great to be here, Jeff. And Ajay Patel, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager at Cloud Provider Software Business Unit at VMWare and a theCUBE alumni as well. >> Excited to be here, thank you for inviting me. >> So, first off, how do you like the digs up here? >> Beautiful place, and the fact we're part of the innovation team, thank you for that. >> So let's just dive into it. So a lot of crazy stuff happening in the marketplace. Lot of conversations about hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, different cloud, public cloud, movement of back and forth from cloud. Just want to get your perspective today. You guys have been in the middle of this for a while. Where are we in this kind of evolution? Everybody's still kind of feeling themselves out, is it, we're kind of past the first inning so now things are settling down? How do you kind of view the evolution of this market? >> Great question and I think Pat does a really nice job of defining the two definitions. What's hybrid versus multi? And simply put, we look at hybrid as when you have consistent infrastructure. It's the same infrastructure regardless of location. Multi is when you have disparate infrastructure, but are using them in a collective. So just from a from a level setting perspective, the taxonomy is starting to get standardized. Industry is starting to recognize hybrid is the reality. It's not a step in the long journey. It is an operating model that going to exist for a long time. So it's not about location. It's about how do you operate in a multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud world. And together at Accenture VMware have a unique opportunity. Also, the technology provider, Accenture, as a top leader in helping customers figure out where best to land their workload in this hybrid, multi-cloud world. Because workloads are driving decisions. >> Jeff: Right. >> We are going to be in this hybrid, multi-cloud world for many years to come. >> Do I need another layer of abstraction? 'Cause I probably have some stuff that's in hybrid and I probably have some stuff in multi, right? 'Cause those are probably not mutually exclusive, either. >> We talked a lot about this, Larry and I were chatting as well about this. And the reality is the reason you choose a specific cloud, is for those native differentiator capability. So abstraction should be just enough so you can make workloads portable. To be able to use the capability as natively as possible. And by fact that we now at VMware have a native VMware running on every major hyperscaler and on pram, gives you that flexibility you want of not having to abstract away the goodness of the cloud while having a common and consistent infrastructure while tapping into the innovations that the public cloud brings. So, it is the evolution of what we've been doing together from a private cloud perspective to extend that beyond the data center, to really make it an operating model that's independent of location. >> Right, so Larry, I'm curious your perspective when you work with customers, how do you help them frame this? I mean I always feel so sorry for corporate CIAOs. I mean they got security going on like crazy, they go GDPR now I think, right? The California regs that'll probably go national. They have so many things to be worried about. They go to keep up on the latest technology, what's happening in containers. I thought it was doc, now you tell me it's Kubernetes. It's really tough. So how do you help them kind of, put a wrapper around it? >> It's got to start with the application. I mean you look at cloud, you look at infrastructure more broadly I mean. It's there to serve the applications and it's the applications that really drive business value. So I think the starting point has to be application led. So we start off, we have our intelligent engineering guys, our platform guys, who really come in and look and do an application modernization strategy. So they'll do an assessment, you know, most of our clients given their scale and complexity usually have from 500 to 20,000 applications. You know, very large estates. And you got to start to figure out okay what's my current applications? A lot of times they'll use the six Rs methodology and they say hey okay what is it? I'm going to retire this, I no longer need it. It no longer has business value. Or I'm going to replace this with SaaS. I move it to sales force for example, or service now, etcetera . Then they're going to start to look at their workloads and say okay, hey, do I need to re-fact of reformat this. Or re-host it. And one of the things obviously, VMware has done a fantastic job is allowing you to re-host it using their software to find data center, you know, in the hyperscaler's environment. >> We call it just, you know, migrate and then modernize. >> Yeah, exactly. But the modernized can't be missed. I think that's where a lot of times we see clients kind of get in the trap, hey, i'm just going to migrate and then figure it out. You need to start to have a modernization strategy and then, 'cause that's ultimately going to dictate your multi and your hybrid cloud approach, is how those apps evolve and you know the dispositions of those apps to figure out do they get replaced. What data sets need to be adjacent to each other? >> Right, so Ajay, you know we were there when Pat was with Andy and talking about VMware on AWS. And then, you know, Sanjay is showing up at everybody else's conference. He's at Google Cloud talking about VMware on Google Cloud. I'm sure there was a Microsoft show I probably missed you guys were probably there, too. You know, it's kind of interesting, right, from the outside looking in, you guys are not a public cloud, per se, and yet you've come up with this great strategy to give customers the options to adopt VMware in a public cloud and then now we're seeing where even the public cloud providers are saying, "Here, stick this box in your data center". It's like this little piece of our cloud floating around in your data center. So talk about the evolution of the strategy, and kind of what you guys are thinking about 'cause you know you are clearly in a leadership position making a lot of interesting acquisitions. How are you guys see this evolving and how are you placing your bets? >> You know Pat has been always consistent about this and any strategy. Whether it's any cloud or any device. Any workload, if you will, or application. And as we started to think about it, one of the big things we focused on was meeting the customer where he was at in his journey. Depending on the customer, they may simply be trying to figure out working out to get on a data center. All the way, to how to drive an individual transformation effort. And a partner like Accenture, who has the breadth and depth and sometimes the vertical expertise and the insight. That's what customers are looking for. Help me figure out in my journey, first tell me where I'm at, where am I going, and how I make that happen. And what we've done in a clever way in many ways is, we've created the market. We've demonstrated that VMware is the only, consistent infrastructure that you can bet on and leverage the benefits of the private or public cloud. And I often say hybrid's a two-way street now. Which is they are bringing more and more hybrid cloud services on pram. And where is the on pram? It's now the edge. I was talking to the Accenture folks and they were saying the metro edge, right? So you're starting to see the workloads And I think you said almost 40 plus percent of future workloads are now going to be in the central cloud. >> Yeah, and actually there's an interesting stat out there. By 2022, seventy percent of data will be produced and processed outside the cloud. So I mean the edge is about to, as we are on the tipping point of IOT finally taking off beyond smart meters. We're going to see a huge amount of data proliferate out there. So the lines between between public and private have becoming so blurry. You can outpost, you look at, Antheos, Azure Stack for ages. And that's where I think VMware's strategy is coming to fruition. You know they've-- >> Sometimes it's great when you have a point of view and you stick with it against the conventional wisdom. And then all of a sudden everyone is following the herd and you are like, "This is great". >> By the way, Anjay hit on a point about the verticalization. Every one of our clients, different industries have very different paths there. And to the meaning that the customer where they're on their journey. I mean if you talk to a pharmaceutical, you know, GXP compliance, big private cloud, starting to dip their toes into public. You go to Mians and they've been very aggressive public. >> Or in manufacturing with Edge Cloud. >> Exactly. >> So it really varies by industry. >> And that's a very interesting area. Like if you look at all the OT environments of the manufacturing. We start to see a lot of end of life of environments. So what's that next generation of control systems going to run on? >> So that's interesting on the edge because and you've brought up networking a couple times while we've been talking as a potential gate, right, when one of them still in the gates, but we're seeing more and more. We were at a cool event, Churchill Club when they had psy links, micron, and arm talking about shifting more of the compute and store on these edge devices to accommodate, which you said, how much of that stuff can you do at the edge versus putting in? But what I think is interesting is, how are you going to manage that? There is a whole different level of management complexity when now you've got this different level of distributing computing. >> And security. >> And security. Times many, many thousands of these devices all over the place. >> You might have heard recent announcements from VMware around the Carbon Black acquisition. >> Yeah. >> That combined with our workspace one and the pulse IOT, we are now giving you the management framework whether it's for people, for things, or devices. And that consistent security on the client, tied with our network security with NSX all the way to the data center security. We're starting to look at what we call intrinsic security. How do we bake security into the platform and start solving these end to end? And have our partner, Accenture, help design these next generation application architectures, all distributed by design. Where do you put a fence? You could put a fence around your data center but your app is using service now and other SaaS services. So how do you set up an application boundary? And the security model around that? So it's really interesting times. >> You hear a lot about our partnership around software defined data center, around networking. With Villo and NSX. But we've actually been spending a lot of time with the IOT team and really looking and a lot of our vision aligns. Actually looking at they've been working with similar age in technology with Liota where, ultimately the edge computing for IOT is going to have to be containerized. Because you're going to need multiple modalware stacks, supporting different vertical applications. We were actually working with one mind where we started off doing video analytics for predictive maintenance on tires for tractors which are really expensive the shovels, et cetera. We started off pushing the data stream, the video stream, up into Azure but the network became a bottleneck. We couldn't get the modality. So we got a process there. They're now looking into autonomous vehicles which need eight megabits load latency band width sitting at the edge. Those two applications will need to co-exist and while we may have Azure Edge running in a container down doing the video analytics, if Caterpillar chooses Green Grass or Jasper, that's going to have to co-exist. So you're going to see the whole containerization that we are starting to see in the data center, is going to push out there. And the other side, Pulse, the management of the Edge, is going to be very difficult. >> I think the whole new frontier. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's moving forward and with 5G IntelliCorp. They're trying to provide value added services. So what does that mean from an infrastructure perspective? >> Right, right. >> When do you stay on the 5G radio network versus jumping on a back line? When do you move data versus process on the edge? Those are all business decisions that need to be there into some framework. >> So you guys are going, we can go and go and go. But I want to follow up on your segway on containers. 'Cause containers is such an important part of this story and an enabler to this story. And you guys made and aggressive move with Hep TO. We've had Craig McLuckie on when he was still at Google and Dan, great guys. But it's kind of funny right? 'Cause three years ago, everyone was going to DockerCon right? That was like, we're all about shows. That was the hot show. Now Docker's kind of faded and Kubernetes is really taking off. Why, for people that aren't familiar with Kubernetes, they probably hear it at cocktail parties if they live in the Bay area. Why is containers such an important enabler and what's so special about Kubernetes specifically? >> Do you want to go on the general or? >> Why don't your start off? >> I brought my products stuff for sure. >> If you look at the world its getting much more dynamic. Particularly as you start to get more digitally decoupled applications, you're starting, we've come from a world where a virtual machine might have been up for months or years to all the sudden you have containers that are much more dynamic, allowed to scale quickly, and then they need to be orchestrated. And that's essentially what Kubernetes does, is really start to orchestrate that. And as we get more distributed workloads, you need to coordinate them. You need to be able to scale up as you need for performance etcetera So Kubernetes is an incredible technology that allows you really to optimize the placement of that. So just like the virtual machine changed how we compute, containers now gives us a much more flexible, portable, you can run on any infrastructure at any location. Closer to the data etcetera to do that. >> I think the bold move we made is, we finally, after working with customers and partners like Accenture, we have a very comprehensive strategy. We announced Project Tanzu at our last VM World. And Project Tanzu really focused on three aspects of containers, How do you build applications, which is what Pivotal and the acquisition of Pivotal was driven around. How do we run these on a robust enterprise class run time? And what if you could take every vSphere ESX out there and make it a container platform. Now we have half a million customers. 70 million VM's. All the sudden, that run time we are container enabling with a Project Pacific. So vSphere 7 becomes a common place for running containers and VMs. So that debate of VMs or containers? Done, gone. One place or just spend up containers and resources. And then the more important part is how do I manage this? As you have said. Becoming more of a platform, not just an orchestration technology. But a platform for how do I manage applications. Where I deploy them where it makes more sense. I've decoupled my application needs from the resources and Kubernetes is becoming that platform that allows me to portably. I'm the Java Weblogic guy, right? So this is like distributed Weblogic Java on steroids, running across clouds. So pretty exciting for a middleware guy, this is the next generation middleware. >> And to what you just said, that's the enabling infrastructure that will allow it to roll into future things like edge devices. >> Absolutely. >> You can manage an Edge client. You can literally-- >> the edge, yeah. 'Cause now you've got that connection. >> It's in the fabric that you are going to be able to connect. And networking becomes a key part. >> And one of the key things, and this is going to be the hard part is optimization. So how do we optimize across particularly performance but even cost? >> And security, rewiring security and availability. >> So still I think my all time favorite business book is Clayton Christensen, "Innovator's Dilemma". One of the most important lessons in that book is what are you optimizing for? And by rule, you can't optimize for everything equally. You have to rank order. But what I find really interesting in this conversation and where we're going and the complexity of the size of the data, the complexity of what am I optimizing for now just begs for plight AI. This is not a people problem to solve. This is AI moving fast. >> Smart infrastructure going to adapt. >> Right, so as you look at that opportunity to now apply AI over the top of this thing, opens up tremendous opportunity. >> Absolutely, I mean standardized infrastructure allows you, sorry, allows you to get more metrics. It allows you to build models to optimize infrastructure over time. >> And humans just can't get their head around it. I mean because you do have to optimize across multiple dimensions as performance, as cost. But then that performance is compute, it's the network. In fact the network's always going to be the bottleneck. So you look at it, even with 5G which is an order magnitude more band width, the network will still lag. You go back to Moore's Law, right? It's a, even though it's extended to 24 months, price performance doubles, so the amount of data potentially can exponentially grow our networks don't keep pace. So that optimization is constantly going to have to be tuned as we get even with increases in network we're going to have to keep balancing that. >> Right, but it's also the business optimization beyond the infrastructure optimization. For instance, if you are running a big power generation field of a bunch of turbines, right, you may want to optimize for maintenance 'cause things are running in some steady state but maybe there's an oil crisis or this or that, suddenly the price rises and you are like, forget the maintenance right now, we've got a revenue opportunity that we want to tweak. >> You just talked about which is in a dynamic industry. How do I real time change the behavior? And more and more policy driven, where the infrastructure is smart enough to react, based on the policy change you made. That's the world we want to get to and we are far away from that right now. >> I mean ultimately I think the Kubernetes controller gets an AI overlay and then operators of the future are tuning the AI engines that optimize it. >> Right, right. And then we run into the whole thing which we talked about many times in this building with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury from Accenture. Then you got the whole ethics overlay on top of the business and the optimization and everything else. That's a whole different conversation for another day. So, before we wrap I just want to give you kind of last thoughts. As you know customers are in all different stages of their journey. Hopefully, most of them are at least off the first square I would imagine on the monopoly board. What does, you know, kind of just top level things that you would tell people that they really need just to keep always at the top as they're starting to make these considerations? Starting to make these investments? Starting to move workloads around that they should always have at the top of their mind? >> For me it's very simple. It's really about focus on the business outcome. Leverage the best resource for the right need. And design architectures that are flexible that give you choice, you're not locked in. And look for strategic partners, whether it's technology partners or services partners that allow you to guide. Because if complexity is too high, the number of choices are too high, you need someone who has the breadth and depth to give you that platform which you can operate on. So we want to be the ubiquitous platform from a software perspective. Accenture wants to be that single partner who can help them guide on the journey. So, I think that would be my ask is start thinking about who are your strategic partners? What is your architecture and the choices you're making that give you the flexibility to evolve. Because this is a dynamic market. Once you make decisions today, may not be the ones you need in six months even. >> And that dynanicism is accelerating. If you look at it, I mean, we've all seen change in the industry, of decades in the industry. But the rate of change now, the pace, things are moving so quickly. >> And we need to respond to competitive or business oriented industry. Or any regulations. You have to be prepared for that. >> Well gentleman, thanks for taking a few minutes and great conversation. Clearly you're in a very good space 'cause it's not getting any less complicated any time soon. >> Well, thank you again. And thank you. >> All right, thanks. >> Thanks. >> Larry and Ajay, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We are top of San Francisco in the Sales Force Tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> from atop the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco. It's the Q covering Accenture Innovation Date brought to you by ex center >> Hey, welcome back Your body jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the essential innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. They worry about security and all kinds of other things. So centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but you're absolutely Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to which all of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know, you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in here, and everyone all right, everyone's >> had a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember We used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service. Now I mean, we went through on premise collaboration, email todo 360 5 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really start to see some scale around it >> and tell me if you agree. I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and the service now is of the world off. 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial barriers which were all really about security and security. Security secure. It's always too here where now security is actually probably an attribute >> and loud can brink Absolutely. In fact, I'm in those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service. Now to put you know instances on Prime, and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know, there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when you happen to sail sports, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems, I've certainly got away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it's all by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the public domain, right? Not public. >> I think it also help them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So Let's back up 1/2 a step cause then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into Public Cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be. Um, but then we ran into a whole new home, Those of issues, right, Which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds there certain attributes that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view, before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How, after they think about what to deploy where I >> think I'll start in the, You know, Larry has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspectives. You got to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues? Or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment? Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will then drive where these applications need to recite. And then what we're seeing in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy, but you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know, clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications. And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms. Guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications going to evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi in and, you know, hybrid cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, et cetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we're gonna modernize that >> it hadn't had a you segment. That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size? Where they should be focusing on. Yes, >> it. Typically, what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications have moved to sass certain other applications you moved past. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization, and then certain others, you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old and where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. >> If >> you could go back three or four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings. I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get, get new capabilities, market faster to change my customer experience. So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. So we're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how do I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get there upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress, So obviously cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on giving the right service levels of right experience to the user. Little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds. Easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define them? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talk to my clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to come toe. You know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific workload >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera, so that's the innovations. There obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it performance, you know, if you think the public world, you know, although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business critical workloads like that article, article rack. You know, the Duke clusters everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terrified Hana database, you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The Laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, You know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of Could still living in, You know, whether it's you, Nick system, that IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right. And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take the reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or every three or four days for my mobile application and It's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, but we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're saying is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles that land is that you know, the red shifts the azure functions of the public world. But then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip data that I need to worry about GDP are you know, the whole set of regular two requirements Over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're Still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from rail client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him. Who runs that AWS Public Sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this thing. This hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of break in the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move Works fine. Be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where but finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it, the business value, replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and you know the micro service's architecture now. D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The the innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> in person, you rated jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you will Yeah, >> I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers. Goto private cloud and so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, the cantinas and Cuban Edie's. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients. >> Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promise of cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started, and they've got some actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at serverless. So you gonna even a single application can span that and one of things we've seen is is first. You know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application. You know, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talked it. It's a very well, despite the power, very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, application service is teams that do the application manager an optimization cloud infrastructure, you know, how do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to Security Service's and bringing those together? And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive of cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public. But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale er's and how they hit incredible degrees of automation, we really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys they're doing that? We came up with this concept We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy environment and started looking say OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl and >> my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that we have. So we started make you know how to be >> standardized like center hybrid cloud solution apart with HP. Envy em where we, you know, how do we that was an example. So we can get thio because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing service catalog. Standardizing that, um, you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now, but truly putting the security and and operations into Deb set cops of bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're writing the automation script to take work, you know, test work out. Right. And over time, they'll be tuned in the air. Aye, aye. Engines to really optimize the environment and then finally has presided. Looted thio. Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know, we What we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms and then the application teams with it with our my wizard framework, and we've been starting to bring that together. You know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide, you know, automation Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a iob is right. I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops, that's what we use. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control, I reporting et cetera. Right >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools. I had to do some strategic function. >> I'm just I'm just >> curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app. Some of them are coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds, that just with the wrong it was just the wrong application? The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, >> I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options, like Aunt Ours and out pulls and other stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that and you see many more options around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, you know, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know, that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed that look >> e. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption consumption model. And they weren't really They didn't have a function to go and look at the thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement, exactly think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on B e e. I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application lead modernization that really that will dictate that. And I think in many cases, people didn't may not have thought through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. You know, I've got a 64 terabyte hana, and that's the core. My crown jewels. That data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that >> right? But if Andy was >> here, though, Andy would say, we'll send down the snow. The snow came from which virgin snow plows Snowball snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But we've seen the >> hold of a truck killer >> that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they you know they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source course than to move it, change it, you know you run it. All these micro lines of billing statement take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe. So if they may want need to expose it? Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out. You know, the particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue. Because no matter how much you know, while Moore's law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle, Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better than network becomes more of a bottleneck. Conned. That's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get. Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith o r. Right Or, you know, highlight and see type or so egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know that That's been a big issue. >> You know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally different building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it. And they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But but the kind of clothes on our conversation I won't talk about a I and applied a I. CoSine is a lot of talk in the market place, but a time machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, >> absolutely completely agree with you in fact. Ah, essential. We actually referred to the Seoul area as Applied intelligence. Ah, and that's our guy, right? And, uh, it is absolutely to add more and more automation Move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than, you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environment is important, right? What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken routing, et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space. Less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, and then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate ones who then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment, right. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement between >> when the best thing to you. Then you have dynamic optimization can. You might be up to my tanks at us right now, but you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending >> when you got you got to see them >> together with it. And multi dimension optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the table. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you. Raise Prasad is Larry. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Theis Center. Innovation have in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

>> Hey, welcome back. Your body, Jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the century innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. There were about security and all kinds of other things, so centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but yeah, absolutely. Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to reach. All of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in >> everyone's, you know, everyone's got a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember we used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service now. I mean, we've went through on premise collaboration, email thio 3 65 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really started. See some scale around it. >> And I think and tell me if you agree, I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and and the service now is of the world office 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial beers, which are all really about security and security, security, security, Always to hear where now security is actually probably an attributes and loud can brink. >> Absolutely. In fact, I mean, those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service Now to put, you know, instances on prime and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when Europe into sales force, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems have certainly gone away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it sold by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the in the public domain, right? Not public. >> And I think it also helped them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So let's back up 1/2 a step, because then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into public cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be, Um, but then we ran into a whole new host of issues, right, which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds. There's certain attributes is that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How should they think about what to deploy where I think >> I'll start in? The military has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspective. You go to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications, or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues, or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment. Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will. Then Dr where these applications need to recite and then what we think in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy. But you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know how clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications? And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms, guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications gonna evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some, like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And, you know, I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi and, you know, every cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, etcetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we gonna modernize that >> it had. And how do you segment? That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size where they should be focusing on us? >> So typically what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications he moved to sass certain other applications you move to pass. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization and then certain others you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have to initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, um, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old. And where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. If >> you could go back through four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings, I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get getting your capabilities to market faster, to change my customer experience. So So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. We're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how'd I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get their upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress. So So Obviously, cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more for, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on, given the right service levels of right experience to the user, little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds, easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define him? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talked more clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to, you know, come to ah, you know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific look >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera. So that's the innovations there obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly, which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption, economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it, um, performance if you think the public world, you know, Although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business. Critical workloads like that article, article rack, the Duke clusters, everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana database you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, you know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of code still living in, You know, whether it's you, nick system, just IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right? And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take their reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now, when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or everything three or four days for my mobile application. And it's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, But we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're seeing is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles. The land is that, you know, the red shifts the functions of the public world, but then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip, a data that I need to worry about GDP are there, you know, the whole set of regular two requirements. Now, over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from my client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him, runs that AWS public sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this in this hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of breaking the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move. Works fine, be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where? But finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it the business value of replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and in a micro service's architecture now D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> and percent you raided, jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single planet glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications in the and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass. Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you will Yeah, >> I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers go to private cloud. And so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, cantinas and Cuba needs. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients, >> right? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promises, cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started in. They've got some, actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at surveillance. So you're gonna even a single application can span that. And one of things we've seen is is first, you know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM, where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talk to it. It's a very well. Despite the power, it's a very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, Application Service's teams that do that Application manager, an optimization cloud infrastructure. How do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to security service is bringing those together. And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive with cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public? But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale, er's and how they hit Incredible degrees of automation. We really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys we're doing that We came up with this concept. We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy, environment, and start a look and say, OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl >> and my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that way. So >> we started make you know how to be standardized like center hybrid cloud solution important with hp envy And where we how do we that was an example of so we can get to you because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing our service catalog. Standardizing that, um you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now. But truly putting the security and and operations into Deb said cops are bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re Skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're riding the automation script to take work, you know, test work out right. And over time they'll be tuning the aye aye engines to really optimize environment. And then finally, has Prasad alluded to Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know what we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms, and then the application teams with it with my wizard framework, and we started to bring that together you know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide. You know, it's automation. Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a I ops, right? I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops. That's what we you A ups. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control? Aye, aye. Reporting et cetera. Right? >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools to do straight functions. >> I'm just I'm just curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app, something we're coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds that just with the wrong. It was just the wrong application. The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options like an tars and out pulls an actor stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that, then you see many more options around around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed. That left >> E. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were a big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption, you know, consumption model. And they went, really, they didn't have a function to go and look at be thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement Exactly. I think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on Do you know e? I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application led, you know, modernization, that really that will dictate that. And I think In many cases, people didn't. May not have thought Through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. And if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana and that's the core, my crown jewels that data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that? >> Right? But if Andy was here, though, and he would say we'll send down the stove, the snow came from which virgin snow plows? Snowball Snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But I have seen the whole truck killer that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they, you know, they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source. Of course. Then to move it, change it. You know, you run into all these micro lines of billing statement, take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe, so if they anyone need to expose it, Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out, You know, particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue because no matter how much you know, while Moore's Law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better. The network becomes more of a bottleneck. And that's a It's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith. Oh, all right. Or, you know, highlight and see type. Also, egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know, that's being a big issue, >> you know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally from building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it and they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, Turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But it kind of close on our conversation. I won't talk about a I and applied a Iot because he has a lot of talk in the market place. But, hey, I'm machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, >> absolutely. Completely agree with you. In fact, attack sensual. We actually refer to this whole area as applied intelligence on That's our guy, right? And it is absolutely to add more and more automation move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environments comported right. What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken rounding et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space, less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, And then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate one too. Then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement. You know, between >> when the best thing to you, then you have dynamic optimization. Could you might be optimizing eggs at us right now. But you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending when you got me. They got to see them >> together with you and multi dimension. Optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the tables. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you, Grace. Besides Larry, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Theis Center, Innovation hub in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Cube, we are high top San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower in the newest center offices. It's really beautiful and is part of that. They have their San Francisco innovation hubs, so it's five floors of maker's labs and three D printing and all kinds of test facilities and best practices Innovation theater and in this studio, which is really fun to be at. So we're talking about hybrid cloud in the development of cloud and multi cloud. And, you know, we're, you know, continuing on this path. Not only your customers on this path, but everyone's kind of on this path is the same kind of evolved and transformed. We're excited. Have a couple experts in the field. We got Larry Soccer. He's the global managing director of Intelligent Cloud Infrastructure Service's growth and strategy at a center. Very good to see you again. Great to be here. And the Jay Patel. He's the senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider, software business unit, being where enemies of the people are nice. Well, so, uh so first off, how you like the digs appear >> beautiful place and the fact we're part of the innovation team. Thank you for that. It's so let's just >> dive into it. So a lot of crazy stuff happening in the market place a lot of conversations about hybrid cloud, multi cloud, different cloud, public cloud movement of Back and forth from Cloud. Just wanted. Get your perspective a day. You guys have been in the Middle East for a while. Where are we in this kind of evolution? It still kind of feeling themselves out. Is it? We're kind of past the first inning, so now things are settling down. How do you kind of you. Evolution is a great >> question, and I think that was a really nice job of defining the two definitions. What's hybrid worse is multi and simply put hybrid. We look at hybrid as when you have consistent infrastructure. It's the same infrastructure, regardless of location. Multi is when you have disparate infrastructure. We're using them in a collective. So just from a level setting perspective, the taxonomy starting to get standardized industry starting to recognize hybrid is a reality. It's not a step in the long journey. It is an operating model that's gonna be exists for a long time, so it's no longer about location. It's a lot harder. You operate in a multi cloud and a hybrid cloud world and together, right extension BM would have a unique opportunity. Also, the technology provider Accenture, as a top leader in helping customers figure out where best to land their workload in this hybrid multicolored world, because workloads are driving decisions right and one of the year in this hybrid medical world for many years to come. But >> do I need another layer of abstraction? Cause I probably have some stuff that's in hybrid. I probably have some stuff in multi, right, because those were probably not much in >> the way we talked a lot about this, and Larry and I were >> chatting as well about this. And the reality is, the reason you choose a specific cloud is for those native different share capability. Abstraction should be just enough so you can make were close portable, really use the caper berry natively as possible right, and by fact, that we now with being where have a native VM we're running on every major hyper scaler, right? And on. Prem gives you that flexibility. You want off not having to abstract away the goodness off the cloud while having a common and consistent infrastructure. What tapping into the innovations that the public cloud brings. So it is a evolution of what we've been doing together from a private cloud perspective to extend that beyond the data center to really make it operating model. That's independent location, right? >> Solarium cures your perspective. When you work with customers, how do you help them frame this? I mean, I always feel so sorry for corporate CEOs. I mean, they got >> complexities on the doors are already going on >> like crazy that GDP are now, I think, right, The California regs. That'll probably go national. They have so many things to be worried about. They got to keep up on the latest technology. What's happening in containers away. I thought it was Dr Knight. Tell me it's kubernetes. I mean, it's really tough. So how >> do you help them? Kind of. It's got a shot with the foundation. >> I mean, you look at cloud, you look at infrastructure more broadly. I mean, it's there to serve the applications, and it's the applications that really drive business value. So I think the starting point has to be application lead. So we start off. We have are intelligent. Engineering guys are platform guys. You really come in and look And do you know an application modernisation strategy? So they'll do an assessment. You know, most of our clients, given their scale and complexity, usually have from 520,000 applications, very large estates, and they got to start to freak out. Okay, what's my current application's? You know, you're a lot of times I use the six R's methodology, and they say, OK, what is it that I I'm gonna retire. This I'm no longer needed no longer is business value, or I'm gonna, you know, replace this with sass. Well, you know, Yeah, if I move it to sales force, for example, or service now mattress. Ah, and then they're gonna start to look at their their workloads and say OK, you know, I don't need to re factor reform at this, you know, re hosted. You know, when one and things obviously be Emily has done a fantastic job is allowing you to re hosted using their softer to find a data center in the hyper scale er's environments >> that we called it just, you know, my great and then modernized. But >> the modern eyes can't be missed. I think that's where a lot of times you see clients kind of getting the trap Hammer's gonna migrate and then figure it out. You need to start tohave a modernisation strategy and then because that's ultimately going to dictate your multi and your hybrid cloud approaches, is how they're zaps evolve and, you know, they know the dispositions of those abs to figure out How do they get replaced? What data sets need to be adjacent to each other? So >> right, so a j you know, we were there when when Pat was with Andy and talking about, you know, Veum, Where on AWS. And then, you know, Sanjay has shown up, but everybody else's conferences a Google cloud talking about you know, Veum. Where? On Google Cloud. I'm sure there was a Microsoft show I probably missed. You guys were probably there to know it. It's kind of interesting, right from the outside looking in You guys are not a public cloud per se. And yet you've come up with this great strategy to give customers the options to adopt being We're in a public hot. And then now we're seeing where even the public cloud providers are saying here, stick this box in your data center and Frank, this little it's like a little piece of our cloud of floating around in your data center. So talk about the evolution of the strategy is kind of what you guys are thinking about because you know, you're cleared in a leadership position, making a lot of interesting acquisitions. How are you guys see this evolving? And how are you placing your bets? >> You know, that has been always consistent about this. Annie. Any strategy, whether it's any cloud, was any device, you know, any workload if you will, or application. And as we started to think about it, right, one of the big things be focused on was meeting the customer where he's out on its journey. Depending on the customer, let me simply be trying to figure out looking at the data center all the way to how the drive in digital transformation effort in a partner like Accenture, who has the breadth and depth and something, the vertical expertise and the insight. That's what customers looking for. Help me figure out in my journey. First tell me where, Matt, Where am I going and how I make that happen? And what we've done in a clever way, in many ways is we've created the market. We've demonstrated that VM where's the omen? Consistent infrastructure that you can bet on and leverage the benefits of the private or public cloud. And I You know, I often say hybrids a two way street. Now, which is you're bringing Maur more hybrid Cloud service is on Prem. And where is he? On Premise now the edge. I was talking to the centering folks and they were saying the mitral edge. So you're starting to see the workloads, And I think you said almost 40 plus percent off future workers that are gonna be in the central cloud. >> Yeah, actually, is an interesting stat out there. 20 years 2020 to 70% of data will be produced and processed outside the cloud. So I mean, the the edges about, you know, as we were on the tipping point of, you know, I ot finally taking off beyond, you know, smart meters. You know, we're gonna see a huge amount of data proliferate out there. So, I mean, the lines between public and private income literary output you look at, you know, Anthony, you know, as your staff for ages. So you know, And that's where you know, I think I am where strategy is coming to fruition >> sometime. It's great, >> you know, when you have a point of view and you stick with it >> against a conventional wisdom, suddenly end up together and then all of a sudden everyone's falling to hurt and you're like, This is great, but I >> hit on the point about the vertical ization. Every one of our client wth e different industries have very different has there and to the meeting that you know the customer, you know, where they're on their journey. I mean, if you talk to a pharmaceutical, you know, geekspeak compliance. Big private cloud started to dip their toes into public. You know, you go to minds and they're being very aggressive public. So >> every manufacturing with EJ boat back in >> the back, coming to it really varies by industry. >> And that's, you know, that's a very interesting here. Like if you look at all the ot environment. So the manufacturing we started see a lot of end of life of environment. So what's that? Next generation, you know, of control system's gonna run on >> interesting on the edge >> because and you've brought of networking a couple times where we've been talking it, you know, and as as, ah, potential gate right when I was still in the gates. But we're seeing Maura where we're at a cool event Churchill Club, when they had Xilinx micron and arm talking about, you know, shifting Maur that compute and store on these edge devices ti to accommodate, which you said, you know, how much of that stuff can you do at the adverse is putting in. But what I think is interesting is how are you going to manage that? There is a whole different level of management complexity when now you've got this different level of you're looting and security times many, many thousands of these devices all over the place. >> You might have heard >> recent announcements from being where around the carbon black acquisition right that combined with our work space one and the pulse I ot well, >> I'm now >> giving you a management framework with It's what people for things or devices and that consistency. Security on the client tied with the network security with NSX all the way to the data center, security were signed. A look at what we call intrinsic security. How do we bake and securing the platform and start solving these end to end and have a park. My rec center helped design these next generation application architectures are distributed by design. Where >> do you put a fence? You're you could put a fence around your data center, >> but your APP is using service now. Another SAS service is so hard to talk to an application boundary in the sea security model around that. It's a very interesting time. >> You hear a lot of you hear a >> lot about a partnership around softer to find data center on networking with Bello and NSX. But we're actually been spending a lot of time with the i o. T. Team and really looking at and a lot of our vision, the lines. I mean, you actually looked that they've been work similarly, agent technology with Leo where you know, ultimately the edge computing for io ti is gonna have to be containerized because you can need multiple middleware stacks supporting different vertical applications, right? We're actually you know what we're working with with one mind where we started off doing video analytics for predictive, you know, maintenance on tires for tractors, which are really expensive. The shovels, It's after we started pushing the data stream up it with a video stream up into azure. But the network became a bottleneck looking into fidelity. So we gotta process there. They're not looking autonomous vehicles which need eight megabits low laden C band with, you know, sitting at the the edge. Those two applications will need to co exist. And you know why we may have as your edge running, you know, in a container down, you know, doing the video analytics. If Caterpillar chooses, you know, Green Grass or Jasper that's going to co exist. So you see how the whole container ization that were started seeing the data center push out there on the other side of the pulse of the management of the edge is gonna be very difficult. I >> need a whole new frontier, absolutely >> moving forward. And with five g and telco. And they're trying to provide evaluated service is So what does that mean from an infrastructure perspective. Right? Right, Right. When do you stay on the five g radio network? Worse is jumping on the back line. And when do you move data? Where's his process? On the edge. Those all business decisions that need to be doing to some framework. >> You guys were going, >> we could go on. Go on, go. But I want to Don't fall upon your Segway from containers because containers were such an important part of this story and an enabler to the story. And, you know, you guys been aggressive. Move with hefty Oh, we've had Craig McCloskey, honor. He was still at Google and Dan great guys, but it's kind of funny, right? Cause three years ago, everyone's going to Dr Khan, right? I was like that were about shows that was hot show. Now doctors kind of faded and and kubernetes has really taken off. Why, for people that aren't familiar with kubernetes, they probably here to cocktail parties. If they live in the Bay Area, why's containers such an important enabler? And what's so special about Coburn? 80 specifically. >> Do you wanna go >> on the way? Don't talk about my products. I mean, if you >> look at the world is getting much more dynamics on the, you know, particularly you start to get more digitally to couple applications you started. You know, we've gone from a world where a virtual machine might have been up for months or years. Toe, You know, obviously you have containers that are much more dynamic, allowed to scale quickly, and then they need to be orchestrated. That's essential. Kubernetes does is just really starts to orchestrate that. And as we get more distributed workloads, you need to coordinate them. You need to be able to scale up as you need it for performance, etcetera. So kubernetes an incredible technology that allows you really to optimize, you know, the placement of that. So just like the virtual machine changed, how we compute containers now gives us a much more flexible portable. You know that, you know you can run on anything infrastructure, any location, you know, closer to the data, et cetera. To do that. And I >> think the bold movie >> made is, you know, we finally, after working with customers and partners like century, we have a very comprehensive strategy. We announced Project Enzo, a philosophy in world and Project tansy really focused on three aspects of containers. How do you build applications, which is pivotal in that mansion? People's driven around. How do we run these arm? A robust enterprise class run time. And what if you could take every V sphere SX out there and make it a container platform? Now we have half a million customers. 70 million be EMS, all of sudden that run time. We're continue enabling with the Project Pacific Soviets. Year seven becomes a commonplace for running containers, and I am so that debate of'em czar containers done gone well, one place or just spin up containers and resource is. And then the more important part is How do I manage this? You said, becoming more of a platform not just an orchestration technology, but a platform for how do I manage applications where I deploy them where it makes most sense, right? Have decoupled. My application needs from the resource is, and Coburn is becoming the platform that allows me to port of Lee. I'm the old job Web logic guy, right? >> So this is like distributed Rabb logic job on steroids, running across clouds. Pretty exciting for a middle where guy This is the next generation and the way you just said, >> And two, that's the enabling infrastructure that will allow it to roll into future things like devices. Because now you've got that connection >> with the fabric, and that's working. Becomes a key part of one of the key >> things, and this is gonna be the hard part is optimization. So how do we optimize across particularly performance, but even costs? >> You're rewiring secure, exact unavailability, >> Right? So still, I think my all time favorite business book is Clayton Christians. An innovator's dilemma. And in one of the most important lessons in that book is What are you optimizing four. And by rule, you can't optimize for everything equally you have to you have to rank order. But what I find really interesting in this conversation in where we're going in the complexity of the throughput, the complexity of the size of the data sets the complexity of what am I optimizing for now? Just begs for applied a I or this is not This is not a people problem to solve. This is this >> is gonna be all right. So you look at >> that, you know, kind of opportunity to now apply A I over the top of this thing opens up tremendous opportunity. >> Standardize infrastructural auditory allows you to >> get more metrics that allows you to build models to optimize infrastructure over time. >> And humans >> just can't get their head around me because you do have to optimize across multiple mentions. His performances cost, but then that performances gets compute. It's the network, I mean. In fact, the network's always gonna be the bottlenecks. You look at it even with five G, which is an order of magnitude, more bandwidth from throughput, the network will still lag. I mean, you go back to Moore's Law, right? It's Ah, even though it's extended to 24 months, price performance doubles. The amount of data potentially can kick in and you know exponentially grow on. Networks don't keep pays, so that optimization is constantly going to be tuned. And as we get even with increases in network, we have to keep balancing that right. >> But it's also the business >> optimization beyond the infrastructure optimization. For instance, if you're running a big power generation field of a bunch of turbines, right, you may wanna optimize for maintenance because things were running at some steady state. But maybe there's oil crisis or this or that. Suddenly the price, right? You're like, forget the maintenance. Right now we've got you know, we >> got a radio controlled you start about other >> than a dynamic industry. How do I really time change the behavior, right? Right. And more and more policy driven. Where the infrastructure smart enough to react based on the policy change you made. >> That's the world we >> want to get to. And we're far away from that, right? >> Yeah. I mean, I think so. Ultimately, I think the Cuban honeys controller gets an A I overlay and the operators of the future of tuning the Aye aye engines that optimizing, >> right? Right. And then we run into the whole thing, which we've talked about many times in this building with Dr Room, A child re from a center. Then you got the whole ethics overlay on top of the thing. That's a whole different conversation from their day. So before we wrap kind of just want to give you kind of last thoughts. Um, as you know, customers Aaron, all different stages of their journey. Hopefully, most of them are at least at least off the first square, I would imagine on the monopoly board What does you know, kind of just top level things that you would tell people that they really need just to keep always at the top is they're starting to make these considerations, starting to make these investments starting to move workloads around that they should always have kind of top >> of mind. For me, it's very simple. It's really about focused on the business outcome. Leverage the best resource for the right need and design. Architectures are flexible that give you a choice. You're not locked in and look for strategic partners with this technology partners or service's partners that alive you to guide because the complexities too high the number of choices that too high. You need someone with the breath in depth to give you that platform in which you can operate on. So we want to be the digital kind of the ubiquitous platform. From a software perspective, Neck Centuries wants to be that single partner who can help them guide on the journey. So I think that would be my ask. It's not thinking about who are your strategic partners. What is your architecture and the choices you're making that gave you that flexibility to evolve. Because this is a dynamic market. What should make decisions today? I mean, I'll be the one you need >> six months even. Yeah. And And it's And that that dynamic that dynamics is, um is accelerating if you look at it. I mean, we've all seen change in the industry of decades in the industry, but the rate of change now the pace, you know, things are moving so quickly. >> I mean, little >> respond competitive or business or in our industry regulations, right. You have to be prepared for >> Yeah. Well, gentlemen, thanks for taking a few minutes and ah, great conversation. Clearly, you're in a very good space because it's not getting any less complicated in >> Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Larry. Ajay, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. >> We are top of San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower at the center Innovation hub. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time. Quick

>> Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Cube, we are high Top San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower and the brand new A century's Thean Novation hub opened up, I don't know. Six months ago or so, we were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stare. So if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about a cloud in the evolution of cloud and hybrid cloud. And clearly two players that are right in the middle is helping customers get through this journey and do these migrations. Our center and h. P. E s were excited to have our next guest, Melissa Bessie. She is the managing director, Intelligent cloud and infrastructure strategic partnerships at a center. Melissa. Welcome. And joining us from HP is David Stone. He's the VP of ecosystem sales. They have a great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> So let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this this new entrance with aws kind of coming on the scene. One of the great lines of Jeff Basil's talks about is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the the bookseller out on the left hand ah, edges coming in to take the river structure business. But as things have moved to Public Cloud, now there's hybrid cloud. No, no. All applications or work clothes are right for a public cloud. So now, while the enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves. But it's complicated. So first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary hybrid cloud versus multi cloud one of those terms mean to you and your customers started Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of multi cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of I would say multi Kludd operating model that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So you have your public cloud providers. You have your sass like, uh, sales force at work day, you have your pass right? And so when you think of multi cloud, any customers goingto have a plethora of all of these types of clouds and really being able to manage across those becomes critical. When you think of hybrid cloud hybrid cloud is really thinking about the placement of ill. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right? Are you going to put your data in the public or in the private space? And so you can't look at it from that perspective, and it really enables that data movement across both of those clouds. >> So what would you see? David and your, uh, your customers? I say that a >> lot of the customers that we see today or confused right the people who have gone to the public cloud have scratched their heads and said, Jeez, what do I do? It's not as cheap as I thought it was gonna be. So the ones who were early adopters or confused the ones who haven't moved yet are really scratching their head as well, Right, because if you don't have the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy, and I think that's where the market and I know a center and HPD clearly see them, the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, Melissa, You said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out where we more often hear it talked about workload. This kind of horses for courses, you know, it's a workload specific should be deployed in this particular kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mentioned data, and there's a lot of conversation kind of pre cloud about data, gravity and how expensive it is to move the date and the age old thing. Do you move the compute to the data, or do you move the data to the compute? A lot of advantages if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the ah, the real negatives in terms of potential cost implications. And we didn't even get into regulations and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay in the data center. So how should people start thinking about these variables when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Ex enters position Definitely like when we started off on our hybrid cloud journey was to capture the workload and once you have that workload you could really balance. It's the public benefits of speed, innovation and consumption with the private benefits of actually regulation, data, gravity and performance. Right? And so our whole approach and big bet has been able is been to basically we had really good leading public capabilities because we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we we said, OK, if we create a hybrid capability that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, Um and that is standard. We'd be able to offer our customers a weight of pick, really the right workload in the right place at the right price. And that was really what? Our whole goal waas. >> Yeah, and so just the Adama Melissa said, I think we also think about at least, uh, you know, keeping the data in a place where you want but then being cloud adjacent. So getting in the right data centers and we often use the cloud saying to bring the cloud to the data right? So if you have the right hybrid strategy. You put the data where it makes the most sense where you want to maintain the security and privacy. Ah, but then have access to the AP eyes and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we hear a lot of the data center providers like quinyx and stuff talking about features like Direct Connect and Noted Toe have this proximity between the public cloud and the and the stuff that's in your private cloud so that you do have no low latent see, and you can when you do have to move things or you do need to access that data. It's not so far away. Um, I'm curious about the impact of companies like Salesforce with Salesforce Tower here in San Francisco at the Centre Offices and Office 3 65 and Work Day on how kind of the adoption of the SAS applications have changed. The conversation about Cloud or what's important and not important, needs to be security. I don't trust eating outside my data center Now, one might argue that public clouds are more secure in some ways than in private cloud. You have disgruntled employees per se running around the data centers on plugging things. So how? How is the adoption of things like Officer 65? Clearly, Microsoft's leverage that in a big way to grow their own cloud presence changed the conversation about what's good about Cloud. What's not good about Chlo? Why should we move in this direction? But if you have thought >> no, look, it's a great question, and I think if you think about that, his Melissa said, the use cases right and Microsoft is have sex. Feli successfully pivoted their business to it as a service model, right? And so what I think it's done is it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the sales forces of the world have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a sass based offer. And so when you could do a work day or a salesforce dot com implementation shirt, it's been built that it's tested and everything else I think, what then becomes the bigger question in the bigger challenges. Most companies air sitting on 1000 applications that have been built over time, and what do you do with those? And so in many cases, you need to be connected to those SAS space providers. But you need the right hybrid strategy again. To be able to figure out how to connect those SAS based service is to whatever you're gonna do with those 1000 workloads and those 1000 workloads running on different things that you need the right strategy to figure out where to put the actual workloads and is people they're trying to go. I know one of the questions that comes up is Do you my grade or do you modernize? And so as people put that strategy together, I think how you tied to those SAS based service is clearly ties into your hybrid strategy, >> I would agree. And so, as David mentioned, right, that's where the clouded Jason see, you're seeing a lot of blur between public and private. I mean, Google's providing bare metal is a service, so it is actually dedicated hybrid cloud capabilities. Right? So you're seeing a lot of everyone. And as as David talked about all of the surrounding applications around your s a P around Oracle, when we created our ex enter hyper cloud, we were going after the enterprise workload. But there is a lot of legacy and other ones that need that data and or the sales force data, whatever the data is right and really be able to utilize it when they need to in a real low leagues. >> So let's I want to get unpacked. The ah central hybrid cloud. Um, what is that exactly is that is that your guys own cloud is, you know, kind of a solution set. I've heard that mentioned a couple of times. So what is the centre? Hyper cloud? >> So eccentric hybrid cloud was a big bet we made as we saw the convergence of multi cloud. We really said, We know we everything is not gonna go public and in some cases it's all coming back. And so customers really needed a way to look at all of their workloads, right? Because part of the issue with the getting the cost of the benefits out of public is the workload goes. But you really don't earn able to get out of the data center. We terminate the wild animal park because there's a lot of applications that right Are you going to modernize? Are you goingto let them to end of life? so there's a lot of things you have to consider to truly exit a data center strategy. And so its center hybrid cloud is actually a big bet we made. It is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability that really augments all of the leading capability we had in the cloud area. It is it's differentiated women, a big bet with HP. It's differentiated on its hardware. One of the reasons when we're going after the enterprise was they need large compute. They have large computer and large storage requirements, and what we were able to dio is when we created this used some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client that we had an existing Io environment. We were actually able to achieve some significant benefits just from the automation. We got 50% in the provisioning of applications. We got 40% in the provisioning in the V m on, and we were able to take a lot of what I'll call the manual tasks and down Thio. It was like 62% reduction in the effort as well as a 33% savings overall in getting things production ready. So this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning at the application level because we're going after the enterprise workloads and it will create these. It's an asset that came from the government. So it's highly secured. Um, and it really was able to preserve. I think, what our customer needed and being able to span that public private capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, you could say I don't know that there's enough talk aboutthe complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing this a sideman piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit. Talk about HBC. A lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with a I and machine learning now, which you know most of those benefits are going to be realized in a specific application, right? It's a machine learning or artificial intelligence apply to a specific application. So again, you guys big, big iron and been making big iron for ah, long time. What is this kind of hybrid cloud open up in terms of HB Ito have the big, heavy big heavy metal instead it and still have kind of the agility and flexibility of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about what HB strategy has been in this area and high performance compute, we bought the company SG eye on. As you've seen, the announcements were hopefully gonna close on the Kree acquisition as well. And so we see in the world of the data continuing to expand in huge volumes, the need to have incredible horsepower to drive that associated with it. Now all of this really requires Where's your data being created and where's it actually being consumed? And so you need to have the right edge to cloud strategy and everything. And so in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge to be able to compute in do stuff in real time. But in many cases, you need to feed all that data back into ah, Mother Cloud or some sort of mother HP, you know, e type of high performance, confused environment that can actually run the more advanced a I in machine learning type of applications to really get the insights and tune the algorithms and then push some of those AP eyes and applications back to the edge. So it's it's an area of huge investment. It's an area where because of the late and see, uh, and you know things like autonomous driving and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud or you need cloud type capability if you will have able to compute and make the right decisions at the right time. So it's about having the right computer technology at the right place at the right time. The right cost and the right perform a >> lot of rights. Yeah, good opportunity for a center. So I mean, it's it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud and and that kind of new new verbs around Cloud and cloud like things is where we're gonna see the same thing. Kind of the edge, the edge versus the data center comparison in terms of where the data is, where the processing is because it's gonna be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out? I was like the edge because there was no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that grade. And maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, EJ offers a whole bunch of different challenges that you can control for in a data center. But it is going to be this crazy kind of hybrid world there, too, in terms of where the allocation of those resource is. Are you guys getting deeper into that model, Melissa? >> So we're definitely working with HP again to create some of all call it our edge. Manage. Service is again going back to what we're saying about the data, right? We saw the centralization of data with a cloud with the initial entrance into the cloud. Now we're seeing the decentralization of that data back out to the edge. Um, with that right in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need. They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil and exploration, if you look at media processing right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things and depending on where it's located, if it's on the edge. How you're gonna feed back the data as we talked about. And so we're looking at How do you take this foundation? Right. This all colonic center hybrid. Um, architecture. I take that and play that intermediate role. I'm gonna call it intermediary. Right, Because you really need a really good you know, global data map. You need a good supply chain, right? Really? To make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application at the right time, with right, the ability to do it at speed. And so all of these things air factors as we look at our hole ex center, hybrid cloud strategy, right? And being able to manage that EJ decor and then back out to cloud exactly >> right. And I wonder if you could share some stories because the value proposition I think around cloud is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right? It's not about cost. It's not about cost savings. I mean, there's a lot of that in there, and that's good. But really, the opportunity is about speed, speed and innovation and enabling more innovation across your enterprise. with more people having more access to more data to build more APS and really to react. Are people getting that or they still the customer still kind of encumbered by this this kind of transition phase. They're still trying to sort it out. Or do they get it? That that really this opportunity is about speed, Speed, speed? No, >> go ahead. I mean, we use a phrase first offices here. No cloud, right. So to your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy? But I think within that you you get what's the right application and how do you fit it into the overall strategy of what you're trying to do? >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, um, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole right. When you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, write applications. And how are you going to some? You're gonna retain some? You're gonna retire some. You're gonna reap age. You're gonna re factor for the cloud or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is you're going to be looking at doing? Um, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters like even the papers killers themselves, right? They recognize the speed. So, you know, we're working with Google. For instance. They wanted to get into the bare metal as a service capability. Write them, actually building it. Getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole ex center hybrid cloud architecture that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub millisecond latency, and so their loved ones, Right? Everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and pre book capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers because it is, as we talked about this multi cloud were lots of things that you have to manage if you can get pieces from multiple plate, you know, from a partner right that can provide Maur of the service is that you need it really enables the management of right, >> right, So gonna wrap it up. I won't give you the last word in terms of what's the what's the most consistent blind spot that you see when you're first engaging with a customer who's who's relatively early on this journey that that they miss that you see over and over and over. And you're like, you know, these are some of the things you really gotta think about that they haven't thought about >> Yeah, so for me, I think it's the cloud isn't about a destination. It's about an experience. And so how do you get you talked about the operations? But how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use a simple analogy that if you and I needed a car for five or 10 or 15 minutes, you go get a new bir. Uh, because it's easy. It's quick. If you need a car for a couple days to do a rent a car, we need a car for a year. You might do at least you need a car for 34 years. You probably buy it right. And so if you use that analogy and think whom I need a workload or in the application for 56 years putting something out, persistent workload that you know about on a public cloud, maybe the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibitive. But if you need something that you can stand up in five minutes and shut right back down, the public cloud is absolutely the right way to go is long as you can deal with the security requirements and stuff. So if you think you think about what are the actual requirements, is it costs is a performance. You've talked about speed and everything else it really trying to figure out you get an experience and the only experience that can really hit you. What you need to do today is a having the right hybrid strategy and every company and a century was out way in front of the market on Public Cloud, and now they've come to the realization, and so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, and it's gonna be multi cloud. And as long as you can have an experience and a partner that can manage, you know, help you to find the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> I think the blinds, but we run into is it does start off as a cost savings activity, and they're really. It really is so much more about how you're going to manage that enterprise workload. How are we gonna worry about the data? Are you gonna have access to it? Are you gonna be able to make it fluid, right. The whole essence of cloud, right? What? It What it disrupted was the I thought that something had to stay in one place, right? And that you were the real time decisions were being made where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds as well as that, you had to own it yourself, right? I mean, everyone always thought Okay, uh, I'll take all of the I T. Department. Very protective of everything that wanted to keep. Now it's about saying, All right, how do I utilize the best of each of these multi clouds to stand up? What? I'll call what their core capability is as a customer, right? Are they do in the next chip design or hey, you know, doing financial market models right? That requires a high performance capability, right? So when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power. Is is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products and service is to market and touching the car customers I need versus Oh, I'm gonna move this out to an infrastructure because that's what God will save me. Money, Right, Bench. Typically the downfall we see because they're not looking at it from the workload of the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff that that's not your core. All right, Well, Melissa David, Thanks for taking a minute and really enjoyed the conversation. Is Melissa? He's David. I'm Jeff. Rick, you're watching. The Cube were high above the San Francisco skyline in the sales force. Tyra. The essential innovation up. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.